Chapter Two
Kieran
Present Day
You could tell a lot about a person watching them kill. There was an intimacy to the act. A private moment between killer and victim. I hadn’t understood what Grandfather meant when he’d given me that piece of truth. Not until I’d witnessed Tristan snap a man’s neck with his bare hands.
Tristan Alexander Brennan looked the part of boardroom CEO, not the backroom henchman like Grandfather. But underneath that dry, stern facade, hid a dangerous animal he’d released whenever needed. His people respected him while they had feared Grandfather. What better way to lead than through fear? That had been Grandfather’s motto, but not Tristan’s. He earned respect. And unlike me, he didn’t give a fuck what people thought about him so long as they respected him and were loyal to him and his family. I was still on the fence if that included me. Up until a few months ago, I’d been his bastard secret, molded into a killer by his father, Cillian. My grandfather had torn me from my world when he took me at age ten.
And Tristan had done nothing to protect me from it.
My hate for him and his family had turned into a plan to take over their legal business. The Ark Boys, as my friends and I were called, had forced my grandfather to borrow against his legitimate business to pay off what we disrupted of his drug trade which ultimately led to his ruin. Too bad he died before I could’ve seen the fruits of my labor. I killed Cillian when he kidnapped Tomás. His body was discovered by two kids on the bank of Lake Wilmer. The investigation was closed. Tristan must’ve called in some major chips to have the death ruled a boating accident. The families had been whispering war ever since.
I wondered if Tristan suspected it’d been me. Every time I got into the dark sedan with him and his bodyguard, Jacob, I wondered if this would be the day all my sins caught up to me. Every time I climbed into that car I wondered if Tristan would order Jacob to veer off the main road and into some remote path, force me out of the car, and place the barrel of his gun against my head.
“Why should I keep you alive?”
That question still haunted me. Even from Grandfather’s grave, I heard the words.
Tristan wasn’t anything like Grandfather. Wearing comfortable slacks, a dark button-down shirt, peacoat and leather calf high boots, Tristan looked both like a businessman and killer. While Jacob wore all black without looking as if he were an actual bodyguard but exuding a penchant for violence just the same. Jacob and Tristan were more than bodyguard and client. They were family. It was evident whenever they were alone, whenever there was no reason for a threat. I sometimes envied Jacob that. He would’ve been Tristan’s perfect son. Healthy.
The reasons Cillian wanted me to lead had all been based on lies. He’d succeeded in turning me into his fucking minion, a killer. But killers were instruments of death. Not leaders.
I spent years hating Tristan Brennan. Wanting blood. I’d planned his fucking murder. But it slowly started to dawn on me that maybe I had been wrong. About everything. But twenty years of hatred poisoned a man. And I hadn’t been detoxed of that hatred. My only guiding light had been Tomás. Thinking how I left things with him burned a hole in my heart. When I first left, we had scheduled time to talk every night. That dwindled to texting, and even that fell silent. I looked at my phone. Like a coward, I hadn’t reached out to him in weeks because I couldn’t answer the one question he kept asking. When are you coming back?
“You good?” Tristan asked as we stopped at a construction site.
No. I fucking wasn’t. “I’m not going to kill you, if that’s what you’re asking.”
A small smirk softened his features.
I didn’t wait for him to say anything else and got out of the car.
The trailer we used as an office was small. A solid oak desk occupied most of the space with a couple of hard chairs in front of it. A quick scan offered nothing else.
“Where’s the bathroom?” I asked.
“Outside,” Tristan said.
“You got to be kidding,” I mumbled.
Jacob chuckled. The first sound I heard from him all morning. I knew he wanted to say something, but he clamped his mouth shut and looked at Tristan instead. I’d been riding shotgun with them for three months and couldn’t hide my OCD, especially when it came to cleanliness and indoor plumbing.
“Hold it,” Tristan said. “This should be quick.”
I wasn’t sure if my body would be able to hold anything, but I gave him a curt nod anyway.
I’d been diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes when I was thirteen as a fuck you from the universe. To avoid a bullet for being a defect, I’d hidden it from Grandfather and Tristan and for the past three months I’d been playing Russian roulette with my health. I’d removed my monitor and pump because we were usually searched when on jobs and I’d be called out. We’d been out since early this morning with nothing to eat. My body was feeling the effects of it, and I couldn’t do anything short of stopping this fucked up situation so I could check my insulin. Not fucking happening.
Jacob took position to Tristan’s left, while I stood to his right. It seemed the most natural thing to do.
Someone knocked on the door. Tristan turned to me. “Just follow my lead,” he said and waited for me to nod before telling the person to come inside.
