Chapter 2
Siobhan
Chosen
* * *
I've been listening to men talk over me for an hour, and not one of them has said anything I haven't already figured out.
Viktor Reznikov is expanding. The Bratva wants the East Coast. Our docks, our unions, our shipping lanes—everything the O'Briens and the Greeks have bled to build for the last three decades is now sitting in the crosshairs of a man who skins people for sport.
I know this because Declan came home last month with two broken ribs and a message carved into the door of his truck: СКОРО.
Soon. I know it because three of our construction workers are dead and their widows came to The Galley last Sunday and Cormac sat with each one for an hour, making promises with his hands that his voice couldn't keep steady.
Declan didn't tell me what happened to him. He never does. None of them do. I found out because I read the police report Finn buried before the ink dried, the same way I find out everything in this family—by being smarter than the men who think I don't need to know.
The meeting room at Elysium is designed to intimidate.
I'll give Nico Konstantinos that much. The lighting, the leather, the way every sightline converges on his chair at the head of the table—it's a stage set for a king.
He sits in it like he was born there, which I suppose he was.
Gold eyes scanning the room with the kind of precision that makes you feel cataloged.
Filed. Assessed and assigned a threat level before you've said a word.
I refused the chair they offered me. Partly because it was wedged between Declan and Cormac like a child seat at the grown-ups' table. Mostly because I think better on my feet, and I had a feeling I'd need to think fast tonight.
I was right.
When the word marriage enters the room, I expect it. Alliance by blood—it's the oldest play in the book. I start running candidates: a Romano daughter, maybe, or one of the Greek cousins. Someone expendable. Someone decorative. Someone whose disappearance from polite society wouldn't leave a hole.
Then Nico Konstantinos's eyes land on me.
Not a glance. Not a sweep. He lands—with precision and intent and the absolute certainty that what he's looking at belongs to him. Those gold eyes pin me to the floor, and I feel it everywhere: my chest, my throat, the backs of my knees.
"Her. Siobhan O'Brien."
The room detonates. Cormac's chair scrapes back. Declan's already halfway to standing, hand moving to his hip where I know the Sig lives. Finn goes perfectly still, which is worse—Finn still is Finn calculating, and a calculating Finn is the most dangerous version.
And then my father's voice. Crackling through a prison phone line from a facility three states away, still controlling every room he touches like a hand reaching through the walls.
"Smart match. The girl has spine. She'll do it."
Cormac leans toward the phone. "That's her call, Da. Not yours."
"It's the family's call. And I'm still the head of this family last I checked." A pause. Static. "Unless you've taken my chair while I'm away, Cormac."
Cormac's jaw works. He doesn't answer. He doesn't have to—we all know Padraig wins. Padraig always wins, even from a cell.
The girl. Not Siobhan. Not my daughter. Not even her.
The girl—a commodity, a card to play. The same way he traded Cormac's twenties for loyalty, sent Declan into fights that left him bleeding on our kitchen floor at seventeen, bartered Finn's conscience for political leverage, and ignored Ronan so completely that my youngest brother learned to disappear into a sketchbook rather than compete for attention he'd never win.
We're all currency to Padraig O'Brien. I've known it since I was twelve years old and watched him sell our mother's jewelry to fund a territory war and tell her it was for the family. Everything is for the family.
Nothing is for us.
The rage is instant and familiar. A hot wire that runs from my stomach to my jaw, the same current that's been live since the first time I sat at the kitchen table and realized no one was going to ask me what I thought about anything, ever.
I've spent twenty-six years being decided for—where I live, what I'm worth, who I belong to.
My father from prison. Cormac from the head of our table.
Even Declan, who thinks standing between me and danger is the same as respecting me.
I could fight it. I could scream, refuse, make a scene. Walk out.
But here's what none of them understand: I've already done the math.
The alliance makes strategic sense. A marriage between the O'Briens and the Konstantinos family creates a bloc that Viktor can't break without a full-scale war on two fronts.
It protects our docks. It protects Cormac's construction sites.
It protects Finn, who's been taking meetings in places that make my skin crawl.
I can fight the decision. Or I can own it.
I stand up straighter. The room notices.
"I'll do it."
Silence. Cormac turns to me with an expression that's half fury, half something that might be pride if he'd ever admit to it. Declan's hand drops. Finn nods, barely.
"On my terms," I add, looking directly at Nico Konstantinos. "I want a meeting. Just us. Before I agree to anything."
His mouth does something. Not a smile—I've seen his smile, or the thing he uses in its place, and this isn't it. This is slower. More considered. Like I've said something that surprised him, and Nico Konstantinos doesn't get surprised.
"Agreed."
One word. Low. Definitive. And underneath it, something I wasn't expecting—interest. Not the kind that makes my skin crawl, the kind I've gotten from every connected man in Boston since I turned sixteen.
This is different. He's looking at me the way he looked at the intelligence reports: with attention. Calculation. Respect.
Or maybe I'm projecting, because my heart is hammering and I need this to be something other than a transaction.
The room begins to move again—voices, logistics, the machinery of war grinding into gear. Cormac grabs my arm on the way out. "We need to talk."
"Later."
"Siobhan—"
"I said later, Cormac."
He lets go. He always does, eventually. That's the difference between my brother and my father—Cormac lets go. My father never learned how.
