Page 9 of Wicked Auction

The food's everything I remembered.

“Christ, he's come home to Mam's cooking and will be twice my size by the weekend,” Seamus mutters. “Fancy a drink?”

I shake my head. “Didn't remember the McCarthys fat-shaming,” I joke into my water glass.

Seamus snorts. “Fat-shaming? Brother, there isn't a shred of fat on you.”

“Right, right, we covered that.”

There's wine and noise, and my father half asleep next to Mam. Kyla's insulting Cavin, and it amuses me to see Cav's wife, Erin, laughing and picking up where Kyla leaves off. For now, I'm enjoying this. Family, changed in small ways but largely the same.

Tomorrow, I'll see the others. The McCarthy family is large and sprawling, loyal to the core. We'll have a proper reunion. But tonight, it's just us.

When Mam brings out the pudding and Da excuses himself to take a round of meds, Seamus gestures for me to join him. We walk wordlessly to the garden.

“I know you've just come home,” he says grimly. “But I've had word since you arrived.”

I half expected as much. “Yeah?”

“Our man inside got a message out an hour ago. Seems the auction's been moved to an undisclosed location near the Boston waterfront. Whoever's running it got skittish—too many eyes on the network after what happened with Boston, maybe, or they've got a buyer who won't wait.”

I go still. “How long?”

“We need you to be ready to take a flight to go to Boston immediately.” Seamus doesn't soften it. “You're barely two hours out of Mountjoy, and I'm telling you the timeline got cut by a week. I won't lie to you, that might not be enough time to do this clean.”

I look at him in the dark, at the lights of the kitchen behind him, at the family still laughing around the table, as if the world hasn't just narrowed to a door I haven't seen yet.

“To do what, exactly?” I say. “Learn a room I've never set foot in. Learn faces I've never seen. Convince men who've spent years building this network that I'm just another bidder with deep pockets and no questions.”

“Aye.”

“And if I'm not convincing?”

“Then we lose her to someone who is,” Seamus says. “Or we lose you trying.”

I nod slowly. I think about the woman in that holding room, however many miles from here, who doesn't know any of this—doesn't know there's a clock running on her behalf, doesn't know my name yet, and won't know what it really means, even after she hears it.

“I thought it best you meet our man tonight,” Seamus says. “While it's quiet. He's waiting at the gate.”