The only thing that had stuck out was that CeCe had a great-uncle in Ireland.

Normally, where someone’s distant relative lived wouldn’t be something I was concerned with. But considering the particular city the uncle lived in, that set off warning bells for not only me, but Pop as well. Just to play things safer, Desi had been asked to look into this great-uncle of CeCe’s. Since the man lived off the grid and was untraceable even on the dark web, it had taken time to get any intel.

“That will be all, Eduard. Thank you,” I told him dismissively before turning my full attention to the file.

My gaze fell on the name I’d been dreading seeing by the time the door quietly clicked closed behind my male assistant. Just reading that last name made my skin feel uncomfortable. Too tight, too itchy…too scarred.

The scars were faded now. The slightly raised burn marks nothing more than light lines on my chest and back. Nova didn’t even see them when she touched me, but she knew what they were from. She and Mom were the only two people in the world I spoke to about how I got them.

The O’Brion name was a powerful one in Ireland. My maternal grandfather had held one of the top positions in the IRA until his death. But while Cormac was still powerful in his home country, he’d turned over what he’d had in the US to the Vitucci family when Pop had married my biological mother, Sheena.

I had vague memories of Cormac, having only seen him a few times in my life. Pop killed Sheena the night he’d discovered her abusing me, but Cormac must have already known about the evil that lived inside his daughter because he’d accepted her death without the threat of retaliation.

The rest of Sheena’s family, however, was another story.

Sheena’s grandmother—my biological maternal great-grandmother—had wanted blood for the death of her beloved favorite grandchild. Cormac forbade it, from what my sources told me, but I’d had ears to the ground since the moment news of his death had reached me. So far, there had been no retaliation, but my gut was telling me that this had something to do with my great-grandmother’s thirst for blood.

Sheena, whom my mother had been named after, was just as evil as my biological mother had been, from all that I’d learned about the old woman. What little I knew about the rest of her family, they weren’t much better, if not worse in some regards. She had several other great-grandchildren, and the worst of them all was Bain O’Farrell.

Muttering a curse, I picked up my phone. After letting Pop and Zio know what our man in Ireland had reported back, I didn’t have to explain to them how potentially serious this was. There was a reason the picture of me with Ciana had been taken rather than the one of Nova and me. If Bain had his eye on my cousin, then I was sure he would try to use her against us in some way.