41. Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-One
M y mind spins from the revelations hitting me in the chest. Lorcan saved my life. He’ll realize my mother put a hit on his father. Finn killed Chad. The last one bounces around in my brain again. Finn killed Chad. Finn almost killed me.
Ignoring Lorcan, I stride to the dresser to grab my gun. He reads me with ease, and he snatches it before I can slip by. I roll off him and reach under the bed to grab the weapon I kept strapped there for emergencies. We circle each other, guns raised.
“You’ve been lying to me,” Lorcan’s voice is a growl deep in his throat.
“Yes.” My lies are done. I keep the gun trained on him, but love and anger are warring in me for dominance. “You’re no Boy Scout yourself.”
“Never claimed to be.” He holds up the letter in his free hand. “This was to get close to us?” He gestures to the bed and the scattered papers he’s riffled through, but his focus on me doesn’t waver.
My carefully constructed piles are a mess. He’s so smart I wonder if he’s pieced everything together quicker than me.
“Yes.”
“Your mother put out a hit on my father? How is this even possible?”
“You understand as much as I do.”
Confusion, anger, and finally love surface before disappearing. His eyes turn stony. “What the hell is going on?”
My gun, in his hand, is still trained on me. “It seems our families are jumbled together.”
He searches my face, slotting in pieces, making the puzzle whole. “You’re Chadwick Lee’s sister.”
I swallow the bile gathering in my throat.
“The shooting you saw when you were ten… It was him.” His face softens around the eyes. He knows what that moment did, how much it haunts me. I’ve given him pieces of me no one else has seen.
I nod, and tears gather in my eyes. Pressing my lips together, I blink to clear my vision. The tears slip out. This could still go in so many directions, but I don’t want to fight Lorcan. I’m not sure I could shoot him even if it came to that.
“He died in my arms,” I whisper.
“Kim.” The gentleness in his voice soothes me. He lets the letter fall to the floor as he raises his free hand and lowers the gun. “Can we—can we lower the guns and talk about this?”
“I don’t know.” I shake my head. “There’s too much. It’s too complicated.”
“My brother killed your brother. Your mother paid for a hit on my father. Your mother had my father killed.”
I keep my gun raised even as Lorcan lowers his. “I don’t think she did. I don’t think that’s what happened.”
He places his hand on the top of my gun, pushing my hand to my side. His proximity relaxes me, takes the edge off my sadness and anger.
“Their mistakes aren’t ours.” His voice has the lilting softness I love, and a shuddering breath escapes me.
“I think your father had my father killed.” Except as far as he knows, my father isn’t dead.
Lorcan frowns as he takes the gun from me and sets both on the dresser. His gaze rakes over me, and I wonder what conclusions he’s making. A single thread tugged the right way is unraveling everything.
“There’s only one explanation that makes sense. There’s only one way your backstory checked out so completely, that your identity was sealed up so solidly.”
I hold his look but say nothing. Anger touches the edges of his features again. Anything I do at this point is risky. At least we aren’t pointing guns at each other anymore.
“I saw you there talking to Zahir.”
His posture tenses, and space opens between us. “FBI.”
“You were willing to work with us if Finn killed your father.”
“Us,” he scoffs. “I told Zahir I’d kill any agent he planted.”
“I know.”
We glare at each other for a moment. My palms are moist, and a trickle of sweat slithers along my side. I refuse to acknowledge the gun on the dresser. Lorcan won’t hurt me.
“I suppose that deal is dead since your mother had the Russians kill my father. It would explain Semyon’s behavior the other day.”
“I think the Russians were involved. But I think Finn was too. I think you were right about him all along.”
“Convenient now for you to agree with me.”
I purse my lips. “When Carys came to see me, she said Finn pretty much told her he had something to do with your father’s murder.”
“Pretty much.” Lorcan raises an eyebrow, skepticism coating him.
“He didn’t admit it, but Carys felt he said enough to suggest he did it or had a part in it.”
“When were you planning on telling me any of this? I tell you I love you, and you keep this shit from me. I guess this explains why you don’t feel the same.”
“I was worried you’d kill me,” I whisper.
Lorcan’s jaw turns to granite, and disgust passes across his features. “Were you? You’re still here. What does that say about you?” His annoyance bores into me like a drill. “I’m not Finn. I don’t work that way.”
“Unless you feel justified.” I raise my shoulders in a tiny shrug. “This wouldn’t feel justified?”
“Maybe. If it were anyone but you.”
I search his face, trying to figure out where this conversation is headed. He’s not full of rage anymore. The new emotion spilling out of him might be worse. His disappointment in me is clear.
“It’s fucked up.” Lorcan’s fingers tuck a few tendrils of my hair back behind my ear. “Your father. Who was he?”
I gesture to the mess of papers on the bed. “You didn’t get that far in your snooping?”
He raises one eyebrow. “Your mum died today. I haven’t seen you for hours. I was worried about you and came looking.” With a frown, he glances at the bed. “I didn’t expect this.”
