CHAPTER TWENTY
William
THREE MISSED CALLS from Aidan. A message was sent twenty minutes ago.
“Answer your fucking phone.”
I stare at it. Then a second message, sent four minutes after the first.
“I'm coming over.”
I'm already pulling on my jeans when the third one lands.
“On my way.”
I look at Aoife in the doorway. She's dressed, arms folded, watching me. A week ago, that would have irritated me. Now I just feel the weight of it.
"Aidan," I say.
She straightens. "He's staying close?"
Something moves across her face before she gets it under control.
Something that looks like relief. I don't know if it's relief that Reilan is near, that her brother has been keeping watch, that she's not as cut off from her own people as she thought.
I don't ask. It's not my business what she hopes for.
"I'm not sure," I say.
I check my phone. Three missed calls, both messages timestamped within the last twenty minutes. I do the math.
"He should be here in less than twenty minutes."
She moves first, going to the kitchen, filling the kettle. I don't tell her she doesn't have to. I don't tell her anything. I pull on a shirt and sit on the couch and look at the wall and think about what I'm about to do.
I've run it a hundred times. Every angle.
Every way Aidan might react, which amounts to one way, one guaranteed response.
I know my brother. I know what he'll do the moment Frank's name leaves my mouth.
The only variable is whether I'll be able to pull him back before he does something that can't be undone.
I should have told him sooner. I know that.
But there wasn't a moment over the last week that wasn't swallowed by the withdrawal, by Aoife, by the fog slowly lifting and leaving behind it a picture I didn't entirely want to see.
Frank was part of that picture. The biggest part. And I kept it at the edge of it.
Not anymore.
At eighteen minutes, someone hits the door. Three heavy blows, no patience in them. Nobody knocks like that unless they're furious or frightened, and I already know which one this is.
I open it.
Aidan. He looks at me the way he used to when we were kids, and I'd done something catastrophic, except now we're grown men, and the catastrophe is worse.
"Why the fuck have you not been answering your phone?" He steps in without being invited. His gaze sweeps the room, clocks Aoife at the kitchen counter, comes back to me. "What's going on?"
"Close the door," I say.
He does. "William."
"Sit down."
"I don't want to sit down. After everything, you go dark on me?
Five days, William. No contact. I thought you were dead.
" The words are clipped, controlled. Aidan's version of furious is not Jason's version of furious.
Jason goes quiet. Aidan gets tight, wound so hard around himself that the slightest thing will spring him loose.
I sit. He stays on his feet in the middle of the room, watching me with that expression I know down to the bone, jaw set, something coiled behind the stillness.
"Sit down," I say again. "Please."
He sits.
I look at Aoife. She's not leaving, and I'm not asking her to. She already knows. She was in the room when I decided this. She's part of it now, whether anyone asked her to be.
"I need to tell you something," I say to Aidan. "And I need you to let me finish before you say anything."
He doesn't answer. Doesn't nod. Just waits.
"Frank is alive."
The room doesn't change. The walls don't move. The kettle clicks off in the kitchen. But Aidan's face does something I've never seen it do: nothing. Absolutely nothing, for three full seconds, and then everything at once.
He's off the couch before I've registered it. The chair behind him skids back. His hands go to his hair, then to his face, then he's pacing, both hands pressed flat against his jaw, and the sound that comes out of him isn't a word.
"Aidan."
"Don't." His tone is low and controlled and terrible. "Don't say anything else for one second."
I wait.
He stops pacing. Turns. The expression on his face is not something I have a name for, but I've felt it, that particular cocktail of rage and grief and betrayal that comes when someone you thought you'd buried walks back into the room.
"How long have you known?"
"Before the house."
He goes very still.
"He came to me," I say. "Said he'd been watching. That he knew the attack was coming. I gave him what he asked for in exchange for the warning. That's why we got out."
Silence.
"You gave him what he asked for."
"Shares. An advisory role."
Aidan laughs. It's not a pleasant sound. "An advisory role." He looks at the ceiling. "William."
"I know."
"Jason put a bullet in him. We watched him go down. We wrote him off."
"I know."
"And you let him in." His gaze comes down. "You brought him back in without telling any of us."
"I'm telling you now."
"That's not the same thing, and you know it." He's not shouting. That would be easier. The quiet is worse. "Does Alex know? Jason?"
"No."
"Matty?"
"No."
He looks at me for a long moment, something working behind his eyes that I can't read. Then he looks at Aoife, who's standing in the kitchen doorway and not pretending she's not listening.
"She knows," he says. It's not a question.
"She found out last night."
"Jesus Christ." He runs a hand across the back of his neck and then sits, heavily, like the air has gone out of him.
Aoife moves from the kitchen doorway and takes the chair across from him. Nobody speaks for a moment. The three of us sit with it.
Then Aidan looks at me. "Were you high?"
I snort. It comes out wrong, no humour in it. "Yeah."
His gaze tightens. "Are you high now?"
I lock my jaw and say nothing.
"No." Aoife's voice is quiet and level. "He's not." There's something in it that isn't quite pride but is close enough to it that I don't know what to do with it.
I move past it. "When can we stop hiding?"
Aidan straightens. Something shifts in him, back into business, and I watch the grief and the fury tuck themselves away behind the part of him that functions.
"That's why I was ringing. My house is secured.
We've reinforced it, cameras on every approach, two men on the gate.
It's a fortress. We use it as the base going forward. "
I nod slowly. "Can we hold a meeting there tomorrow? I want everyone in the same room."
He looks at me. "Everyone."
"Matty. Reilan. Aoife." I pause. "And Frank."
