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My father chuckled. “She’s got her mother’s temper for sure.” His smile fell, his eyes becoming haunted, like looking into a fractured mirror. It didn’t take a genius to know he was thinking of Katherine McDonough. Ava’s mother.
It was still hard to believe that I had an older sister. She wasn’t much older than Kiernan and me—just a few months, which meant I could still pull out the “nearly your older brother” card when I needed to.
It wasn’t a secret that my mother wasn’t my father’s first love. Kiernan was dead set on the fact that my father only married our mother out of duty, and I couldn’t find a reason to disagree with him. The pair were polar opposites. After Saoirse was born, they’d even stopped sharing a bed. Hell, they barely shared a house any longer now that we were all nearly grown.
We’d rescued Ava nearly three weeks ago from the hands of Christian Ward, the man she’d believed to be her biological brother for years. She was terrified of him. I didn’t blame her. The man had a sick, perverted obsession with her that bordered on psychotic.
The surprise on my father’s face when Vasily Ivankov darkened our doorstep, alone and unarmed, had been earth shattering.
That one had balls of steel, which was the only reason my father heard him out rather than shooting him and dumping his body in Lake Union.
Another sister.
At first, I’d thought the man was trying to blow steam up our asses, but there was no denying the truth when he pulled out her picture. Fuck. She could have been our triplet. We looked that much alike, with our ginger hair and vibrant green eyes.
Then he told us a story.
Her story. As much as he knew, anyhow.
Where she’d been. How she’d gotten there, and it made my blood boil.
In the Kavanaugh family, we had one saying.
A statute we lived by.Fola roimh gach ní eile
Blood before all else.
She’d been Elias Ward’s prisoner. Locked away, believing that the family she had didn’t care about her.
They beat her.
Used her.
God knows what else Ward did to her before handing her over to Dashkov as a fucking bargaining chip to save his pathetic son’s life.
Cac.Fuck.
Elias Ward was lucky he was already dead.
“We do have a slight problem, though.” I cleared my throat, setting the towel on the bar as I turned to face my father. “Someone saw us take out Jimmy.”
My father paused in his cleaning, looking at me askance.
“Did you take care of them?”
I ducked my gaze away from his, heat blooming up my neck in shame, but I wasn’t second-guessing what we did. It had been the right thing.
“No,” I admitted, swallowing back the lump in my throat as I prepared myself for his disappointment. “She’s…Kiernan’s taking her upstairs.”
Leaning back against the bar opposite of me, he crossed his arms against his chest, eyebrows raised expectantly.
“It’s a woman?” he asked. I bit my lip and nodded. “If you keep her, you know what I expect,” my father warned me, his gaze hard and serious.
“Yes, sir.”
“You and Kiernan will be responsible for keeping her in line.” He turned back to finish putting away the glasses. “She needs to understand this lifestyle and what she’s given up in exchange for her life. If she escapes and goes to the cops, it’s on your heads.”
“I understand.”
