CHAPTER TWENTY ONE
William
THE DINING ROOM is quiet when I come downstairs. The wrong kind of quiet.
Matty is in the corner, watching me the moment I come through the door, the way he watches everything, quietly and from a distance, giving nothing away.
Reilan stands by the window with his arms folded and his back half-turned to the room.
Aoife is beside him, close enough that their shoulders nearly touch. She doesn't look at me when I walk in.
Aidan is standing by the fireplace. He has the same quality our father had when something was wrong, and he'd already handled it. Still. Waiting.
Nobody speaks. They are all waiting for Frank.
Five of us should be in this room. There are three.
Alex walked away from this family and took the truth about our father with him.
Jason is in another country with Kira, tied to the Bratva by a contract Frank's ambition wrote, living a life that should have been different.
Neither of them gets to be here for this.
I don't know if that's a mercy or if it's another thing Frank took from us.
I think about what Frank is. Not what he did, though that list stopped fitting in my head before I was twelve.
What he is. The man who sold our family to the Bratva one percentage at a time until there was nothing left.
Who put everything in his own name when our father died and left five sons with nothing.
Who took what Alex did and turned that knowledge to his own advantage without a second thought.
Who sat in this room while a man bled out in front of Raven to make a point.
Whose son put his hands on her. Who shot at Aidan in his own home.
Who watched Jason sign his life over to the Bratva and called the debt settled.
He arrives at seven minutes past two.
I hear the front door. I watch every face in the room from the moment the sound registers. Matty goes very still. Reilan turns from the window. Aoife's hand tightens on her brother's arm.
I watch Aidan. He holds himself at the fireplace and looks at Frank with every bit of history between them held behind his jaw. The muscle in his cheek is jumping. His hands are at his sides.
Frank clears the threshold, and Aidan moves. Not toward Frank. Toward me. His hand closes around my arm.
He agreed to this meeting. But agreeing to a thing and standing in the same room as that thing are not the same experience, and I watch him discover that.
"Aidan." I hold his gaze until something in his expression shifts, that particular look where he decides to trust me over every instinct he has. He releases my arm. I step forward.
Matty has pushed back from the table. He's not moving, but his entire body has changed, weight forward, that alertness that doesn't look like alertness unless you know him.
Reilan is pale. Aoife has her hand on his arm, and she is watching me across the table the same way she watched me from the kitchen doorway the night I told her about Frank.
Steady. Present. Whatever you're about to do, do it.
Frank stands in the doorway, and he looks like Frank has always looked. Older now. Heavier. A man who has been in hiding long enough that scanning a room before entering it has become instinct. His gaze moves over each face in turn and settles on me.
"William."
"Sit down," I say.
He moves toward the table and pulls out a chair, and Aidan makes a sound low in his throat.
"Aidan." I don't raise my voice. "Sit. All of you."
Nobody moves for a moment. Then Matty sits. Reilan pulls Aoife down beside him. Aidan sits last, dropping into his chair slowly, every movement controlled.
Frank settles into his chair like he owns the room.
I stand at the head of the table and look at each of them.
The contracts are laid out in front of me, unsigned.
Matty, who spent years believing our father chose to die, and has spent the weeks since learning the truth carrying that, too, in ways none of us have named.
Aidan, who sat in a clinic car park for six hours at three in the morning because I told him I'd walk if he left, who watched Frank shoot at him in his own home, and had to stand down.
Aoife, who walked into this family not knowing what she was walking into, hasn't flinched once.
Reilan, who is beginning to understand from the set of everyone's shoulders exactly what kind of room this is.
And Frank, watching me with that expression he has had my entire life. The one that says he already knows where it's all going.
"Frank has been alive for months," I say.
"He survived what happened. He went dark because he needed to.
He came to me before the house with intelligence that kept people in this room alive.
I made him a deal. Shares in the company, an advisory role.
That's what the paperwork my lawyers have been drawing up covers.
As of today, Frank Murphy is back in the family. "
Matty is on his feet before I've finished the sentence.
"No." His voice is flat and final. For Matty, that's a speech.
"Matty."
He doesn't sit back down. He stands with both hands on the table and looks at me, and I hold his gaze the same way I always have, without flinching, because Matty can read a flinch from across a room.
"He warned us," I say. "People are alive in this room because of the information he gave me. That's what this is. That's the only reason he's here."
Matty says nothing. He looks at Frank. Then back at me. Then he sits down, slowly, and I know that's all I'm getting from him, and it's enough.
It's Aidan who speaks next, his voice low and controlled in the way it gets when he's working hard to stay that way. "He would have given that information regardless. Getting back in was the price. You didn't owe him shares for it."
"I know."
