Necessary.
The word detonates in my skull.
I laugh once—short, humourless, broken. “You don’t get to decide what’s necessary anymore.”
Her eyes harden then, the mask slipping just enough to show the steel underneath.
“You had a future,” she says coolly. “A bride and a place in the Cosa Nostra that would have made you untouchable.” Her gaze flicks, briefly, dismissively, to Lily. “And she made you weak. I couldn’t allow that.”
I feel Lily flinch.
That’s the last mistake Una will ever make.
My grip tightens around my knife. “She is not a thing you move around a board,” I snarl, hearing the approaching footsteps and knowing backup is seconds away. “She’s not leverage, she’s not expendable. And if you think being my mother gives you any protection here—”
Jonathan and Liam enter first, weapons already up, bodies angling left of the table without a word exchanged. It’s instinctive. Muscle memory. The kind of movement you only learn when you’ve cleared rooms before and know hesitation gets people killed.
Aidan’s right behind them, jaw locked, eyes never leaving Antonio as he takes up space near the door, Da hot on his heels and placing himself halfway between Aidan and me. The air shifts the moment they’re all inside, pressure building, the room suddenly too small to hold this much restrained violence.
I don’t know where Owen, Declan, Brennan, Seamus, and Jack went after I bolted, only that they’re not here, and that absence feels deliberate. Like teeth closing somewhere out of sight.
Ten of us.
All moving with the same purpose.
All of us here because someone touched Lily, and whatever happens next, this place isn’t surviving it.
I step forward.
The room seems to recoil.
“You’re wrong.”
The temperature shifts. Even Una feels it—her shoulders stiffen, her smile tightening by a fraction as she takes in the full weight of the Points and every ounce of fury we all carry. Her days of being a backstabbing bitch are over, and she’d be a damn fool to think she’s making it out of this one alive.
She might have been able to leverage being my mother as her claim to this family for the past twenty-five years, but no more.
The balance has shifted. She knows it, Antonio knows it.
And Lily—pressed against me, trembling, breathing sharp and uneven—feels it too.
Antonio clears his throat, a forced attempt at reclaiming the room. “This is unnecessary,” he says, voice smooth but betraying a tiny crack. “We can discuss—”
“Shut your mouth.”
The words tear out of me before he finishes, low and dark, shaking with a fury I can barely contain. I tighten my grip on my knife, grounding myself so I don’t lunge across the room.
Jonathan’s jaw flexes, his gun steady as stone. “The fucked-up ink—it’s yours. You branded them. Planted rats in my ranks, you son of a bitch, didn’t you?”
His gaze cuts briefly to Una, sharp and unforgiving. “And you”—his lip curls—“played the long game. Whispered poison into Ciaran’s ear before he cast you aside. Pushed him toward Salvatore. Made it sound like aligning with the Cosa Nostra wasbest for the family, when really it was just a way to pull Matt away from his own blood, so you could get your hooks into him and rot him from the inside.”
Una doesn’t deny it.
That silence is louder than any confession.
Antonio’s smile wanes, finally cracking under the weight of it all. “This was business,” he says tightly. “If you just—”
“Don’t,” I cut in, my voice flat now. The time for his excuses is finished. “You don’t get to rename this.”