Cameron Russo wore a long coat, black slacks, and shiny ass shoes. His balding head red from the exposure to the cold outside. He had pockmarks on his face and a crooked nose from too many beatings. Accompanied by two of his security detail, he trudged inside. The taller guard stood to his right, facing off with Jacob. The shorter blond glared at me. They wore street clothes, muddied boots, and zippered jackets over their weapons. I never understood why henchman carried weapons they wouldn’t be able to reach at the onset of a firefight. As if they relied on luck of a bad shot before returning fire. I wore my coat open, my arms crossed in front of me, thumbing the handle of my weapon.
“Ah, the prodigal son returns,” Russo said, breathing as if he’d run a mile.
He gave Tristan the familiar bullshit greeting with a man hug. Tristan received it with a smile as well, though I was pretty sure his body was ready for anything.
Russo took a step back as Tristan remained standing in front of his desk, leaning on it.
“Thank you for meeting me here on short notice,” Tristan said in a tone that meant business.
Russo shifted as if expecting Tristan to invite him to sit. A conversation had standing up was always fueled with tension. This one was no different. The fat fuck didn’t seem to like the play.
“Quick to business then,” he started, not hiding his agitation. “Word on the street is that war follows your return. You lost the business, and you make alliances through matrimony that go against God and the church.”
The blond in front of me sneered. I almost expected him to spit at my feet. There was no mistaking the disdain of Maddox’s marriage to Alessandro Mancini, a union that gave the Brennans more street cred after losing their legitimate business to me. It meant that they wouldn’t be able to filter their illegal earnings using the Ark Boys’ corporation, Arcas International. Though I had left the Brennans some scraps, like their assets and a minority share of the business so they wouldn’t fucking starve, their illegal business took the biggest hit. Tristan hadn’t come clean to me with his plans for the future, but I suspected he’d be letting the illegal side of his business go if he believed they would survive it. With a family like the Brennans and Mancinis, there were too many people wanting blood. Memories lasted forever, but the promise of vengeance lasted even longer.
It'd never end.
“The union between Maddox and Alessandro is a contract between families and not anyone’s concern.”
“But Imogen would’ve been the better fit. She can produce a natural heir.”
Tristan gave away nothing in his expression. “Again, it is not your concern.”
“Cillian would not have approved.” Russo pressed.
The guy in front of me shifted, expecting something.
Tristan revealed nothing in his expression. A flat affect that made the hairs along my skin rise. “Cillian is dead. I lead the families now.”
I kept my focus on the threat in front of me.
“Thorne is pushing into the neighborhood, offering opportunities,” Russo went on. I learned early on in this game that silence could keep you alive. Apparently, Russo hadn’t learned shit.
A slow tingling lifted up my spine, branched out along my shoulders, up my neck. I shuddered in response. The blond’s eyes narrowed. Fuck. If there was a God, please let me have this one thing. This one part of me hidden. Sweat dripped down my back. I needed the fucking bathroom.
“You and the others are considering your options. You think I don’t know how to run the business.” Tristan hadn’t formed that as a question.
Russo shrugged.
A blur of movement caught my peripherals, and Jacob and I pulled out our weapons as if we’d practiced this a dozen times. In sync, it was a beautiful thing.
Tristan slammed Russo’s head against the side of the desk hard. With a resounding crack of bone, Russo’s body hit the floor. He didn’t move.
The adrenaline spike made my hands shake.
The guys shifted, realized they were fucked and glared at Tristan.
“Where do your loyalties lie?” Tristan asked the two fuckers as if he hadn’t just exerted a good amount of pressure to the back of a fat man’s head to kill him on impact. This was an olive branch. Tristan didn’t kill needlessly, but he wasn’t a pushover either. Apparently, Russo had forgotten that hard truth. “You think my family weak? You think we don’t own this fucking city?” Tristan’s voice took a slight lilt, an accent that only surfaced when he was enraged. Something he had eliminated so that he would be taken seriously in the boardroom only to lose it all. Because of me. Not something I should be thinking about while I tried to control my body. And it wasn’t fucking working.
My hand holding the gun shook. This time Jacob and Tristan caught it too. Tristan wasn’t armed. That meant Jacob was the only one here that could protect him. Killing Tristan would end the family. Maddox was a hot head, not a leader. And Liam knew nothing about the business. His expertise lay in Restitution. In information. And Declan and Imogen were targets.
Fuck. I fucked up.
That’s the last thing I remembered when the world narrowed to a tiny point. I saw the fucker in front of me reach behind him, heard the sharp report of a gun, then nothing.