24. Luca

CHAPTER 24

LUCA

A WEEK LATER – GATHERING MY DEFENCE

I t had been one hell of a week. Whistling as I descended the stairs toward Marko’s office, I couldn’t wipe the grin from my face. My Little Miss Sexy Ass and I had just wrapped up another steamy session, and things between us were better than ever. Claire had finally given in, and we’d been inseparable since, spending every moment we could together—talking about everything when we weren’t going at it like bunnies.

She’d left a short while ago with Vlad to see Bradley; she had a client up in court this afternoon. I couldn’t shake the anticipation of her return. Every moment apart felt like an eternity. Tonight, as she joined the other women for Marcie’s cocktail night, I wondered how much more of her wild side would emerge. I craved that side of her, the one that lit up like fireworks after a couple of drinks.

I pushed open the door to Marko’s office, the scent of stale coffee and the hum of computers greeting me like old friends. Still riding the high, I strolled in, my grin impossible to hide.

“You look happy,” Marko said, glancing up from his computer.

Dropping into the seat beside him, I grinned, my fingers tapping restlessly against the armrest, my pent-up energy needing an outlet. “I am. And once I clear my name and we deal with the MP, I’ll be even happier.”

“All going well, that won’t be long,” Marko said. “I’m still digging into how the MP figured out who you were. We’ll get to the bottom of it.”

It was a dilemma.

Marko’s office, cluttered with monitors displaying streams of data and walls plastered with graphs and photos, felt like the nerve centre of our operation—a place where plans were hatched and secrets were unearthed. If the guy wasn’t Bratva, I swear he’d be a top analyst for MI5. Maybe even one of their agents.

The name’s Bond, Marko Bond.

I snorted, spilling coffee down my shirt. Dabbing at it with a blank piece of paper.

“What the fuck is wrong with you?” Marko asked, looking at me as if I’d lost the plot.

Sniggering, I shook my head but didn’t respond.

Instead, I changed the subject, getting serious. “Did you manage to get anything yet?”

It had taken a while, but Marko had finally found proof that the cameras in my building on the night of Julie’s murdered were indeed tampered with. He’d been working to recover the deleted security footage ever since.

He nodded. “I’ll bring it up on-screen and we’ll view it together.”

As we waited for it to load, he filled me in on the latest with Simpson—a guy we were keeping alive because he might prove useful, despite the fact the perverted arsehole should have been killed months ago.

“Fucker’s been lying low. He knows we’re watching his every move. He’s even stopped his little rendezvous with the rent boys he loves so much.”

Thank fuck. Bile rose in my throat as my mind assaulted me with images I’d seen of him in compromising situations. I hated the slimy little weasel. He was married with teenage sons, but that didn’t stop him from regularly attending sordid sex parties where he got far too friendly with young boys not much older than his sons. The guy sickened me.

Just before I met Claire, we’d discovered the alliance between the Malia Boys and Broxys. After their attack on our estate and drug lab, we found they were backed by a London lawyer named Nigel Simpson, working for a Glasgow lawyer, Aiden Mathieson.

Mathieson had been quietly orchestrating our problems for years, driven by a vendetta against Miki’s dad, Alexi, who had exposed Mathieson’s banker father’s criminal dealings. When his father committed suicide in prison, Mathieson set out for revenge, funding gangs and running a human trafficking ring, building a powerful little empire for himself. Somehow, he’d learned about Alexi’s involvement in his father’s demise. By that time, Alexi was dead, and Miki was pakhan, but that didn’t stop the fucker from extracting his retribution.

Once we learned he was the one responsible for our troubles, we pulled Mathieson’s empire down like a house of cards, thanks to Eilidh, Miki’s fiancée, who had been investigating him. She understood the risks all too well; her father had been killed by the same corrupt cops Mathieson had in his pocket. Eilidh’s intel helped us gather evidence that brought Mathieson’s operation crashing down, and we managed to grab him before the police did. But the bastard’s heart gave out under interrogation before we could extract anything useful.

Marko hacked into one of Mathieson’s accounts and set up an alert for any activity. Months later, a transfer popped up—this time to a woman named Melissa Martin. At the time, she was just another lead, but through her, we uncovered the MP’s connection to Mathieson: they were half-brothers, sharing the same father and a deep-seated grudge against us. It wasn’t until later that Melissa became Marko’s fiancée.