He looks at me like I've said something in a language he doesn't speak.
"I'm introducing him back in," I say. "In front of everyone. So we deal with the reaction once, together, and then we move on to the actual problem."
"The actual problem?" he repeatsslowly. "Because Frank walking back from the dead isn't enough of a problem?"
"There's something else. But I'm telling everyone at once."
"What kind of something else?"
"The kind we can't afford to handle badly." I meet his gaze. "I'll make the calls."
I spend the next hour on the phone.
The lawyers first, walking through the share documentation I had drawn up three days ago in the early hours when I couldn't sleep and needed something to do with my hands.
The paperwork is clean. Frank's name, a percentage of shares, an advisory title, language that makes it look legitimate and considered.
A reward for loyalty, for intelligence, for keeping us alive.
I read it back to myself when the lawyer sent it over, and I feel nothing in particular. It says what it needs to say. That's enough.
Aidan will handle the others. That's already understood without saying it. He'll ring Matty, ring Reilan, tell them when and where. That's what Aidan does. It's always been what Aidan does.
Which means the only call I have to make is to Frank.
He picks up on the second ring.
"William." There is something moving beneath his voice when he says my name, a careful quality, like he is deciding how much to give away. "I thought you were dead."
"That seems to be a running theme in this family," I say. "Thinking people are dead when they aren't."
A short sound comes down the line. Frank, laughing. I don't think I've heard that in years, and I'm not sure it's a good sign that I'm hearing it now.
"I've been in hiding," I say. "Whoever is feeding the Bratva our location is still out there. I couldn't risk moving until I knew the house was secure."
Silence on the line. I wait. I give him the space to fill the silence, because if Frank knows the name of the mole, now is when he offers it up.
He has been sitting on intelligence for days.
The intelligence is the reason he is still alive, the reason he has the promise of shares coming his way, the reason I have kept him close rather than finishing what Jason started.
If he knows who it is, this is the moment he trades the name for goodwill.
He doesn't offer anything.
I listen to him not speak, and I try to read the quality of the silence.
With Frank, there is always the same problem.
He never gives anything away without first calculating what the information is worth and what he gets in return for handing it over.
The silence could mean he genuinely does not have a name.
Or it could mean he has one and he is holding it back, waiting to see how much higher the price can go before he plays the card.
I store the question away and leave it unanswered for now.
"There's a family meeting tomorrow," I say. "Aidan's home is the only secure location we have right now, so we're using it as the base. Everyone will be there." I pause. "Including you."
"Me?"
"We're doing this properly. The paperwork gets signed in front of the whole family. No more operating in the shadows." I keep my voice level. "Better to rip it off fast than drag it out."
Another pause. Longer this time. I can hear him thinking, the way I always could, that particular quality of his silence when he's checking every angle before he commits to a direction.
"I'll be there." Something in his tone shifts, just slightly. Warmer. Like he's won something. "Thank you, William. I know this wasn't easy."
I hang up without answering that.
Aoife is leaning in the doorway of the bedroom when I put the phone down, a mug in both hands, and she doesn't ask how it went.
"We're leaving," I say. "Aidan's home. Tonight."
She nods. "Give me ten minutes."
I pack in less than five. There isn't much.
There never is in a safe house. A bag, a change of clothes, the phone charger.
I stand in the middle of the room for a moment and look at it, this place we've been for four days, and I think about what happened here, and then I stop thinking about it and pick up my bag.
Aoife is already by the door when I come out.
It's a long drive. The roads are quiet, the dark comes early, and Aoife sits in the passenger seat with her knees pulled up and her head turned toward the window. Neither of us speaks for a long time.
She breaks it first. "Tell me about Aidan."
I glance at her. "What about him?"
"The two of you." She turns her head from the window. "He walked in today and looked at you like he was deciding whether to hug you or hit you."
"That's just Aidan."
"Is it?"
I watch the road. The headlights pick out the white lines and let them go again.
"He used to cover for me," I say finally.
"When I was using. He'd tell Jason I was sick, tell Alex I was lying low.
He did it for nearly two years before he stopped.
" I pause. "Not because he stopped caring.
Because he figured out that covering for me was making it easier for me to keep going. "
She's quiet for a moment. "That must have been hard. To stop."
"Harder than he let on." I think about Aidan's face in the doorway of whatever flat I'd been in the third time he came to collect me.
The way he hadn't said a word. Just stood there and waited until I could stand up on my own.
"He's the one who drove me to the clinic the first time.
Sat in the parking lot for six hours because I told him I'd walk out if he left. "
"Did you? Walk out?"
"Not that time."
She makes a small sound that isn't quite a laugh. I don't look at her.
"Is that why he was so angry today?" she asks. "Not just about Frank. About you going dark."
"Probably." I keep my eyes on the road. "When you've pulled someone out of a bad place enough times, radio silence tends to mean the same thing."
She doesn't say anything to that. The countryside rolls past dark and flat on both sides of the road, and the silence between us is the comfortable kind, the kind that doesn't need filling.
After a while, she says, "What's he like? When it's not a crisis."
I almost smile. "Plays guitar. Collects vinyl. Raven thinks he's the most romantic man alive, and she's probably right, which is embarrassing for all of us." I pause. "He's a good man. Better than me on most days."
"You keep saying that. About your brothers being better than you."
"Because it's true."
"Or," she says, "because it's easier than believing you might be on the same level."
I glance at her. She's looking out the window, her breath fogging the glass slightly, and she doesn't look like she's trying to make a point. She says things like that, the way other people state the weather.
I don't answer. She doesn't push it.