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“Yeah,” Evie sighed. “This is the price. But I meant what I said at the bridal boutique. I want you to have as much of what you want as I can get for you. For the wedding and beyond. You’re family, or you will be, and family is everything.”
Viv was saved from having to respond when a technician poked her head around the door, and Evie motioned them inside. Not like she had any idea what to say anyway. But Evie’s words nestled down deep and took root.
Family. That’s what you gained when you got married, right? A new family. Aidan might hate her, but Evie didn’t seem to, and Libby was eaten up with guilt for decisions that were far beyond her control, however responsible she felt.
Evie was offering far more than Viv ever expected, a place carved out in the Callahan family, and she was going to try to make the best of it. She’d been doing that her whole life. What was another sixty years or so?
ChapterEight
Aidan sat in one of the chairs flanking the fireplace in his room, a series of files and papers spread out on the low table in front of him. They maintained just enough records to keep things straight and be able to pinpoint if anyone was screwing them, but not enough that they’d sink the whole damn ship if they ever got raided.
The syndicate was a business as much as a criminal enterprise, and Aidan was getting a peek behind a curtain he’d never expected to see. The hardest part wasn’t memorizing dealers or suppliers or their long list of buyers that kept them in business. It was reading through page after page of Finn’s looping script.
It had been over a month since he’d been killed in the raid, sliced open from the middle of his chest to the waist of his jeans. Finn had left behind a wife Evie’s age, one of her best friends, and a young son. Evan wasn’t even four.
Finn’s absence was a heavy, dark cloud that hung over them, impossible to escape. For Aidan especially, because Brogan blamed him for Finn’s death. He blamed him then for not acting quickly enough, and the way he wouldn’t meet his eyes and barely spoke to him showed he blamed him still.
What Brogan didn’t know is no one could blame him more than he blamed himself. Every night when he closed his eyes, he saw Finn’s lifeless body dripping blood onto the dining room floor, and he wished he’d done something different. Anything to get upstairs faster, to cover Finn and his team.
Libby might have brought the nightmare to their door, but he was the one trapped in it, the one who jolted out of sleep in a cold sweat most nights with Finn’s face swimming in his vision.
He dropped the paper he’d been reading on the table and rubbed his eyes before squeezing the bridge of his nose. He needed to focus. He only had a few more hours before he had to get ready for this stupid engagement party tonight.
At a noise in the doorway, he turned to look over his shoulder and found Brogan framed there, his eyes fixed on some point over Aidan’s head. Aidan sighed.
“Got something. Upstairs in five.” He was gone before Aidan could respond.
After shuffling the papers into neat stacks and sliding them back into their folders, Aidan stood and followed the hall to the stairs, taking them up to the third floor. It was mostly storage and staff rooms up here for the few permanent staff who were always in residence, but Brogan’s tech lair was here, as well as a library Declan had renovated after Aidan had been outvoted on putting in a home theater.
The door was open when Aidan rounded the corner, and he could hear the hum of the machines and the wall-mounted air conditioner as he approached. Stopping in the doorway, he was greeted with the crunch of metal and glass breaking. Declan bit off a curse.
“Find something on the accident finally?”
Aidan ignored the way Brogan snorted under his breath as he pulled up the footage from another angle and displayed it on the largest screen over his head. He tapped a button and the footage played, this time without sound.
The van drove toward a red light, slowing slightly until the light changed and they picked up speed. Just as they pulled into the center of the four-way intersection, a black Jeep came careening from the cross street and rammed the van, making it spin a full 360 and teeter on two wheels before stabilizing itself.
The Jeep paused for a fraction of a second to see if anyone got out of the van. When no one did, they sped off in the opposite direction. Pedestrians and other drivers called the cops, while the women inside called their husbands instead. Brogan hit pause when Declan’s SUV lurched to a halt and they both jumped out.
“So…not an accident.”
“Doesn’t look like one,” Declan gritted out.
“Unfortunately, I don’t have anything on a driver,” Brogan said, tapping the keys and bringing up another angle. “The car has no plates on it, and if I had to guess, it's probably stolen.”
“Can you get a good look at anyone inside the car?”
“No. The clearest shot I have is when they’re sitting still after they ram them. And the sun is glaring off the windows too much to make out any kind of person, let alone get a clear image of their face.”
“How did they know?”
“What?” Declan looked over his shoulder at Aidan.
Aidan stepped forward and reached out to point at the screen, dropping his hand when Brogan glared at him and shoving it into his pocket.
“The direction the Jeep comes from is lined with trees. There’s no way they’d be able to identify exactly which car was coming through the intersection next, let alone time it perfectly to hit them. So how did they know?”
Declan turned back to the computer while Brogan typed furiously, searching for wider camera angles.
