“To profit off the strife,” Zael murmured. “There are always fortunes to be made in war, regardless of which side you’re on. Unfortunately, peace is a far less lucrative business.”
The Atlantean was right. And unless the Order found a way to clamp a lid on the panic before it got any further out of hand, Opus might damned well succeed.
Lucan cursed as more video of screaming civilians and stampeding workers inside the GNC building filled the monitors. The attackers were dead, but the panic was still at a fever pitch.
“I’m heading out to the government center,” he said, turning away from the images of carnage and terror.
Gabrielle anxiously caught his hand. “It’s the middle of the day.”
He didn’t particularly relish the idea of a daylight tour of duty either, given that without proper equipment, his solar-averse Gen One Breed skin would start sizzling in under ten minutes. But it had to be done.
Opus attacked at a time of day that all but guaranteed little to no risk of Order interference. As the highest ranking official of the GNC and the leader of the Order besides, Lucan would be damned if he was going to sit back and wait for sundown before confronting the carnage and taking control of the situation.
“I’ll prep the UV gear for both of us,” Dante said, zero hesitation.
Chase and Tegan spoke up next, and soon the entire company of warriors—new and old—were volunteering for the patrol. It gave Lucan great pride to see the depth of commitment and courage in the faces that looked to him for leadership.
He only hoped he wouldn’t let any of them down.
Lucan nodded to his team. “Dante and Chase, prep the gear. Tegan and I will get the weapons and the vehicle loaded up. Brock and Kade, you suit up too.” He glanced to the other warriors. “I need the rest of you here. Hunter, you’re in command. Even if we don’t expect any direct hits from Opus, that doesn’t mean I want to risk leaving our base short-handed.”
The stoic warrior had once been a stone-cold killer in his own right. If Lucan trusted anyone to stand between danger and the people he cared about, he could find no better guardian than Hunter.
“What about the lead I dug up in Ireland?” Gideon asked.
Lucan raked a hand over his head. “Shit. I don’t want to let it go cold, but we’ve got several fires to put out here.”
“What lead?” Brynne asked.
Gideon explained. “Just before the situation went all to hell today, I managed to crack through the first layer of encryption on Opus’s secured network. I followed a hunch down a rabbit hole and I found a name, one we haven’t run across before.”
“You mean an Opus member?”
“Possibly. It’s also possible we just got a hit on the woman Crowe had been visiting frequently for the past few years.”
Aric Chase snorted a laugh. “You mean the reputed mistress? If this woman is under thirty, brainless, and full of plastic, odds are pretty good Crowe was banging her.”
“We don’t have a physical description,” Gideon said. “We also don’t have work history, tax records, nada. All we’ve got is a name registered to an IP address, which I then ran down a bit more by hacking into several layers of the ISP’s parent company records. A few more database taps, log file scrubs, and I got a hit on a location in Finglas, County Dublin.”
Dante and Tess’s son, Rafe, smirked. “Anyone with poor enough taste to be spending time with some Atlantean scumbag is suspect in my book.” Rafe shot a glance at Zael. “No offense.”
Zael arched a wry brow. “You’re right. Crowe was a scumbag. What’s the name of this woman?”
“Iona Lynch,” Gideon replied. “Any ties to your people that you know of?”
“None that I’m aware of. Crowe may have been Atlantean, but he had been gone from the realm for a very long time. What he did and who he associated with in the time since is anyone’s guess.”
“I’ve never heard the name either,” Brynne said. “If I could get access to my old JUSTIS records, I might be able to search—”
“Been there, done that.” Gideon’s smile was a little sheepish, but mostly smug. “I’ve had my hands up JUSTIS’s skirts for a long time. Anything in their global databases or secured servers is ours as well. They don’t have anything on this woman. No one does.”
“Except us now,” Rafe said. The warrior had his blonde mother’s looks but his father’s dark tenacity. “If this woman has anything to do with Crowe, she might be the only person we’ve got who can help us unmask the other members of Opus.”
Dante nodded in agreement with his son. “And if Iona Lynch is part of Opus, then we need to get our hands on her and do it yesterday. We sure as fuck don’t want another situation like what happened with that Irish lawyer, Hayden Ivers.”
The men were right. And Lucan was still simmering over the Order’s near miss with Ivers. They’d already had a team on the ground at the human’s house, closing in on the bastard, when Ivers popped some poison then set his own house on fire to avoid capture.
Mathias Rowan looked Lucan’s way. “Shall I put my London team on this?”