Murphy's Wrath (Murphy's Law Book 2)

by Michelle St. James

  No wonder she hardly ever came home to Boston. Emotionally shut down and busy with MIS, Ronan, Nick, and Declan didn’t exactly give her a reason to visit.

  “Good,” Julia said. “I stayed under for a half hour this time.”

  Nora lifted her arm for a high five. “Nice.”

  “What makes you think the new boat is our mark?” Nick asked when he’d joined them on the dock.

  They’d hacked one of the satellites for the HCG — the Hellenic Coast Guard, which was responsible for patrolling the waters off Greece — and had been watching the boats in the area since they’d arrived on Santorini. Most of them were easily traceable to wealthy owners hobnobbing in the area and were gone within a few days of their first sighting.

  “I ran the registration when I saw it heading for Kos,” Nora said. “It’s shady.”

  “Shady how?” Ronan asked.

  “Shady like all the other stuff surrounding Manifest. Shell companies leading to shell companies leading to shell companies. No clear owner.”

  “Could be a legitimate someone looking for privacy,” Nick said.

  “Could be,” Nora agreed. “But we’re four days out from Saturday, so I figured it’s worth keeping an eye on.”

  Four days until the date listed on the asset sheet with Elise’s picture that Julia had found at the villa in Florence. Four days until he had no choice but to let Julia walk back into the lion’s den with the sick fucks of Manifest.

  It felt even more dangerous than the villa in Florence. He tried to tell himself it was because of the close call: his and Julia’s flight underground, the alarm squealing in the villa, the quick getaway with Nick at the wheel. He even told himself it was the location of their next mission, the yacht and the fact that there would be nowhere to run, no tunnel to provide an escape, just miles and miles of sea.

  But it was all a lie, or a distraction at best. The real problem was Julia. If Elise was on the boat, Julia wouldn’t leave without her, even if it meant sacrificing her own life.

  And Ronan had a feeling that this time, Elise would be there.

  They couldn’t even begin to plan a way onto the boat until they knew what kind of boat it was, and even then, getting a handle on security would be next to impossible at this late date. It meant the whole job was a powder keg of potential problems, the very last kind of place he wanted Julia to be.

  But he’d given up trying to convince her not to come along. She’d fought him every step of the way so far, and he had no reason to believe this would be any different. The fact that she knew how to fire a weapon gave him only modest comfort. Beyond that, he could only hope to keep her close, get Elise, and get the hell out as quickly as possible.

  On his best days, he thought the operation in Greece might be the beginning of the end of the barrier between them. On those days he was hopeful that they would rescue Elise and bring her back to Boston. Julia would see that he still loved her, that what they had wasn’t just a product of Elise’s disappearance.

  That it was real.

  Other times he wasn’t so sure. He would catch Julia looking out to sea, her eyes shadowed with thoughts she didn’t want to share, and he’d wonder if she would ever fully trust in his love.

  And there was another fear, one that lurked in the deepest recesses of his mind, one he didn’t dare speak aloud: that Julia would feel she owed him if they rescued Elise. That once they brought Elise home, he would never truly know if she loved him or if she was repaying a debt.

  He’d tried in vain to break down the last remaining wall between them during their weeks in Greece, but it was still there, invisible to the eye but as impenetrable as granite. His desire to turn it to rubble was starting to feel like a mandate, the only way he’d be sure she loved him if they managed to rescue Elise.

  June 25th was only four days away.

  Four days to identify the boat carrying Elise and come up with a plan.

  Four days to destroy the wall Julia had spent a lifetime building between her and the world, the one she’d spent months maintaining between them.

  It wasn’t enough time.

  24

  “What can I do?” Julia asked Nora, standing at the counter in the kitchen, laying out crumbly chunks of feta, stuffed grape leaves, and olives on a platter.

  Nora smiled up at her and Julia was struck again by her eyes, as clear and blue as Ronan’s. “Nothing. You’ve been in the water all day. You must be wiped.”

  Julia smiled. “I’m fine. I can help.”

  Nora turned to the fridge and removed a six pack of beer. “You can take these to the terrace and put them in the ice chest.”

  “That’s it?”

  “That’s it. Seriously, I’ve been inside most of the day running the registration on that Oceanco. I’m happy to be busy.”

  Nora had explained on the way up to the house that the boat picked up by the satellite heading for Kos was a three-hundred-foot Oceanco yacht.

  “Let me know if you change your mind,” Julia said, taking the beer and heading to the terrace.

  She’d been surprised by how much she liked Nora Murphy, surprised by how natural their friendship felt. After living in close quarters with Elise her entire life, Julia knew she missed her sister, but she hadn’t realized how much she’d missed the companionship of another woman, especially in the testosterone-fueled Murphy house.

  Nora was quick to call the men on their shit — Braden included — and just as quick to ruffle their hair like they were still little boys even though they all loomed over her. It was clear they adored her, and equally clear that the vacuum left by Erin’s death was still present, a jagged, invisible hole everyone stepped carefully around.

  “Anyone need another beer?” Julia asked as she stepped onto the terrace.