Something changes in Aidan's expression. His gaze sharpens and holds on mine for a long moment.
Frank leans back in his chair, and I look at him.
He is comfortable. That is the thing. He is sitting at Aidan's dining table, months after they wrote him off, in a room where every person present has more than one reason to want him dead, and he is comfortable.
Hands loose in his lap. Shoulders down. Already past the hard part in his mind and onto whatever comes next.
He has always been like this. Since I was eight years old, I have watched Frank walk into rooms that should have destroyed him and walk out the other side, calculating his next move before the door closed behind him.
I walk around the table toward him.
He looks up at me, and there is something almost paternal in it, the shadow of that particular smile he used to give when he thought he was about to say something that would settle a room.
"William, I know this has been difficult.
But you've made the right decision. The intelligence I gave you kept this family alive.
Now we move forward. That's how this works. That's what family is."
I look at him for one second.
Jason at thirteen, running from this man because knowing the truth about his own blood was easier than staying.
The scars on Jason's back. Our father's company moving piece by piece into Frank's hands while Edward Murphy understood what was happening and couldn't stop any of it.
My father in his office and the rope and the months I spent wondering if he changed his mind at the end, when there was no going back.
Nobody telling us the truth because Frank had more to gain from the lie.
Jason in exile. Aidan in a car park at three in the morning. Matty's face the day we told him how our father actually died.
My mind does something strange then. Not a thought. Not a memory. Something faster than either. Like a circuit blowing.
Jason's back. The scars Frank put there and called lessons.
Aidan's voice on the phone the night I relapsed, flat and careful the way it gets only when he's terrified.
Matty sitting very still at the kitchen table when we told him. Not crying. Just going somewhere behind his eyes that none of us could reach.
My father's office. The door I pushed open. The light from the window. The way the room looked completely normal until it didn't.
Him hanging there.
The rope.
I pull the gun from my waistband and shoot Frank in the head.
The sound in the room is enormous and then, immediately, isn't. Frank tilts sideways in the chair and doesn't right himself. The wall behind him is ruined.
Nobody moves. Not for a full three seconds.
Then Aidan is on his feet.
"What the FUCK." He's staring at the wall, at Frank, at me, his hands out at his sides. He says the words again, quieter this time, and the quiet is worse than the shout. Then: "Raven loves this room."
I put the gun back. "I'll have the wall replastered."
"That is not—" He stops. Starts again. "William. What did you just do?"
"What needed doing."
Matty hasn't moved. He's looking at Frank with those dark eyes, and I can't read what's behind them. He was never disturbed by violence. Violence never cost him. What came before it always did. I won't ask what he's thinking. He won't say.
Reilan makes a sound across the room, something low and controlled, and when I look at him, his face has gone the colour of old plaster. His gaze moves between Frank and me.
"Why?" The word comes out carefully, like he is checking the ground before he puts his weight on it. "Had he betrayed you already?"
"No," I say.
Silence.
"He hadn't done anything yet." I keep my eyes on Reilan.
"But he would have. That's who Frank is.
I gave him the one thing he's wanted his entire life and watched what he did with it.
" I glance at him. "Three minutes in that chair and he was already thinking past this room.
The shares were never real. The paperwork was never going through.
I needed his intelligence, and I needed him in this room.
" I look back at Reilan. "He was useful. He isn't anymore."
The room stays quiet.
Aidan is looking at me with an expression I've never seen from him. Not anger. Something on the other side of it.
"You let him believe it," he says. "The whole time."
"Yes."
He sits down, puts his elbows on his knees, and looks at the floor. I let him have it.
I look at each face in the room in turn. Aidan. Matty. Reilan. Aoife.
"There's something else," I say. "This is why I needed everyone here." The room goes very still.
"The Bratva knows we're alive. They knew before the house.
They knew exactly where to find us." I pause.
"Someone gave them that information." Nobody moves.
"The attack wasn't random, and it wasn't gathered intelligence.
Someone who knew the location of the safe house told them where we were.
" I look at them. All of them. I let the words land. "Someone in this room is the mole."
Reilan's face changes.
I watch the change happen in real time. The colour drains out of his face, slow and unmistakable, like water drawn from a glass. His gaze goes somewhere that isn't this room and then comes back, and when it does, he makes the mistake of looking directly at me.
I don't look away.
Neither does he. But his hands, resting on his knees, press flat against his legs, fingers spread, the way a person presses down when they are trying very hard to stay still and their body is working against them.
I saw that gesture the first time I met him.
No one else in the room is doing it.
I say nothing. I watch him, and I wait, and the silence in Aidan's ruined dining room settles around all of us like something with weight.
Reilan opens his mouth.