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Conor keeps his hand grasped firmly in mine as we walk as though someone might steal me away in the night. I smile up at him. Well, someone might try, but he and his brothers would never let them take me and I have never felt as safe and protected as I do as a part of their family.
“You okay, Angel?” he asks, his brow furrowed in concern.
“Yeah,” I whisper as I squeeze his hand.
Shane has his head bent, looking through some paperwork when we walk into his office. He looks up when he hears us. “What are you two doing up?” he asks with a frown.
“What are you doing up when you promised we were all taking the night off?” I ask with a flash of my eyebrows as I pull up a chair beside him and switch on my computer. When I became a permanent resident here, Shane bought a much bigger desk. It’s big enough that the two of us can work comfortably at it all day on two separate computers. Its huge size also comes in handy for the various other things we like to do on it. Even the thought makes my insides warm and tingly and I remind myself I came here to work.
Shane leans over and kisses my cheek and my skin warms at his touch. “I couldn’t sleep.”
“I knew you wouldn’t,” Conor says with a knowing smile as he sits on the edge of the desk beside me.
“I can’t stop my brain from ticking over.” He scowls at the paperwork in front of him. “I was wondering if this deal we struck up with Chicago had anything to do with it?” He rubs his temples and frowns at the papers on his desk.
“I think I know who’s behind this. Well, kind of,” I say and he turns back to me.
“Who?”
I start to pull up some of the records from my hard drive. I have stored everything I have ever found out about my past and my family on here.
“Tell us about the dream, Angel,” Conor says.
“Dream?” Shane’s frown deepens.
“A memory really,” I say as I start to trawl through the files. “I knew I’d seen that tattoo before.” I pull up the image of the guy’s neck from the ice cream parlor and although it’s obscured by his blood and a gaping bullet hole, the image is still recognizable. “It’s a firebird. See?” I point to the orangey red feathers on the screen.
“A firebird?” Conor asks as he peers closely at the screen.
“Yeah, like a phoenix, you know?”
Both he and Shane mumble their agreement.
“When I was little, The Firebird and the Princess was one of my favorite fairytales. My father used to tell it to me all the time.”
I look between both Shane and Conor as they stare at me in confusion and I realize I’m not making much sense.
“There are lots of variations of the firebird folklore, but the one my father told me was of an archer who finds a firebird feather and presents it to the king in the hopes of reward, instead the greedy king forces the archer to steal a princess. But, the princess didn’t want to be stolen and she refuses to marry the king. In traditional variations, the archer marries the princess himself, but in my father’s unique spin on it, the princess steals the firebird for herself and escapes to a faraway land.” I blink away a tear as I think about my papa and his soft, calming voice.
Conor reaches for my hand and squeezes and I smile at him.
“Anyway, because of that story, I think I forgot about the men who came to take me. The men with the firebird tattoos, or at least I jumbled the memory and the fairytales until I didn’t realize that part of it was real.”
“So you think these are the same men who tried to take you yesterday?” Shane asks.
“Not the exact same men, because as far as I recall, my father killed all of the men who came for me when I was a child.” More memories now of gunfire and shouting fill my head and I shake it to clear my thoughts. “But part of the same brotherhood.”
“Brotherhood?” Conor frowns at me.
“Hmm. I saw something about this years ago but because I was so focused on the Wolf I didn’t do a lot of research into them specifically.” I open a document that contains the information I gathered. “Roughly translated as the brotherhood of the firebird.”
“And they are?” Shane asks.
“Well, they used to be the Bratva’s most skilled assassins.”
“Used to be?” Shane frowns again.
“They haven’t been active for over a decade. At least not according to any of the research I did, which is why I never focused on them. They had no connection to the Wolf. In fact, the Wolf kind of put them out of business.”
