AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Five
Finn
When Brennan’shead popped around the door, I wasn’t sure who froze the most.
Junior gaped, and I definitely stared, everything inside me rejecting what his presence in the doorway might mean, but it was Senior who rasped, “Brennan, boy, if you’ve come to tell me you’re a fucking Sparrow—”
Bren stormed in, Conor at his back, and his immediate scowl had me relaxing some. “Do I have a label on my forehead or something? Jesus Christ.”
“No blaspheming,” Senior wheezed, but it lacked the usual ire that came with that chastisement. He sounded more breathless than furious. “What is it then?”
Brennan straightened his shoulders, wriggling them some as he moved toward the desk. “I got something I need to tell you.”
“Not the Sparrows?” Senior almost pleaded this time.
“Not the fucking Sparrows,” Brennan snapped before he blew out a breath. “Something else… something about the Sparrows but not to do with me.”
“What?” Aidan Sr. demanded.
“Callum O’Reilly—” Brennan hesitated.
Callum O’Reilly had gone missing just before Thanksgiving, so, interested, I asked, “What about him?”
Senior had been driving us all crazy about him. Making us put feelers out, but there'd been no bites as far as I knew.
Brennan shot me a look. “He was working with the Sparrows.”
Aidan Sr. tensed up. “Was?”
He dipped his chin. “Was.”
Conor shoved Brennan in the back. “Callum wasn’t a fucking Sparrow. I’ve been on the hunt for him since his disappearance, and I’ve found no links between him and those asswipes.”
Bren twisted around. “Kid, I’m telling you the truth. He was. He just hid it well.”
“How do you know?” Senior demanded, sitting straighter in his chair at Conor’s defense of Callum.
“I lied to you about those men behind the jewelry break-ins at Hummels. I didn’t kill them before they could talk. They talked first but I knew you weren’t ready to hear what they had to say, so I dealt with it.”
“You dealt withhim?” Tension gripped Senior in a chokehold.
“I did. Remember what I told you before? That some Five Pointer informed the brains of the operation that Hummel’s wasn’t protected by the Points anymore?”
“I remember.”
“That was Callum.”
“No way was Callum a Sparrow,” Conor snapped again, getting in Bren’s face.
Junior hobbled over to them both so I didn’t bother getting involved, just watched as he shoved one hand on each brother’s chest, and in a move that I’d seen too often because he was their fucking referee with decades of experience, he pressed them apart.
“Break it up, fuckwits,” he snarled. “Getting into a fight isn’t going to change the truth.”
“What truth?” Conor hissed. “What happened to ‘innocent until proven guilty,’ huh?”
“You want goddamn proof?” Brennan shoved Junior’s hand aside as he reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out his cellphone.
As he did, he swiped a couple times, then, there was the unmistakable sound of someone sobbing and of fists meeting flesh.
