CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Aoife
NOBODY MOVES.
That's the first thing I notice. The sound fades, and the room holds itself completely still, everyone suspended in that beat where the body hasn't caught up with what just happened.
I have heard a gunshot at close range before. I know the way the sound moves through a room, the way it doesn't stop when it stops. What I wasn't prepared for was how ordinary William looks afterwards. No shake in his hands. No pause. He just turns back to the room.
Frank is sideways in the chair. One hand trails toward the floor.
I break it down into pieces small enough to hold. Six people when we started. Five now. The wall behind Frank is ruined. William is standing at the head of the table with his hands loose at his sides and his face completely closed, and that is the thing that stays with me. Not Frank. William.
Aidan is on his feet. He's saying something about the room, about Raven, about the wall, and his voice reaches me, but the words don't land. I watch William answer him and then turn back to the rest of us.
"There's something else," he says. His voice is completely level. Like he didn't just shoot a man in front of all of us. Like the wall behind Frank isn't ruined. "This is why I needed everyone here."
I hear my pulse in my ears.
"The Bratva knew we were alive. They knew before the house. They knew exactly where to find us. Someone gave them that information." He looks at each face in turn. Slow. Deliberate. "Someone in this room is the mole."
Reilan opens his mouth.
Nothing comes out.
I watch the color leave his face. Slow and unmistakable, the way I've only seen it happen to him once before — the night our father told us our mother wasn't going to recover.
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 William.
I'm on my feet before I know I've decided to move. My chair scrapes back, and I've put myself in front of him.
The instinct is embarrassing. William notices. He looks at me, and something passes through his expression that I can't cleanly name. Not amusement. Not contempt. Something more careful than either.
I don't move.
William is looking past me at Reilan. I can see it in his face — that particular stillness he gets when he's found something worth examining. He's very good at looking at people. Sober, he's extraordinary at it. I watch him register whatever he sees and file it away.
I step slightly left. Not enough to block his line of sight entirely. Enough to remind both of them I'm standing here.
"You can't blame family without proof," I say. "The mole could be anyone. Any one of a dozen people with access."
"No," William says quietly. "It couldn't."
He leaves the room.
Aidan follows. Something passes between him and Matty—a look, a decision and then Matty pushes back from the table too. William didn't tell anyone to leave. He didn't have to.
Matty passes me on his way to the door. He stops. Those dark, careful eyes settle on my face and stay there for a moment.
"Are you okay?"
It surprises me so much I almost don't answer. I nod because I don't have words for anything more than that. He holds my gaze one second longer, checking, and then he leaves.
Then it's just me and Reilan and Frank Murphy, who is not going to say anything to anyone ever again.
I turn around.
Reilan looks terrible. The color has gone out of him in a way I haven't seen since our mother was dying—that particular gray that settles into a face when something large and irreversible has happened, and the body knows it before the words come.
He's standing by the chair with his arms loose at his sides and his face open in a way I've rarely seen from him, like he's too far past composure to close anything off.
That frightens me more than the gray does.
Reilan closes everything off. Our father trained it into both of us.
Feeling something and showing it are two separate acts, and showing it is a choice, and Reilan never makes that choice without reason. He's not choosing it now.
"Tell me it isn't true," I say.
His jaw tightens.
"Just say it. Three words." I hold his gaze. "Tell me it isn't you."
He opens his mouth.
He closes it.
The space where those words should be is the loudest thing in the room. Louder than the gunshot.
My throat tightens. I look away from him and look at the window, at the dark garden beyond the glass, and I breathe. In and out. I count the panes. Six. I count the seconds until my hands are steady.
Behind me, Reilan says my name. Very quiet. The way he used to say it when I was fifteen and crying in the back garden, and he'd come looking for me. He always came looking.
"Don't." My voice comes out flat. "Don't say my name right now."
He goes quiet.
I give the silence what it needs. I let myself feel the whole of it, the cold in my chest, the image of Reilan's face when he couldn't make himself say three words and then I turn back around.
"Get out of this room," I say.
"Aoife, just let me—"
"I can't look at you right now." My voice doesn't crack. I'm grateful for that much. "Go back to wherever you're sleeping. Don't come near me tonight."
He looks at me for a long moment. There's something in his face I won't examine yet, not in this room with Frank Murphy three feet away. Then he nods once and goes.
The door closes.
I'm alone.
I stand in the middle of the room, and I breathe. I focus on the grain of the mahogany panelling, the way the chandelier light sits on the table. Anything with edges and weight. Anything that holds still.
My brother.
My brother, who sat with me the night our father told us about the marriage contract, in the back garden, and held my hand without saying a word until I stopped shaking.