When I went undercover as the MP’s bodyguard, I thought my disguise—blond hair, fake tattoos, and a Scottish accent—was foolproof. But somehow, he figured out who I was. We knew there was always a chance my cover might be blown, but we never imagined it would happen so soon—or that he’d go as far as killing one of my exes to frame me for her murder.

The MP was a lunatic, and we needed him out of the picture—permanently.

“Here we go,” Marko said as a grainy black-and-white image flickered to life on the screen.

“It’s a shit system they have, and I haven’t been able to clear it up any better than this,” he continued, squinting at the footage as we both leaned in closer.

We watched the video intently, taking note of the comings and goings from the basement car park. Then I saw what I was looking for.

“There,” I said, my voice barely above a whisper. Marko quickly froze the image.

“That’s Joey McDougall. One of the MP’s bodyguards. A right arsehole,” I said, anger simmering beneath the surface as Marko snapped a screenshot of the man’s face.

We spent the next couple of hours combing through the rest of the footage. By the end of it, we had identified our killer. The bastard had been in the car park of my flat not long before I returned home. He’d shown up carrying a large holdall, one big enough to contain a body—or more likely, a restrained person. Julie. Within twenty minutes, he’d exited again, and this time the bag didn’t look quite so heavy.

Now we’d identified the likely culprit, we needed to link him to Julie and find more evidence because the images alone wouldn’t be enough.

It didn’t take long for Marko long to hack into his mobile and unearth numerous texts between him and Julie.

They’d been dating, having met after she got out of rehab. From what I gathered, she’d been at the MP’s garden party on the day of the heist while I was undercover. I hadn’t seen her, but she must have spotted me, recognised me despite my disguise, or perhaps noticed something about Leon Peters, my alter ego, that reminded her of me. Maybe she hadn’t given it much thought at the time, but after the MP was arrested and I went off the grid, she might have mentioned it. They could have easily connected the dots.

Something had clearly gone wrong between her and McDougall, as several texts revealed him calling her a cheating slut. That was the motive.

So, Joey McDougall was the rapist and murdering bastard directly responsible for Julie’s death, and he was going to pay.

“Let’s tell Miki what we found. We need to find this guy,” Marko said.

Marko and I strode into Miki’s office, the air thick with urgency. Miki was hunched over a stack of documents, his brow furrowed in concentration. He looked up as we entered, sensing the gravity of the moment.

“What’s going on?” he asked, setting aside his work.

I took a breath, ready to lay it all out. “We found our suspect in Julie’s murder. Joey McDougall, one of the MP’s bodyguards. He was in the car park of my flat just before I got home. He had a large holdall with him, and it didn’t look so heavy when he left.”

“Got any proof?”

“Absolutely,” Marko confirmed, stepping forward and opening his laptop to pull up the images we’d gathered.

“Good work. Miki said, smiling in approval as he scanned the footage.

“Can we tie him to Julie?”

“Yeah. I hacked his mobile, there are a lot of conversations between the pair,” Marko stated.

“McDougall and Julie had been dating, having met after she got out of rehab. She was at the MP’s garden party on the day of the heist. We suspect she might have seen something, and he could have found out about our past,” I told Miki.

Miki leaned back in his chair, the weight of the situation settling in. “Motive?”

I nodded. “We’re working on it. The initial messages to Julie were passionate before things went dark. His jealousy and anger are evident in those texts. They paint a clear picture of a volatile relationship.”

Miki’s eye narrowed in thought and he steepled his hands. “If he’s our guy, we need to move fast. I don’t want him slipping through our fingers. We need him alive. He’s your way out of this, Luca. But we can also use him to hammer yet another nail into that fucking MP’s coffin.

I felt the adrenaline surge through me, a familiar rush of determination. “Let’s make it happen.”

Marko exchanged a glance with Miki, and I could see the gears turning in their minds. “Alright,” Miki said, leaning forward. “Let’s find out where McDougall is hold up, and Simpson; we’ll use both of these arseholes to get the MP to break his bail conditions. He won’t be able to fuck us up so easily while he’s stuck in a prison cell. We need him remanded and dealt with once and for all.”

As we discussed the plan, my thoughts drifted back to Julie. The rage I felt simmered just beneath the surface. She didn’t deserve this—none of it. And I would ensure that those responsible paid.