He leans forward, his eyes shooting flaming daggers in my direction. “And instead, she walked out with all of that plus a head start because you went in half-cocked and let herescape.” Kingston lifts an eyebrow. “So tell me, brother. What exactly did your judgment call accomplish?”
The silence pulls tight.
With a grimace, I pull out my phone and toss it onto his desk. It’s open to the screenshot of Tierney’s face that I grabbed from the security feed before I went in. Dark braid, sharp profile, pale skin lit blue by a monitor she had no business being in front of.
“Tierney Blake,” I say. “Twenty-six years old. Daughter of Declan Blake, head of the Blake family out of Belfast. They’re a mid-level Irish organization. They deal in small-time drugs, protection rackets, and weapons trafficking across Eastern Europe. Declan's been trying to rise as a global power for years but keeps failing. Dad turned down his alliance request a while back.”
Lorenzo nods. “They weren't worth the trouble. Small fish.”
“Small fish with big goals,” I counter. “And now the daughter has intel that could bury us.”
Kingston picks up my phone and studies the photo. His jaw tenses and he looks up at me. “What did she take?”
“I tracked her movements to the main server room. She must have taken enough to outweigh the risk of walking into the Blood Vault. I watched her run a bulk download before I engaged.”
“Before you engaged and lost her,” Kingston says, because he's a prick like that.
Reign pushes off the wall. “Do we know what she was actually there for? Seems like a hell of a risk for a small-time crime organization to hit the Tribunal's vault. Why us and not the other shady bastardsthey’re working with?”
This is the part that's been chewing on my brain since Bucharest.
“She wasn't there for us,” I say. “It was something to do with her brother.”
They all snap to attention. Especially Dad.
“Connor Blake’s a twenty-two year-old, history student in Dublin. A bookish nerd who’s not involved in the family business. According to what I dug up, the Tribunal approached Declan a few weeks ago with footage of Connor killing some guy. Now they're using it as leverage against the family. I’m not sure what they want but if Declan doesn’t agree to it, the kid will either face time or be found hanged from a bridge.”
“How do you know she was sent to destroy it? That she wasn’t there for some other reason?” Kingston asks.
“Because she told me herself.”
Kingston’s brows pull together. “You had time to chat?”
“Interogate, K… when I had her back against the wall, she blurted it out. Everything I've dug up in my research since then confirms it.”
I lean forward, my elbows on my knees. “She wasn't in that vault to drag us down. She was in there trying to save her brother's neck. But, she must’ve failed and had to improvise by downloading whatever she could reach, which just so happened to be Viacava files.”
Reign nods slowly.
“Family,” he says in a somber voice. “People do desperate shit for their family.”
They’re not just words, though. I know my brother well enough to understand there’s something behind them, but I don't have time to unpack that rightnow. So I file it away for later because Reign doesn't say shit like that out loud without a reason.
“I don’t give a fuck about her brother,” Kingston says, slamming his hand on the desk. “Declan Blake is sitting in Belfast right now with enough information to destroy us. Which means the clock is ticking.”
Dad steps away from the window. “We have three options. Retrieve it. Destroy it. Or destroy them.”
“Agreed,” Kingston says, picking up a glass and sloshing the amber-colored liquid around. “But we can't send a team into Belfast without starting a war with every Irish family on the continent. We need a better approach. A cleaner one.”
I look between them and sit up straight in the chair. “Let me handle it.”
Kingston rolls his eyes. “You? The one who let her escape instead of putting a fucking a bullet in her chest.”
“Yeah, K, me. I'm the one who owes it to our family.”
I grip the arms of the chair.
“Look, I saw the woman's face and know how she works. She fights like Declan trained her from the fucking womb. To pull that job off makes her smart. Smarter than anyone he should have access to.” I hold his gaze. “Let me find her. Get close. Figure out what Declan's planning before he does it. I’ll take back control.”
