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I pressed the device to my ear. “Raphael.”
“Lucifer. Are you somewhere you can talk?”
“Aye. Just Keegs and me here.”
There was a prolonged silence, which suggested in the next breath he’d instruct me to take the call privately, but then he cleared his throat. “What do you recall about Jack’s daughter?”
I rubbed the center of my chest with a closed fist. The sensations from earlier in Keegan’s office had resurfaced without warning.
“Her name is Willa.”
It was the first time I’d spoken her name out loud, and it had been a decade since I’d heard it. I’d only ever laid eyes on her one time, and that was thirteen years ago. Though Jack had taken me under his wing when I’d become a foot soldier at seventeen, he’d rarely mentioned his kid. A measure he’d implemented to protect her innocence, I assumed.
“What else?” he pressed.
And that’s when I heard the strain of urgency bleeding through.
I glanced at Keegan, who was scrolling through Instagram—the proverbial leaving the room—before I continued, “That night ... Athair ordered you to deliver one hundred thousand dollars in cash to her mother with instructions for her to take the child and disappear. I never heard of her again.”
Silence.
“Very well. I need to get back to dinner.”
I swallowed the lump that had lodged itself in my throat as my gaze dropped to the dark screen in my hand.
Dots—blue dots—connected in my mind.
Cold realization filtered through my bloodstream.
There’s no fucking way.
I hit the keyless ignition with more force than necessary, and the engine roared to life.
“Drop yourself off,” Keegan said. His voice stabilized me in the present. “I’ll take it from here.”
I met his eyes, and he gave me a solemn nod. He’d read the room. He didn’t ask questions because he didn’t require answers.
But I did.
Willa
“I apologize—business.” A debonair grin rearranged Raphael Flynn’s chiseled features as he pocketed his cell phone and folded into his seat at the head of the Flynns’ dining table. “How’s the cottage pie?”
After a few hours spent with the man, I’d come to learn that my future husband was slick and refined. If I didn’t know what a monster he was, I could have found him charming.
I dabbed my mouth with a napkin. “Splendid. Everything is lovely, thank you.”
I was certain that when Raphael had heard my first name and looked into my telltale Callahan-blue eyes that he’d thought he’d seen a ghost. My useless travel companion and current brother-in-law, Cillian, was so oblivious to anything that didn’t have a vagina or wasn’t triple distilled that he’d missed the spasm of disbelief and shock in my fiancé’s stare.
Raphael held me with an assessing gaze. “As are you, Willa.”
Every time he drawled my name, it hung in the air like a poisonous gas capable of disintegrating my insides.
I forced a smile and relaxed the tension in my shoulders before taking a sip of water.
Raphael’s brow tightened. “Do you not care for the Pinot Noir? It typically pairs well with lamb.”
I shook my head. “It’s fine, I just prefer to rehydrate properly after a long flight, that’s all.”