  Nick stood over the grill, brushing tuna steaks with olive oil and squeezing lemon over them while Braden and Ronan sat around a laptop at the other end of the patio, looking at the satellite images of the Oceanco yacht.

  “I’ll take one,” Nick said.

  She handed him one of the bottles and took one for herself, then bent to put the rest in the cooler on the ground near the grill.

  “Those smell amazing,” she said, looking at the tuna.

  “Fishmonger said they were caught this morning,” Nick said. “It’s one of the things I love most about this place.”

  She took in the sweeping views of the Aegean sea, the white stucco houses stark against their blue tiled roofs and the water that surrounded everything. “It must be one of a million.”

  He smiled. “You have a point.”

  “Do you come here often?” she asked.

  He sprinkled salt on the tuna. “When I can get away. It’s like another world here. All the things I worry about in Boston don’t seem to matter.”

  She wondered what Nick Murphy worried about in Boston but didn’t want to pry. “I can see that.”

  He looked more closely at her. “How are you holding up?”

  “I’m okay.” She looked down at the beer in her hand. “It’s hard to feel like I deserve to enjoy anything.”

  “I felt that way,” he said. “After Erin.”

  She nodded. “I’m sorry.”

  “It took me a long time to believe that Erin would want me to keep living.” He shrugged, but the nonchalance felt forced. “But that’s different than with Elise.”

  “How so?”

  “Erin was dead. Of course she would want me to live. What else could I do?” he hesitated. “You must feel like you shouldn’t be doing anything but trying to find her.”

  “Pretty much,” she admitted. “I know it’s not possible. I’m a person. I need to sleep and eat, and I’m limited to what I can do at any given moment.”

  “But this isn’t a situation where intellect rules,” Nick pointed out.

  “Exactly. I keep wondering if she’s hurt or scared, if she thinks I’ve given up on her.” Despair rose in her throat like bile. She shook her head. “I t
ry not to think about those things, but it’s hard.”

  He didn’t say anything for a long time, testing the fish with a fork to see if it was done. “I used to obsess over Erin’s last moments. I’d play out all the different scenarios — she knew what was happening to her and wanted someone to save her, she fell asleep and never knew what happened to her, she was scared, in pain…” He shook his head. “It’s a kind of hell.”

  “How did you stop?” she asked.

  He looked at her and she was struck by his eyes, not blue like Ronan’s, but green like the leaves on the old trees surrounding her gramps’ property. “Honestly?”

  She nodded.

  “I just played it out. Eventually, I’d imagined everything so many times that it didn’t have as much power over me. And in the end, she was still gone.”

  The resignation in his voice terrified her. She knew it was different: Erin was dead — there was still hope of saving Elise.

  But it was all too easy to imagine herself someday telling a story like this one, a story where Elise was gone and nothing would ever, ever bring her back.

  “I think it was hardest on Ronan,” Nick said.

  Julia glanced at Ronan, his head tipped toward something Braden was pointing out on the laptop, then returned her eyes to Nick. “Why do you say that?”

  She knew Erin’s death had broken Ronan, that it had driven him in some way toward every decision he’d made since, but she was surprised to hear Nick say it had been hardest on him.

  “He’s the oldest,” Nick said. “It wasn’t just implied that it was his job to look out for us — my dad used to say it.” He affected a deeper voice, mimicking his father. “Ronan, look out for your sisters. Are you going to let someone bully your little brothers, Ronan? Don’t just stand there, Ronan, do something. If you don’t look out for them, who will?”

  “That’s a lot of pressure,” Julia said.

  “I don’t think he really felt it until Erin started using.” He smiled. “In fact, I’d say before that he actually enjoyed being the overlord.”

  Julia smiled. “It has its advantages.”

  Nick nodded. “But when Erin OD’ed, Ronan took it personally. In his eyes, he’d failed her, had failed us all.”

  “Which is why he started MIS.” Julia knew Ronan had been the one to start the business, although to hear him tell it, it hadn’t taken much to convince Nick and Declan to join him.

  Nick raised his beer in assent, then grew quiet as he started pulling the tuna off the grill. “He’s been different these past few months you’ve been around.”

  “Different?”

  “He hasn’t been quite as much of an asshole.” Nick laughed a little before his expression grew serious. “I think maybe he’s started to believe that something good could happen for him again, but like you, he feels guilty that it’s come at your sister’s expense.”

  “We didn’t exactly meet under normal circumstances,” she said. “Everything’s been upside down since the beginning.”

  Nick closed the grill and turned his eyes on her. She wasn’t prepared for the worry she saw there.

  “Thing is, I’m not sure he’d make it through another mind fuck.”

  She blinked, surprised to hear Nick use the figure of speech. “I’m not fucking with him.”

  “I’m not implying it’s intentional,” he said. “But I know this is a difficult time for you — believe me, I know — and it can make it hard to think about how it affects the people around you.” Her face grew hot, and she opened her mouth to defend herself only to have Nick hold up a hand to stop her. “I’m just doing my due diligence for my brother. He’s head over heels for you, Julia. It’s a lot of power to have over someone. I just want to make sure you know you’re wielding it, whether you want it or not, and that you’re being straight with him.”

