“You like her,” Cillian says with a waggle of his eyebrows.
“Fuck off. I’ve known her for twelve hours.”
“Didn’t answer the question.”
“I don’t know her well enough to like her. I know she’s smart. I know she’s strong. I know she built a $300 million company from scratch because she refused to live off her father’s dime or his name.” I pause. “And I know she’s about to have her entire life ripped apart because of my family, and that makes me want to put my fist through a wall. Or Dad’s throat. Maybe both.”
Nobody speaks for a long minute.
Gavin, God bless his twenty-one-year-old inability to read a room, breaks the silence first.
“So on a scale of one to ten?—”
“I will fucking end you,” I growl.
He holds up his hands. “Fair enough.”
Wolfe closes his laptop. “For what it’s worth, her firm’s security protocols are better than most Fortune 500 companies. Theyweren’t outsourced or inherited. She designed the framework and it’s solid.”
I look at him. “How do you know that?”
“Because I tried to find a vulnerability and couldn’t.” Wolfe’s lips lift into a rare almost-smile. “She’s smart, Loch. Smarter than Dad is giving her credit for. That might be the only advantage you two have as a married couple.”
Yeah. I’m starting to figure that out.
The sun drops in the sky. We stay at the bar until early evening. I choose coffee over whiskey when Cillian pours rounds for everyone. The constant banter between my brothers, the easy laughs, the relentless ribbing… it almost feels normal, like those first few months after Mam died, when we’d all pile into my bedroom and just exist together there because being alone was worse.
I was seventeen when we lost her. Gavin was ten. He didn’t understand what happened, just that Mam was gone and nobody would, or could, explain why. I was the one who sat up with him every night for three months, teaching him how to breathe through the panic attacks, how to count backward from a hundred when the nightmares haunted his sleep.
I was a kid raising a kid because our father was too busy running an empire to notice his youngest son was falling apart.
Some things don’t change.
“Ronan called,” Cillian says as I’m pulling on my jacket.
My chest tightens. “And?”
“He’s pissed. More than usual. Said Dad is giving you everything he earned.”
“Fuck him. He can take it up with Dad.”
“You know he won’t.” Cillian looks at me, and for a second, his relaxed bartender act drops. Underneath it is a twenty-six-year-old who’s seen too much and carries way more than he lets on. “And you know this is just gonna be more fuel for his fire.” His shoulders slump. “You guys need to work things out, once and for all.”
“I’m not the one who created this whole shit storm,” I say. Anger bubbles in my veins. “Ronan made his bed. Chose his master.”
Cillian sweeps a hand over his head. “You know, we all suffered, Loch. Everyone deals with things their own way. And he’s always been?—”
I lean in close and hold up a hand because I’m finished with this conversation. “C, there’s a right way, a wrong way, and a fucking asinine way. He picked his poison. I’m done.”
Frustration flickers in his eyes. "Fine. But Loch, you're about to walk into a war zone. The Russians, Dad's scheming, a wife who doesn't trust you,andRonan sharpening his knives?" He shakes his head. "That's a lot of battles to fight on your own. You might want to think about shutting one of them down."
"Ronan can shut it down any time he wants."
"So can you."
I grab my jacket. "I'll see you later, C."
"Yeah." He doesn't push it. "Be careful out there."