My brother, who reworked our father's alliance structure last year, quietly, painstakingly, so that I would have more standing in negotiations and not just a ceremonial seat at the table.
My brother, who has always put himself between me and the worst of it.
Who gave the Bratva our location.
I make myself say it plainly, in my own head. Not as a question. As a fact that needs to be looked at clearly before I can decide what to do with it.
Then I leave the room.
The hallway is empty, but I can hear William and Aidan in the kitchen at the back of the house, their voices low and contained. I move toward them because standing still isn't something I can do right now.
I work through what I know as I go. Reilan couldn't say it wasn't him — that's the center of it.
But not saying it isn't a confession. People go mute for reasons other than guilt.
Shock can do it. Fear can do it. The weight of a room where a man was just shot, and everyone is looking at you, can do it.
I've been watching Reilan tell lies and tell the truth my entire life, and I know which one his face was doing tonight. I'm not going to pretend otherwise just because I love him.
I know what William is doing, too. He built the trap for Frank — the fake paperwork, the phone calls, the promise of shares — and waited until Frank was comfortable, until Frank believed he had won, and then he pulled the trigger. He doesn't need certainty. He needs enough.
I stop at the kitchen door. The voices cut off when they hear me. I push through.
Aidan is leaning against the far counter with his arms folded. William is by the range. They both look at me, and nobody speaks.
"Tell me what you saw," I say to William.
Aidan's arms drop slightly.
"When you made the announcement," I say. "You watched the room. Tell me what you saw from him."
William is quiet for a moment. Working through something. Then: "His hands."
I wait.
"Flat on his knees. Fingers spread. He does it when he's trying to stay still, and his body is working against him. I've seen it before. Twice."
"That's what you have." I keep my voice level. "A gesture."
"It means something."
"Or he was frightened." I step further into the kitchen. "His sister just watched her fiancé shoot a man across the table. He didn't know what was coming any more than the rest of us did. That kind of shock moves through people in different ways."
Aidan makes a small sound.
William doesn't look away from me.
"He couldn't say it wasn't him," I say it before he can find another way to learn it. I need him to hear it from me first, with my framing on it, not someone else's. "I asked him directly. He didn't answer."
Something shifts in William's expression.
"I know what that looks like," I say. "I'm not asking you to ignore it. I'm asking you to wait."
"How long?"
"A few days. Give me a few days and let me talk to him properly. Somewhere that isn't here, with you in the next room and a body in the dining room." I hold his gaze. "If you're right about him, I'll tell you. All of it. Nothing left out."
The kitchen is quiet. The clock above the range is silent. A radiator ticking somewhere down the hall. Aidan is looking at William and not at me, giving him the room to make the call.
William looks at me for a long time with that attention that I still haven't gotten used to, that complete, unfiltered focus. There's nothing blurred about him anymore. Everything lands.
I don't look away, and I don't soften anything because he'll see through both.
"A few days," he says.
"A few days," I agree.
He turns back to the range. I stand there for a moment longer, and then I walk back out.
The stairs are at the end of the hall. I find them, and I go up, and I stop at the top landing and press my back to the wall in the dark.
I need to find my brother.
I need to find him, and I need to put him in a room with no exits, and I need him to tell me the truth, all of it, the beginning and the reason and the shape of what he's done.
Because right now I have a gap between what I know and what I can prove and what William has, and the only person who can close that gap is Reilan.
And when it's closed, I have to decide what to do with what's inside it.
I breathe in the dark at the top of the stairs.
Because I know my brother. I know every tell he has, every way he moves when he's carrying something heavy, and I have known since the moment William's words landed, and Reilan's hands pressed flat to his legs, that I am not going to get the answer I'm hoping for.
I already know what he's going to tell me.
I've been moving fast enough to keep from looking at it clearly, and I've run out of hallway.
I push off the wall.
The light under Reilan's door is still on. I can see it at the end of the corridor, that thin yellow line on the floor. He's awake. He's waiting.
I walk toward it.
I knock twice.
There's a pause, like he's deciding whether to answer. Then his voice, low and careful. "Come in."
He's sitting on the edge of the bed with his elbows on his knees. He's still in the same clothes, tie gone, shirt collar open. He looks up when I walk in, and whatever he sees in my face makes him go very still again.
I close the door. I lean back against it.
The room is small. A single lamp on the nightstand was casting a yellow light across his face. He looks older than he did this morning. Something has settled into the lines around his mouth, something that wasn't there before tonight.
He looks at me for a moment. Then he nods, once, and opens his mouth.
"Start from the beginning," I say. "And don't leave anything out."