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He huffed. “Sicko.”
“Yup,” was my cheerful retort.
There was a reason I was my father’s favorite, even if I hadn’t been feeling like his goddamn favorite with the arranged marriage.
Birds of a feather…and all that.
I’d inherited most of the crap that made him a lunatic, and while I had a better handle on it, one thing I didn’t have?
Ma.
Lena O’Donnelly was calm, rational, and level-headed. Everything my da wasn’t. Though she had little to do with the business, outside of rallying the womenfolk together when times grew tough and all the women had to go on lockdown for their safekeeping at our compound, I had a feeling she was the reason my father was on the brink of hitting seventy.
Without her calming influence, he’d have been dead twenty years ago.
Of course, I wouldn’t be married if that was the case. Aidan Jr., my eldest brother and our father’s namesake, wasn’t the type to force his brothers into arranged marriages, even if that was the number one way of uniting enemies.
There was a bittersweet irony to the fact that I’d be better off with Da dead…at least, by that logic.
Conor grunted, and the sound dragged me away from the darker recesses of my mind. “You have any clue who it might be?”
“The usual suspects. I’ll start digging,” he muttered on a sigh, and I heard the thud of his fingers on his phone screen that told me he was already working on shit.
“Do you think the whole system has been compromised?” I queried.
“I hate to say it, but yeah. Potentially. Fuck. I had so many firewalls on our security systems that I don’t have a goddamn clue how they could be broken—”
“Maybe they weren’t,” I said softly. Conor had lost a lot of bonuses when someone had hacked our security a couple of years back. I highly doubted he was bullshitting me.
“Then how?”
I shrugged, not really knowing where I was going with this, but… “There’s a camera in the elevator. Could someone have hacked that?”
I appreciated the notion even less, to be fair. I’d done a lot of shit in that elevator…including transporting dead bodies down it.
Unease slithered through my veins when Conor muttered, “It should be all tied together.”
“Maybe it wasn’t.” I blew out a sigh. “Just figure it out, Conor. Please?”
“Why do you think she was there?”
“From the little she was wearing, she wanted to fuck.”
“She was naked?” he blurted, his surprise clear.
“Yeah, legs spread wide…that’s how I walked in. Inessa saw it—”
“Aw, shit. That sucks.”
He wasn’t joking, which surprised me. We were a close-knit family, but we were guys. If we could rub salt in the wound, we often did. Which meant my brothers were giving Inessa the benefit of the doubt. That came as a shock considering her ties, but I figured the fact I’d maimed her father today made them pity her.
Not ideal, but better than outright loathing.
From our own experiences, we knew not to always pin the sins of the father on the sons. For all the sins we’d committed, they were nothing to Aidan O’Donnelly Sr.’s. That was why he was obsessed with church and confession. He figured that was the only way he and Ma would be together in the afterlife.
Crazy, yup. But I’d already called him a lunatic for a reason…
“Yeah, it does.”
