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“I do not. Nor do I care. She’s young and well broke—of that, I am certain.”
I shook my head in distaste.
Raphael laughed without humor. “C’mon, Lucifer, you know they aren’t dubbed ‘The Brennan Butchers’ because they fancy the taste of lamb. Have you ever met a more depraved group of bloody savages?”
Without warning, memories I’d long since tried to eradicate played like a movie reel in my mind. A dank room with thick chains hanging from the ceiling. The flash of a steel blade. The screams of a voice as familiar to me as my own.
The back of my neck broke out in a cold sweat, and I rubbed a hand over the damp skin.
Raphael’s features smoothed into a knowing expression. “Exactly, brother.”
Lucifer
There was an obnoxious pounding on my office door.
I looked up from the screen I’d been studying in earnest. “Come in.”
Keegan burst in wearing the expression of a teenager who’d happened upon his father’s porn collection. “Dude—you gotta come check this shit out.”
That level of enthusiasm? Fine. I’d bite.
I exited out of the encrypted file on the desktop. A little personal light reading that had turned out to be boring as fuck.
Good news for the Albanians—in the wasted hours of my life that I’d never get back, Molotov’s claims remained unfounded.
Not-so-good news for the fucking Russians.
Cillian and Widow Brennan had arrived at the estate hours ago, but Raphael hadn’t insisted on my presence yet. Perhaps our talk last night had reminded him of how personal this was for me. Regardless, while my brother played host to our enemies, I’d spent the day in my office at The Ruby Slipper reviewing Keegan’s latest reports on the Albanians.
Eight years ago, our father had transformed the Boston honeypot from a strip club with a seedy reputation to an exclusive gentleman’s club that catered to a different sort of clientele. It was a place where we could run our operations and launder money while hosting the very men who guaranteed our success.
Our regulars were high rollers who enjoyed our backroom card and roulette tables and puppet politicians who wanted an indulgent place to unwind. Certain organized crime families in the Boston area chose The Ruby Slipper for meetings based on its neutral ground and stellar view. Women were no longer on the menu, but that didn’t mean the ladies serving drinks and trendy light fare weren’t pleasing to the eyes and scantily clad.
I trudged behind Keegan as we made our way next door to his office.
He motioned to one of the dozen monitors on his wall. “There she is.”
I followed his hand to take in the high-definition image within a smaller square on a screen. The last time I’d looked at our surveillance footage, it had been black and white and grainy. Finn had definitely made some upgrades to Keegan’s systems. Everything was digital now and—as I’d learned today—encrypted like it was a matter of national fucking security.
Through the vantage point of a camera positioned on the outside wall of the mansion, we could see a woman standing in front of my apple tree. Snow covered the ground, and the temperature hovered at freezing, yet there she was, admiring the last gift my mother had ever given me. A pane of golden hair cascaded down the back of her ivory overcoat, and a pink scarf was wrapped around her neck.
“That’s gotta be her, right?” Keegan asked.
“Most likely.”
“Sweet. Let me see if I can zoom in ...” Keegan fidgeted with something in his hand and the image of the widow grew closer.
At that exact moment, she turned, scanning the side of the mansion at the same height as the camera. She froze, perfectly framed in pixels. The scarf covered most of her face, but her iridescent blue eyes shimmered in a way that Finn’s high-tech camera couldn’t miss. She blinked, and then her gaze narrowed, but only for a moment. Then she dipped her head and moved out of our line of sight.
“She knows she’s being watched,” I stated.
Keegan shook his head. “Impossible. Finn’s cameras? Un-fucking-detectable to the naked eye, bro.”
It wasn’t worthy of a debate. I trusted my initial analysis—at the very least, Widow Brennan was observant as fuck.
And there was something else. Something ... disconcerting.
A sensation I couldn’t define developed in my chest.