  She wanted to protest, to say of course she was being straight with Ronan. That she loved him, that she’d told him she loved him and meant it.

  But the words rang hollow because deep down she knew Nick’s warning had been issued for a reason. She’d been holding something back from Ronan since the beginning, that tiny part of herself that worried what they had was like a comet, an anomaly born out of Elise’s disappearance that wouldn’t hold up under the weight of everyday life.

  She’d told herself it was because of Ronan. That he was a danger junkie, a man who would never be happy with one woman, a man who would never be satisfied coming home to sit around the dinner table with a wife and kids when bad guys were still running around waiting to be caught. That their relationship worked because it was conducted within the confines of the danger that was a part of his life.

  But that was a cop-out. The truth was she was scared. Scared of her own ability to stick it out, to do what her mother had never done and build a life with someone that was built on something solid.

  Something real.

  Deep down she wondered if maybe she was her mother’s daughter after all, less flighty than Elise on the surface but every bit as weak.

  Nick picked up the platter of fish and smiled. Any anger she’d felt dissipated. Nick was looking out for his family. She’d done the same a hundred times for Elise.

  “I like you,” he said. “It’s been awesome having you around, and I hope you’ll stay. But if you don’t plan to, it would be better for Ronan if you told him sooner rather than later.”

  25

  Ronan spread the blueprint out across the table on the terrace and used the salt and pepper shakers, a napkin holder, and Nick’s empty bottle of beer to hold down the corners.

  “This is the Oceanco LR 100,” he said. The blueprints illustrated two views of the yacht, the exterior measurements and the interior layout. “It can carry a crew of up to thirty-one, plus twenty-two passengers at one time.”

  “A crew of thirty-one?” Julia repeated. “How many of those will be security guards?”

  “We don’t know,” Ronan said. “There’s a lot we don’t know, but we’ll go over that in a second. You should all take a mental snapshot of the ship’s interior, because we’ll need to move fast once we’re inside.”

  They’d come to the conclusion that the Oceanco vessel named Elysium was the boat that belonged to Manifest when it moved into position over the exact coordinates listed on Elise’s asset sheet in Florence. It had been anchored there for the past two days and showed no sign of leaving.

  Tomorrow was June 25th.

  “You can see the primary lounge area here.” He pointed to a large open space at the craft’s stern. “Not ideal, because it means we’ll have to board the ship from the bow to avoid detection.”

  “Is that even possible?” Julia asked. When they dived, they dropped off the side or rear of the boat, but they were always pulled back aboard at the stern, which sat lower in the water.

  “It’s possible,” Nick said. “We’ll have to throw up a line and rappel up, but it’s doable.”

  “We just have to make sure we aren’t spotted before we’re on board,” Braden said.

  “That’ll be the hard part,” Ronan agreed, “especially since we don’t know more about security.”

  The satellite imagery had helped, showing a rotating series of guards patrolling the deck of the Elysium, but the images didn’t tell them anything about the total number of guards on board, or about other security measures like cameras or alarms.

  “Someone will have to surface and get a look before you board,” Nora said. “It’s not foolproof but if you take a minute, you should be able to get a sense of the timing of the patrol.”

  Nora had agreed to stay in the boat that would act as their dive point. They needed somebody who could work the satellite feeds in order to know if and when she should call the authorities for help, and they needed someone who was ready to drive the boat once they got Elise onboard.

  If they got Elise on board.

  “It’s not ideal,” Braden said.

  “No,” Ronan agreed, “but it’s al
l we have.”

  “Twenty-two passengers doesn’t allow for a lot of guests,” Julia said.

  Ronan nodded. “The assumption is that the auction is online.”

  “So the boat will only carry crew, security, the women, and a handful of people running the auction for Manifest,” Nick said.

  “That’s what I’m guessing.” Ronan hated that he was guessing about any of it. Guessing got people killed, and this time guessing could get Julia killed.

  But this was their last chance. The Elysium was in position ahead of the date of sale listed on Elise’s asset sheet. Once she was taken off the yacht, the chances of ever finding her again were slim at best.

  “At least we don’t have to worry about a bunch of rich fucks wandering the deck with champagne,” Nick said.

  Ronan turned his attention to the interior view of the boat. “These are the cabins.” He tapped the blueprints where they showed bedrooms. “This is probably where Elise will be kept, and any of the other women if they’re there.”

  “What do we do about them?” Julia asked. “The other women.”

  It was a question Ronan had been dreading. “Getting Elise out alive is our mission.”

  “We can’t just leave the other women there,” Julia said.

  “And hopefully we won’t have to,” Ronan said. “But we have to remember that getting Elise is our objective. We do what we can for the other women, but not at Elise’s expense.”

  He ignored the voice in his head that said he would never be able to leave the other victims behind. Those were the kinds of decisions he made on the fly, when he had no one to worry about but himself.

  Risking Julia’s life — and Elise’s, if they were finally in sight of saving it — wasn’t an option.

  He could see the internal war playing out on Julia’s features, knew that she wouldn’t go quietly if it meant leaving behind other women, but it wasn’t something he could worry about right now.

  “Will we have comms once we get to the boat?” Nick asked.