Declan falls into step on my other side, a wall of fury and Celtic knots.
He doesn't say anything. Doesn't have to.
His silence is a monologue: I'll kill him if he touches you.
I'll kill him if he looks at you wrong. I'll kill him on principle, because you're my sister and he's a Greek and Greeks don't get to own O'Briens.
"Don't," I say.
"I didn't say anything."
"Your face said it. Stop."
Finn catches my eye as we cross the lobby.
He gives me the smallest nod—the Finn nod, the one that means I see what you did and I respect the play.
Of all my brothers, Finn understands strategy.
He knows I didn't just agree to a marriage.
I seized control of the only decision anyone was going to let me make.
Ronan is already at the car, leaning against the hood, sketchpad closed under his arm. He slipped out before the meeting broke—my youngest brother has a talent for disappearing before anyone notices he's gone. He looks at me with those quiet eyes and says, "You okay?"
"I'm grand."
"You're a terrible liar."
"Must run in the family."
He almost smiles. Almost.
We're at the car when I hear footsteps behind me. Not heavy—measured. Heels on marble. I turn.
The woman is my age, maybe a year or two older, and she carries herself like she was assembled by a team of people who understand exactly how power looks when it walks into a room.
Dark hair swept back from a face that belongs on a coin—classical, symmetrical, the kind of beauty that doesn't need effort because it was built on a foundation of good genetics and better nutrition.
Her dress costs more than Cormac's truck.
Her perfume reaches me before her hand does—something warm and expensive that probably has a French name I can't pronounce.
She extends her hand with the kind of warmth that feels genuine precisely because it's so well-practiced. I'd bet my life she rehearsed this in a mirror. I'd also bet she's good enough that I'll never be sure.
"I'm Elena. Elena Drakos." Her handshake is firm. Not competitive—confident. There's a difference. "I grew up with the Konstantinos brothers."
I place her immediately. The Drakos family—Greek allies, old money, connected to the Konstantinos organization the way ivy connects to stone.
Decorative. Structural. Impossible to remove without damage.
I saw her sitting in the meeting, poised and expectant, and I saw the way she looked at Nico right before he said my name instead of hers.
The way her face didn't change. The way her eyes did.
She knows I saw it, too. That's why she's here. Damage control dressed as grace. And I respect the hell out of the move, because it's exactly what I would do.
"I just wanted to say—you're braver than anyone in that room." She holds my hand a beat longer than necessary. "If you need anything at all. A friend, a guide to the Greek world—I know it can be overwhelming. I'm here."
In a room full of people who either fear my future husband or pity me for marrying him, Elena Drakos feels like an open window. Warm air in a cold building. The only person tonight who's looked at me and seen a woman instead of a chess piece.
"Thank you," I say. And I mean it. "I have a feeling I'm going to need a friend."
"You have one." She squeezes my hand. "Call me. Any time. I mean it."
She walks back inside. I watch her go—the posture, the poise, the way she moves through this world like she was born to its rhythms. I envy that. Growing up O'Brien means growing up loud, fast, and ready to fight. The Greek world is different. Quieter. More dangerous for it.
"Who was that?" Declan asks from the car.
"An ally. I think."
"You think?"
"I'll know for sure when I see how she acts when she doesn't know I'm watching."
Declan grunts. It's the closest he comes to approval.
In the car, Cormac drives. He always drives when he's angry—something about controlling the wheel when he can't control anything else.
Declan rides shotgun. Finn and Ronan bracket me in the back seat, a wall of brothers, and for a moment I feel twelve again, small, protected, suffocated by the love of men who'd die for me but never think to ask what I want.
I close my eyes and let the city blur past.
Nico Konstantinos. My husband-to-be. A man who kills with the kind of precision that suggests he learned young and practiced often.
A man who chose me over a Greek woman who was raised for this exact role—and I need to understand why.
Not the strategic reason. He'll give me that in the meeting and it'll be true as far as it goes.
I need the real reason. The one underneath.
The one that made his mouth do that thing when I demanded terms.
Because men like Nico Konstantinos don't choose on impulse. Every move is calculated, every angle worked. So why me? What does he see when he looks at me that he can't find in a woman who already speaks his language, knows his world, sits at his table?
I don't know yet. But I'll find out.
I'm already making a list: things to demand, things to concede, things to hide. Separate bedrooms. My own money. Freedom to see my family. An exit strategy if things go wrong—though I'm smart enough to know that in this world, the only exit strategy is a body bag or a betrayal.
I don't plan on either.
My phone vibrates. Unknown number. I glance at the screen.
Looking forward to our meeting, Miss O'Brien. —N
He has my number. Of course he does. A man like Nico Konstantinos probably had my number before he had my name.
I type back: It's Siobhan. And you should be.
I hit send before I can second-guess it. Three dots appear. Then nothing. He read it and didn't respond.
Good. Let him sit with that.
Outside, Boston rushes past in streaks of light and dark. I press my forehead to the cold glass and think about gold eyes and the way he said agreed like he was swallowing something he didn't expect to taste.
Tomorrow, I walk into a room with a man who runs an empire built on blood and ask him to treat me like an equal. The smart money says he won't.
The smart money doesn't know me.
Behind us, the lights of Elysium shrink in the rearview mirror. Somewhere inside, Elena Drakos is watching me leave through a window, her expression hovering between admiration and something I can't name from this distance.