“How could you? I didn’t even know it existed.”
“So you coming here, it wasn’t for revenge?”
I rub my forehead. “I didn’t realize we were connected until I saw Chad’s picture in Derry’s hallway. Then I started digging, and things slotted into place, connecting our families in ways I would never want.”
“Who is your father?”
“Axel Henhawk.”
Lorcan frowns, and then his eyes narrow. “Name doesn’t mean anything.”
“You have a file on him in your office.”
A spark of surprise strikes Lorcan’s face. “Not the only one snooping.” He takes my hand and links our fingers together.
A sigh escapes me, and we stare at each other for a minute.
“What the hell are we gonna do?” Lorcan asks.
“I want you to tell me what happened to my father. I need to know. I… If you see the file, do you think you’ll remember?”
“Maybe. What then? I’ve done things, a lot of things. And you work for the FBI.”
“They were willing to make you a deal.”
“If I turned on Finn.”
“You’ve got your confirmation.”
Lorcan frowns. “I need to be sure.”
“Or else what?”
“I help you get out, and I go down with the ship. I can’t let him take the fall for all of it.”
“Why does it matter so much whether he killed your father or not? He’s done so many terrible things.” I’m almost pleading. I can’t be a party to Lorcan’s prison sentence.
“Family is everything. You know that.” He examines me. “If he can kill our father, regardless of the reason, someday he could kill me. For the rest of my life, I’ll be waiting for the knife in my back from the one person I should trust the most.”
“Your father had his wife killed, and you trusted him.”
“My relationship with my father was complicated. It’s not an easy thing to explain. I’ve always known I could count on Finn. Always. The way my father died, it’s made me think there’s a side to Finn that can’t be trusted.” He looks at his feet before glancing at me under his lashes. “I won’t live like that.”
We are toe-to-toe, and I wonder whether it’s possible to make it out of this alive and with my heart intact. Lorcan laces our fingers again and leads me out of my room and along the hall to his office. There, he riffles through the files until he comes to Axel Henhawk.
He drops the file on the desk, and we are shoulder to shoulder as we sift through it. “This was in there the whole time?”
I nod.
His finger traces over the photos of me. “I’d know you anywhere.”
“Do you remember what happened?”
He scans each note before putting it to the back of the folder. At the end, he checks the dates and glances at me. “This is—it’s incredible.”
“And Finn doesn’t believe in coincidence.”
“Feels like a warped version of destiny. The name meant nothing, but looking through the file, it’s a bit more familiar. Your dad was poking around, offered to snitch to the police if he could get hired on with us. That’s how you learned Irish, yeah?”
I nod.
“He pissed off my father. Approached a cop on the payroll.” Lorcan goes back to the first paper in the folder. “We tried to pay off your parents after Chad died—hush money. They didn’t take it.”
“How do you know that?”
He points to symbols on the page. “These. Means surveillance started because a payoff didn’t work.”
I peer at the symbols again and wonder why I didn’t see them the first time. This assignment has dulled my senses, weakened my instincts.
“I was home on Easter break from uni. By chance, I walked in on a conversation between my father and one of his men. They were talking about what to do with you and your mum.” His pained eyes search mine. “I told him I was tired of the murders without reason, and I wouldn’t be staying in the business if he didn’t reconsider.”
“Your dad was okay with that?”
Lorcan’s lips quirk up. “I was twenty. I didn’t give a shit what my father was okay with. I knew I could convince Finn to back me up. He hated our dad back then, anything to screw him over.”
“Twice.” I focus on the paper in his hand before gazing into his eyes. “You saved my life twice.”
One side of his lips rises, revealing his dimple. “I’ve never been so grateful for my soft heart.” He drops the sheet into the file, and his fingers weave into my hair. “I’ve lived this life because I was born into it. I’ve never wanted anything or anyone more than this.”
The intensity of his gaze causes an ache to bloom in my chest. Tears pool in my eyes and overflow down my cheeks. “Lorcan,” I say, my voice thick.
“Hey, hey. My a chroí . We’ll sort it out, yeah? We’re going to come out the other side.” He wraps his arms around me and keeps me tight to his chest.
“How?”
“If Finn killed my father, we go to the FBI and turn him in. We’ll see what’ll happen to me.”
“If he didn’t?”
“We’ll sort it out.”
That’s not good enough for me. It doesn’t matter what I have to do, I’m going to prove Finn played a part in his father’s murder. I’ve lost everything else. I don’t intend to lose Lorcan.
He frames my face and kisses me, and I deepen the kiss, pressing my body to his. I might not be able to solve anything tonight, but I can find an escape in him, relish in the connection, the fact we’re alive. Against the odds, we found each other.
He knows what I’ve been doing. And I’m still here. Triumph blooms across my chest. I wasn’t wrong. He loves me enough for the details to be a speed bump and not a roadblock.
In the morning, I’m paying another visit to the Russians. This time, I’m not leaving until I have the answers I need to seal Finn’s fate.