Chapter 55

“Sinead, girl, this is- fuck,” Jules said.

They were posted up in the Financial Forensics offices, which were once again empty except for the two women. Sinead had no fucking clue what the two old men she worked with were doing, and she hadn’t heard from her Captain in two weeks since she’d given her last report. It was a little ridiculous, but it was giving her the freedom to work so she wasn’t going to raise a stink about it.

Maybe if she actually broke Barisha, and that led to breaking Le Français, she could use that to whip the department into, well, looking like an actual department.

“I know,” Sinead said, shifting in her chair. They’d moved some desks around and she’d scrounged a pair of whiteboards on wheels from the basement storage of the building and they’d set up a little command centre to track all the different accounts and businesses moving money for Barisha. The only problem was that, sitting on her rolling chair, she could feel the buttplug.

She wasn’t sure why she hadn’t taken it out after parting with Marc. He didn’t expect her to wear it all the time, just when they were going to meet up. But for some reason, she felt like she should keep it in for ... some reason. She knew digging too deep into that feeling would lead her down a rabbit hole of thinking about everything else Marc had told her about their ‘game,’ and she didn’t have time for that at the moment.

“This all came from Fornier?” Jules asked.

“The first files we went through were what he gathered himself,” Sinead said. “The new set of digital records is what Barisha gave him to audit - Fornier said they haven’t even signed a contract, so there’s no legal expectation of privacy. Barisha doesn’t want to be a client of the company, he just wants Fornier to do the work. The last hardcopy stuff Barisha hand-delivered to Marc this morning and I went and picked it up. We went through it quickly and he helped me identify a bunch of the core leads.”

“So the new stuff is a little more legal than the last stuff, but without Fornier being an official CI or making an actual report with his name on it, it’s still not going to fly in court,” Jules muttered, then looked across the desks at Sinead. “I’ve talked to him too, but you’ve been working with him longer. Are you sure we can’t get him to agree to anything, or to testify?”

Sinead had a flash of ... she wasn’t sure. For some reason being reminded of Jules meeting with Marc alone, and knowing that Marc already had another partner, made her feel a spike of worry or jealousy that maybe Marc was starting a game with Jules as well. She was a beautiful woman, and probably a little more experienced in terms of the kind of stuff Marc liked. She even had that big back tattoo, so she could sit through hours of needles stabbing her skin. If that wasn’t masochism, she wasn’t sure what was...

“He’s set against it,” Sinead said, shaking off her wandering thoughts. “It would burn him completely in his actual work, and would burn him as an asset for future investigations as well on our end. This info might not float in court, but it’s damn fucking useful since it gives us a lot of puzzle pieces.”

“Yeah, I’m just not thrilled at needing to duplicate the pieces so that they’re legal,” Jules sighed. Then she got a look on her face as she watched Sinead from across the desks. “Are you feeling alright?”

“What? Why?” Sinead asked, looking up from the notes she’d been writing.

“Because you’re sitting weird, and keep shifting around like you can’t get comfortable,” Jules said and then smirked. “If I didn’t know any better I’d think you did anal last night.”

“Fuck off,” Sinead scoffed, though she knew she couldn’t hide the blush that rose to her cheeks. Why the hell was she getting embarrassed so much today? Usually, she wasn’t so easy to get to.

Jules broke into a laugh. “It’s alright, babe. One of these days we’ll find you the right guy to take that stick out of your ass for good.”

Sinead just buried her head in her work, trying not to think about Marc’s promise of what he would be taking eventually.

A couple of hours later, she and Jules had a comprehensive list of businesses they needed to start researching and then checking out, and accounts they needed to tie to names or companies. It was going to be a long week.