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Dec was an equal partner in the business, but while he showed an annoying level of competence at pretty much anything when pressed into duty, he couldn’t be pressed into duty often between the bevy of women who frequented his bed at their sharedresidence.
“Dec’s not stupid,” Nick said, pulling Ronan from histhoughts.
“I didn’t say he was,” Ronan said. “But we both know he’s not in a position tocriticize.”
Nick met his eyes. “We’re all in a position to criticize, Ro. That’s what it means to have partners. Andbrothers.”
Ronan looked away, not wanting to admit Nick was right. What would Ronan do if the roles were reversed? If Nick deployed the company on what was, for all intents and purposes, a wild goose chase, tying up their resources in a pro bono client while paying clients waited in thewings?
He didn’t have to think long about the question. Ronan would shut it down. He’d tell Nick exactly what Nick was telling him, albeit a lot less diplomatically. Their business, borne out of their grief and rage over Erin’s death, was about more than money, but they couldn’t take pro bono jobs without paidclients.
“Clay and his guys are getting close to something on Gold,” Ronan said. Clay was the unofficial leader of their freelance digital team and the hacker who’d gotten them deeper into the Manifest website when Ronan had first metJulia.
“That’s what you said lastmonth.”
“It was true last month.” Ronan looked at Nick. “This isn’t some hit job. We knew it would be more complicated goingin.”
The Berenger job had always been outside of MIS’s true purview. For lack of a more eloquent word, they were vigilantes, men who stepped in to take out the trash when the system had failed, as it had when it set loose the drug dealer who’d gotten Erin hooked on heroin when she was still in highschool.
They weren’t private investigators. Clients came to them when they already knew who topunish.
But Ronan had been moved by John Taylor’s predicament even before he’d crashed into Julia in an alley, both of them surveilling Seth Campbell, the tech giant who’d been dating Elise before her disappearance. At the time Ronan hadn’t known Julia was his new client’s granddaughter any more than Julia had known her grandfather, John Taylor, had hired MIS to find Elise and punish herkidnappers.
Usually MIS was called in when it was too late to save anyone. By the time their clients walked through the doors of their office, the damage had beendone.
All that was left wasretribution.
John Taylor was everything Ronan admired: a quiet but commanding man of few words, a former Army drill sergeant, a man who took seriously his duty to protect the people he loved, even if it meant subverting thelaw.
In Taylor’s plea, Ronan had seen an opportunity to actually save someone, to save Elise Berenger before punishing the men who’d takenher.
Had he been compromised by his history, by the loss of Erin all those years ago, by his inability to save her? Fuck yes. That’s all MIS was: a series of attempts at rewriting a history that could never berewritten.
It hadn’t stopped them from taking jobsbefore.
“I’m concerned about the personal angle,” Nick said. “And before you get your panties in a twist, you know you’d say the same thing to me if the roles werereversed.”
Ronan bit back his anger, forced himself to breathe. The personal angle. It was too antiseptic a word for the feelings he had for JuliaBerenger.
She flashed behind his eyelids: her tawny hair spread like silk across his bare chest, body supple and soft in his arms, brown eyes lit with amber fire and pain she didn’t want him tosee.
“We made a commitment to John Taylor.” Ronan wouldn’t pretend Julia had nothing to do with his desire to find Elise, but their contract — illegal and unspoken as it was — wasn’t nothing. In their business, a business not found on Yelp and not reviewed on social media, trust was everything. If they started backing out of every job when it got tough, their paying clients wouldn’t be so eager to pay, and that would mean no more pro bono work either, and no more MIS, something that was more than just business for the Murphybrothers.
Nick sighed. “I know. I’m just saying. There has to be an end point. We don’t have to figure out what it is tonight, but you should start thinking aboutit.”
An end point: a polite way of saying the point at which they gave up on Elise Berenger, the point at which Ronan would have to tell Julia her sister was lost forever, just likeErin.
Over his dead fuckingbody.
2
Julia turnedoff the engine and looked at the cottage in the middle of the clearing bordered by trees. It was August and at least ten degrees cooler here than in the city, but she couldn’t seem to make herselfmove.
The living room light was on in her gramps’ house, the glow warm and welcoming, and yet she could only sit, the cold air seeping from the car’s interior, the engine ticking as it cooled. It had been like that in the months since she’d gotten back from Dubai, her usual anticipation at seeing her grandfather dampened by the fact that week after week, there was no news aboutElise.
Her frustration was only inflamed by her gramps’ calmness. It wasn’t that he wasn’t worried about Elise — he still called hospitals every two days to see if anyone matching Elise’s description had been brought in withoutID.
But where Julia’s panic seemed to rise with each passing day, an invisible clock ticking down the time that had passed since Elise’s disappearance (four months, five days, twenty hours) while her runaway mind calculated the decreasing probability that she was still alive, her gramps was unflappable in his belief that Ronan and his brothers would bring Elise home safe andsound.
