“We already know he can put the mind whammy on us, and Gray said before he looked like he might have some sort of offensive stuff he’s hiding from Carnell.”
“That’s right, he looked ready to take Carnell on when I saw them while Traveling. Good thinking, baby.” Grayson squeezes Luca’s foot.
Finn doesn’t add that if this divide-and-conquer idea has Grayson and Nix separated for more than half a day, they’re going to be in trouble again with the BBS. Hopefully, this won’t take longer than a few hours.
It feels incongruous to hear himself say that he hopes it will take only a few hours to take a life. His Oath judders and twinges at the thought, but Finn has long ago made peace with doing what he needs to do to keep his family safe—even if that means breaking his Oath.
He doesn’t need to learnthatlesson more than once.
18
The Shadow Crown (Finn)
The atmosphere in the cottage is quiet, but Finn knows it’s just that everyone is lost in their own thoughts.
Even after the flurry of discussion, the bare-bones chessboard plan, and Luca’s half-asleep commentary from Gideon’s lap, his thoughts are still racing. His brain keeps looping the same internal checklist—What’s next? What’s missing? What’s going to go wrong?—while his fingers move without direction, tugging on borrowed sweatpants and fidgeting with the old wooden chess pieces Leo had left behind.
They’re scuffed and worn, clearly well-loved. Who had played here before them? Who had left them behind?
With a sigh, Finn sets the white Queen gently back in place and finally gives in to what he’s been resisting for the last ten minutes—pulling up the biometric data for all his mates, even though he can see with his own eyes that they’re here. That they’re okay.
His phone rings before the screen can even load. The sudden vibration makes him flinch and nearly drop it to the stone floor.
“Shit,” he mutters. “It’s Margot.” He hits accept, his thumb trembling. “Hello, Finn speaking.”
“Finn, is Jay there?” she asks, sounding a bit off—even to Finn, who has only met her a handful of times.
Finn puts her on speaker and places the phone in the center of the chessboard.
“We’re all here. Is everything alright at Phoenix?” Jay asks.
“As good as it can be, given we’re dealing with the…uh, debacle…” she says cautiously.
She’s referring to Jay’s shooting and the public perception of his subsequent demise. Finn hates to even think about how close it was to being reality rather than fiction—a disaster rather than a mere debacle.
“Sorry. We know it’s a lot of work.”
“Lauren says it’s important—and if it’s important to you, it’s important to us. That’s why I’m calling. She said I should let her know if there was anything weird happening, but I can’t get her on the phone or by email since this morning. So I wanted to call you.”
It’s unlike Lauren to disappear off the radar without letting them know. Shit.
“What is it? Trouble with the news agencies?” Leo asks.
“No, actually, we got a DM on socials yesterday.”
“From whom?” Nix asks, curiosity clear on his face. “Does Phoenix usually respond to DMs?”
“We don’t, but we screen them for verified accounts as a professional courtesy. The DM came from @bossmanpc??. We escalated it to Sentinel to do a bit of recon right away, given the content of the DM, and a few things popped up. It was enough to make us take it seriously. I didn’t want to call until we knew what we were dealing with.”
“That handle sounds like I should be making a connection. Just save me from my stupidity and give it to us straight,” Jay jokes.
Nix growls at the self-effacing insult to their alpha while Luca snorts:Straight! Ha.
“Sure thing, Boss. You said before that you knew Carnell had connections in your old company, right?”
“Buddies of buddies and a bit of blackmail fodder,” Jay says with a frown.
There had been some high-ranking members of the board on Carnell’s blackmail list. They’d assumed he’d been putting a bit of pressure on to keep Hayes employed in the aftermath.
