I’m pacing the Chieftain’s office, Uncle Cormac heads up the clan and runs all the family’s legitimate and completely, blatantly, criminal activity. He looks uncannily like my Da, with dark hair and green eyes, even though my father is four years younger. Today, Uncle Cormac looks every bit his age, groaning and rubbing his forehead.
“Ye know that prick Anselm has her,” I growl. “I canna believe I let her out of my sight.”
“Georges and Xenia managed to track the van via traffic cameras to a private airfield near Uddingston,” he says. “The eejit pilot even filed a legitimate flight plan. They’re landing in Copenhagen. I’m thinking Anselm would want her close so he could draw ye in to kill ye himself, aye?”
“He’ll have her taken to Rolig ø,” I say, rapidly categorizing everything I know about Anselm’s stronghold. He keeps a penthouse in his office building in Copenhagen, a mansion in Switzerland, another in St. Petersburg, as well as a couple more in London and New York.
But he’ll want Arabella where he feels most secure, which is his enormous estate on a private peninsula on the coast of Copenhagen, surrounded by his platoon of soldiers and his fawning entourage.
“He’s a spiteful bastard, so he’d want her in his compound,” I say, wanting with everything in me to punch a hole in the office wall.
Not like I’d be the first.
“My personal jet’s already fueled and ready,” Uncle Cormac says. “Michael, Kai, your Da and twenty of our best people are on their way to the airfield.”
“Yourbest?Like those wankstains who let Arabella be taken, not knowing what the feck happened until herstudentsraised the alarm?”
Now, I’m seeing the Chieftain of the MacTavish Mafia. The room’s temperature seems to drop ten degrees.
“If our clan makes an error, we make it right,” he says, his words cold, and clipped. “The lass saved your life. We’ll save hers in return. Regardless, you will never speak to your Chieftain like that again.”
The air’s crackling with tension between us. If he were any other man…
Dipping my head into a nod, I force out, “Aye. My sincere apologies, Chieftain.”
He tilts his head toward the door. “Go on with ye. Get the girl back.”
Our tech genius Xenia is on the jet already, lounging at the conference table with six laptops spread out around her. Her partner Georges is terrified of my brother Kai after Georges went snooping and put his wife Luna in danger, so he stayed behind at MacTavish International for “additional research.”
One of Xenia’s minions is setting up three drones with additional heat signature cameras and heavy-duty clips that I know will be holding explosives.
“Heya, Logan,” she says cheerfully, “we’re gonna kick some fucking ass tonight, huh?” Xenia looks like a rich girl from Connecticut - which she was - until she opens her mouth. Then she’s 100% hood rat and I like her all the better for it.
“Ach, I got a metric tonne of targets for ye, lass.” I tap on the walnut tabletop with my knuckles. “Thank ye for coming.”
“Wouldn’t miss it,” she chirps, logging onto a site on the dark web. I’ve seen some strong shite, but even my stomach’s turning inside out after seeing these images. Xenia keeps stuffing fish crispies into her mouth and humming as she scrolls through the site.
“What are ya looking at?” I say, forcing my gut back down my throat. “Does it pertain to the mission or just a wee bit of light reading?”
She narrows her eyes, making me wait until she’s finished off a Monster energy drink. “Oh, I think your mission just expanded, if your father and Chieftain are as angry about this as I am. After you fucked over Anselm by taking all his Bitcoin fraud data and violating his patents on his illegal pharmaceutical research, well, what’s a lad to do?” She spins one of the laptops around to show me the screen.
It looks like the aftermath of a battle, a dozen broken, bloody bodies lying sprawled in tattered sheets or naked. “What the feck has he done?”
“Anselm - and may that fucker die a horrible death - is deep into human organ trafficking,” she says, polishing off her drink and cracking open a new one. “There’s still a shit ton of pharmaceuticals coming out of his labs, but the organ trade… We didn’t know about this until you blew up his other hobbies and side interests. He’s kicked it into high gear.”
“Ye know, I’m already planning on killing him.” I run my hands through my hair, “Now, I’m thinking I’ll take my time.”
She smiles wryly. “Yeah, he deserves it.”
“Xenia, we’re taking off in three minutes, secure your gear, aye?” My Da slaps me on the back with a grin. “Mind joining the rest of us? It sounds like we have a mission to plan that’s getting more complex by the minute.”
“Aye, it is,” I admit. “But extracting Arabella is still my first priority.”
We settle in a big grouping of seats around a low table in the main cabin. Uncle Cormac’s jet is a Gulfstream G700, a lavish thing with more teak trim than your average sailboat, huge black leather chairs and its own armory. He did issue a moratorium about cleaning and loading weapons onboard after a couple of “unfortunate episodes” involving my cousins Jack and Wallace.
“And they all think I’m the reckless one?” I murmur. Da raises a brow and I shake my head. “Just thinking.”
“Good,” he says crisply, “we’re going to need all the brainpower on board and back home for this fecking mess.”
