Fionn had returned. Her heart gave a funny little leap as she grabbed the papers and hurried downstairs.
“She’ll be all right, though?” Siobhan was asking.
“Who?”
Fionn turned as Lyse spoke. The smile that lit his face was soft, glowing from his eyes like he was happy to see her despite whatever had gone on tonight. “One of the village girls. Mack has taken her to the station. We found her at Ferrina’s.”
Mack had done a lot of follow-up at the station the past few days. She eased closer to Fionn, needing his warmth, the reality of his body, whole and unharmed, against her, but afraid to presume. “What did they do to her?”
“She’d been abducted from somewhere in town.” Deacon’s voice was an angry growl as he paced the length of the room. “We got her away safe before they had a chance for anything else.”
She was within reach now, but it still startled her when Fionn held out his hand and pulled her closer, his arm going around her waist. Lyse blushed, but that didn’t stop her from cuddling up against him. She noticed that Siobhan’s worried eyes warmed as she watched them.
“Mack will be back soon,” Fionn said, “but we’ll need to talk about what to do next. Ferrina knows his base has been exposed. He won’t stay there.”
“You think he’ll be moving on us then?” Siobhan asked.
“I do. And he’s got the manpower to win, if what we saw was any indication.”
Lyse agreed. There was no reason for Ferrina to wait, really. And if they’d started picking off villagers for their own amusement, it was better all around not to wait. She looked down at the papers in her hand. “If Ferrina is moving up his timeline, maybe we can use that to our advantage.”
Fionn twisted to face her, his hand sliding to rest on her hip. “How?”
She looked up, trying to read his expression. “Can we sit down?”
When they were settled around the small coffee table, Lyse began laying out the report she’d carried downstairs. “I created a program to run algorithms that would help me track money going in and out of Robert’s investment company.” She tapped a couple of sheets. “Based on aliases I’d uncovered, I was able to account for quite a bit of the money he and Ferrina took.” Given a few more days, she could probably track every penny. “What I found was that he didn’t keep the money in various accounts like the investigators thought. He cashed it out.” She glanced at the others. “That’s how he was stealing the money right under Ferrina’s nose. He was emptying the accounts little by little without Ferrina’s knowledge.”
Fionn frowned down at the figures lining each page. “That’s a lot of currency disappearing. He couldn’t have hoped to keep it in cash form without the serial numbers being traced.”
“I don’t think he did.”
“Then what did he do with it?” Siobhan asked, looking confused.
“He exchanged it for gold.”
Fionn cursed. He knew as well as she did that small amounts, bought over time and stockpiled under various names, would make the money nearly impossible to trace. And Robert could convert the gold back to currency the same way, a bit at a time. The question was, where did he put the gold?
Fionn rubbed his knuckles along the stubble on his chin. “That would be a shit ton of bars.”
“It would be.” She almost grinned when she realized she’d picked up Fionn’s way of answering questions. Not yes or no, but repeating the verb in a full sentence. An Irish thing. “He’d need someplace secure to stash it, someplace no one would suspect.”
“But the garda went through the house, his office, everywhere we could think of,” Siobhan said. “They found no trace, and nothing through the aliases they uncovered.”
“Except they didn’t uncover all his aliases,” Lyse explained. “I’m pretty sure I have, or most of them. Gimme a few days and I’ll know for sure.” She pulled a page away from the others and laid it on top. “I was looking through the background intel on all those names, and one thing immediately stood out to me: this alias in particular owns an estate in Northern Ireland. Extensive land. Middle of nowhere. What was it you told me, Siobhan? That he would do anything for you, and what you wanted most was to move somewhere away from the city, away from Dublin?”
The older woman’s eyes were round as she eyed the data on the page. Lyse wasn’t sure she was reading it so much as she was remembering Robert’s words, their conversations about the future, about their dreams. It killed Lyse to bring it up, but she had no choice. Finding that money was the only way to end this.
“If I’m right, if this is what I think it is”—she tapped the paper—“we can find that money and turn it in, and end this once and for all.”
Fionn’s gaze met hers, and she saw his resolve, saw that he’d already made his decision. It was the only way to keep Siobhan safe forever. There was something else there too, something she couldn’t quite put a name to. Excitement, maybe? “We need a plan.”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
“So,” Deacon asked, leaning against the doorjamb in Mack’s study, “how are you getting a message to Ferrina if he’s no longer at his base camp?”
Good question. Fionn huffed a laugh. “It’s not like he’ll be having an email address we can access, like IrishCartel@ gmail—”
“You might be surprised.” Lyse turned a grin on them, the sassy edge making him shift to give his fatigues more room in the crotch. “If it was that easy, y’all wouldn’t need me. But it isn’t, and you do, so…” She turned back to her screen, that tempting expression still on her face, and went back to typing. Her hands literally flew across the keyboard, the lines of text on the computer moving too fast for him to read.
He hadn’t even been
