I turned back to the other two brothers. "I don't really understand anything of what just happened." I took another drink of water to help push the bile back down. I could connect the dots well enough to know that, somehow, I was partially to blame for the blackmail attempt. Tove looked at me. "Was your mother named Moira Hellen Parker?"I jerked again. My brow furrowed. "How could you possibly know that?"He raised one finger. He tapped on his phone screen. Flipped it around so I could see it. "Is this her?"I looked at the screen and felt the bottom of my belly fall out. I nodded as I looked at the face of the single person who had truly loved me. I took the phone from his hand as tears gathered in my eyes. "She was so beautiful. So happy. I'll never understand why she ran away to the Oaks.""I think your mother was running for her life, and she unfortunately ran into the wrong guy. From what I could find, Moira Hellen Parker was born as Mary Ellen Elgesmythe. Not a lot ab

"Just fix it, Jameson," I said. The idiot needed to be moved to a different section if he couldn't figure out the simplest of routine fixes. I walked back to my office and pulled up the encrypted file I had started at home. We needed more information. At least we finally knew who the master was. I could start doing a deep dive on him. But it was going to be very tricky. The man was richer than Midas and he had his own computer team protecting his data from here to eternity. It wouldn't matter. Not in the grand scheme of things. He'd hurt my Hollyn, and that shit wasn't going to stand. I set up another autotask to mine for data between the Walsh, Kavanaugh, and Cananach names. Then another with all of those and the Christiansens. The fact that Ainsley was involved in this mess should have come as a shock. But when I thought about it, I could see the calculation and predatory look in her gaze too often. I wouldn't be surprised if she knew we had magical blood in our family ei

I blinked rapidly, tried to clear the clouds and mist from my vision. It still looked like I was standing in the middle of a cloud bank. I reached up to rub my eyes. Only I couldn't. Restrained once again. Damn it. I reached out with my senses. It didn't work in this world as well as it had worked when I was in the Village. Nature whispered to me there. But all the cement and metal in Triport blocked that communication. Nothing whispered back to me. Time for the old-fashioned route."Hello?" I called softly. "It's awake," a hard, feminine voice called. She grabbed at something on my head and yanked. I rolled my lips in to keep from shouting when she pulled some of my hair out with whatever the cloth had been. I blinked again, glad my eyes hadn't been lying to me. They were still working. I looked up at the woman. She had a very thin body. So thin, I could see most of her bony parts. Her hip bones looked like mountain cliffs in her tight muted green dress. Her dark red

I double clicked my mic in the affirmative. My tech guy, aptly named Radar, had piggybacked the signal Tove had on the tracker for Sweetcheeks. I was in the building across the street. I gritted my teeth as I looked through the thermal imaging glasses. At least she was all alone in that ancient hotel room. On the top floor, her guards were two doors down in both directions. The windows had all been boarded over so I couldn't see her with my eyes. But I knew that body, even if it was outlined in rainbow colors. "Setting up eagle position," Banksy said through the comm link. I double clicked again. I wasn't moving from this spot until I could put my hands on Sweetcheeks. After this, I was going to lock her up in the penthouse. Bar the doors. Demand blood sacrifice before anyone else was allowed in to see her. I took a picture of the thermal imaging with a date/time/location stamp on it. Once we got her back, I was going to toss all of the Christiansens under the fucking bus.

I wiggled free of Ainsley's touch. My stomach threatened to rebel at having her hands on me. Even through the barrier of clothes, it felt wrong to have someone other than Stretch touching me. "Get the fuck on with it, Ainsley. I'm sick and tired of your shit," I said it under my breath as we passed the mayor and his wife. The man was one of the best we'd had in our city for a long time. After the wars that sprang up following COVID-19, he'd been a voice of reason. The man was a huge advocate of self-policing and natural consequences. "Then you should have just done what I told you to do the first time around, lover," Ainsley said. I clenched my fists to keep from slugging her in the face. I wasn't a violent man, and definitely not against women. But this particular one made me want to do her physical damage. Especially after she kidnapped Stretch to force my compliance. "What do you even want with the land, Ainsley? There's nothing out there. We've checked. Multiple times."