Page 53 of Sweet Revenge
She didn’t stop running until she reached the door, flinging herself against it in a bid to shove it open. She slammed it behind her and leaned her forehead against the wood, gasping for air while her heartbeat slowed.
Minutes ticked by, agonizingly slow, while she watched the patch of road she could see through the window. Nothing. No one drove or even walked by. Huffing out a relieved breath, she rubbed a hand over her chest. Christ, she was getting paranoid.
ChapterTwenty-Five
Declan waited impatiently for days for Brogan to find something useful on DiMarco’s drive. The waiting was starting to piss him off. He’d even been working almost exclusively from home unless he had a meeting that pulled him into the city. He wanted to be close if Brogan did find something. Mostly.
It didn’t hurt that working from home meant he could wander the house whenever he felt like it and find Evie somewhere. She was usually pecking away at her laptop, combing through the notes she’d made about Morocco, convinced Peter’s silver bullet was somewhere in those pages.
Declan was as eager to get rid of Peter as Evie was, if not for entirely different reasons. She couldn’t stop talking about getting back to her real life once Peter had been dealt with. It didn’t matter how many nights she spent in his bed or how many glimpses he caught of the girl he’d loved; she seemed as eager to get away as he was to keep her.
And keep her was exactly what he wanted to do. She’d slipped through his grasp once, and he’d be damned if he’d let it happen again.
They still hadn’t discussed whatever made her leave in the first place, something they’d eventually have to drag out into the light of day and deal with. They could focus on that later, though, once Peter was gone and they didn’t have any more obstacles standing between them.
Unable to concentrate on the final project proposal from Rodriguez, Declan rose from behind the desk and went in search of the very thing he couldn’t stop thinking about. Opening the door to his office, he nearly ran into Brogan, fist poised to knock.
“Good, you’re not busy.”
“You’ve got something?”
“It’s something,” Brogan agreed.
In his lair, Brogan had all of his screens up, an array of open files spread across each one. Each document was nothing but a series of random numbers and letters, listed in rows in three columns on every single page. At least a dozen pages.
Brogan dropped into his chair and swiveled toward the desk, dragging one image onto the biggest screen to enlarge it. Declan frowned. What the fuck was that?
“This,” Brogan began, as if in response to Declan’s unasked question, “is what every single document on this goddamn drive looks like.”
Declan moved closer to study the combinations of numbers and letters. They seemed to be separated into groups of about ten, but other than that, he could see no rhyme or reason to any of it.
“Please tell me you know what the hell this means and your silence is for dramatic effect.” When Brogan said nothing, Declan bit off a curse and turned to his brother. “Seriously? Nothing?”
Brogan highlighted the first column. “Best guess is that these are dates based on the number of characters and the dashes. I think these,” he added, highlighting the second and third columns, “are locations.”
“Why?”
“They look like coordinates. Longitude and latitude.”
Declan looked closer and could make out the breakdown of each line. “Can’t you run these through some program and unscramble them?”
“Despite what people with only a basic understanding of a smartphone and a search engine might believe, technology isn’t magic.”
Declan shot Brogan a warning glare. “I’m not interested in your mouth today. Can you figure it out or not?”
“Not. It’s a cipher and not a common one. I tried those already. Without the specific key DiMarco uses to create this code, I can’t tell you what it says.”
“So we’re exactly where we started.”
Brogan arched a brow. “I wouldn’t call dozens of hours of work nothing, but we don’t have as much as I’d hoped we would. If I had to guess, these are lists of product he’s moving from one location to another on certain days and times. What that product is, when it’s being moved, or where? I couldn’t tell you.”
Declan’s fingers curled into a fist. He allowed men to operate in his city, to run their drugs and their illegal fight rings and their stolen cars. They existed only by his good graces, and these bastards were pissing on his authority and rule with this cloak and dagger bullshit. That wouldn’t last long for them.
“Brogan?”
“Yeah?”
“Find me another angle to work. If these pricks are up to something, I want to know what it is.”
