Chapter 9
KATE
Fiona Moran and the Old Colony Crew
You’re now in charge of their Lone Wolf account
The text is pure Cole. He’s in charge. He’s made a decision.
But there’s an entire encyclopedia of meaning behind the words.
He assumes I have the coding skills to handle whatever issues come up for the Boston mob.
He believes he and I are a team; we’re working together without second thoughts about what happened last night—my desperate need to safeword in the glorious dungeon he rebuilt for me, my eejit decision to fake.
In two short sentences, Cole has told me we’re fine.
Which is more than I can say about Granny and Breagha. I need to let them know about everything that happened at Sunday Roast. Squaring my shoulders, I head out the front door.
Drew Cameron glides to my side before my feet hit the drive. “I’m just going across the road,” I tell him. “To the carriage house.”
He gestures for me to lead the way.
“Alone,” I say.
“Not today.” He smiles as he says it, but I recognize the iron in his tone.
“You lot have cameras on both the properties,” I argue. “You can sit in the garage and watch me on the screen.”
“I’ll take you across the street and wait in the carriage house foyer.”
I don’t want him hearing a word I have to say about the mess up in Canton. I won’t air the Lynch clan’s dirty laundry in front of a feckin’ stranger. “You’ll see me through the gate and wait out on the road,” I order.
“At the carriage house door.”
“Outside.”
“Outside,” he agrees.
So much for my brilliant mood from Cole’s text. I stomp toward the gate, taking childish pride in my long strides as Drew scurries to catch up. I’m still in a mood when Mrs. Watson opens the carriage house door.
“Ah, Kate!” Granny’s nurse glances at Drew behind me and makes a flustered sound that manages to include him in her greeting, even though she doesn’t know his name. “Will the two of you stay for lunch? I’m making ham and cheddar sandwiches.”
Drew offers a slight shrug. “No thank you, ma’am. I’ll just wait out here.”
“In the sun?” Mrs. Watson sounds appalled. When he simply shrugs again, she says, “Let me at least get you a chair from the kitchen.”
“I’m fine, ma’am,” Drew says.
The nurse insists, though. I feel vaguely ashamed as she brings out a ladderback chair and settles it in a sliver of shade under the eaves.
“Kate?” she asks, once we’re inside. “A sandwich?”
“No thank you.” I suspect neither Granny nor Breagha will have any appetite either, after I tell them about my trip to Baltimore. Gritting my teeth, I step into the sunroom.
Granny sits in her padded chair by the great wall of windows, with my sister at her feet. My grandmother’s arthritic fingers are wrestling with a mess of scarlet yarn, doing their best to wind a ball from the skein stretched across Breagha’s hands.
“Kate!” Granny says, as if it’s been days since I last visited instead of twenty-four hours. “And how was Sunday Roast?”
Before I can answer, my sister’s mobile chimes with the sound of a hooting owl. “Kate?” Breagha asks urgently, gesturing with her bound hands. “Come take the yarn. I need to answer my phone.”
“Can you wait? I need to tell you both—”
But Breagha has already slipped the loose skein over my hands and disappeared into the bedroom. Glaring at the closed door, I ask, “Do you know who she’s talking to?”
Granny purses her lips. “That Nathan Cohen. For the third time this morning.”
I sigh. “All the more reason she needs to hear what I have to say.”
Granny’s gaze is sharp over her growing ball of yarn. “What happened up in Baltimore? How’s my Barry-boy?”
Granny has never made excuses for Da. She’s never said he’s a loving father or a dedicated husband or even a competent captain.
But she’s worked all her life to make him a stronger man than he is.
She’s given him advice on the rare occasion he’ll take it, and she’s pulled strings to prop him up when she can.
She loves him. So I offer a truth that isn’t a real answer. “He truly loves Cook’s colcannon.”
Granny’s frown shows I didn’t fool her. “What happened, a chroí?”
It’s the a chroí that tears me apart. Granny has called me that for my entire life—before the Bad Men, when we were in County Donegal, through all the years I’ve spent fighting Mam and Da since then.
When she says I’m her heart, I believe her.
She’ll be there for me, no matter how terrible the news.
So I tell her all of it as quickly as I can—Da’s damage, Mam’s plotting, Ilya Danilov expecting to steal away my sister. With every word, Granny’s face grows more drawn. By the end, she’s fumbling for her emergency inhaler.
After I help her with the medicine, I say, “I wish everything could be as simple as it was when I was little.”
She works on taking a full breath before she offers a wry smile. “Things weren’t so simple then, a chroí.”
She’s right, of course. If things were simple, then Breagha and I would never have been kidnapped. Pyotr Tarasov wouldn’t have hurt me. Granny would never have taken me away to County Donegal.
Donegal… Now that was simple. Granny and I ate. We walked. We slept—with the light on, sure, but Granny helped me through each night.
The world felt safe with an ocean between us and Baltimore. The bratva didn’t have a toehold in Ireland. And if any Russian mobster ever thought of taking over, I knew Mad Robbie Malloy would see him gone, straight away.
Now I say his name out loud, like a charm against evil: “Robbie Malloy.”
“What’s that?” Granny tilts her head like a bird.
“Mad Robbie Malloy. Back in County Donegal. If we brought him here, the Crew would have a chance.”
Robbie is some sort of cousin, third or fourth, or maybe thrice removed.
His granny and mine grew up in the Irish countryside together.
They walked miles to their one-room school.
They sewed their own dresses and cooked for their clan and watched the family rise to power.
They were like sisters until Granny married, until she became a Lynch.
When Granny took me to safety in County Donegal, Old Malloy—Robbie’s grandad—ran the mob there.
Robbie was a soldier, known for his bare-knuckle brawls and his repeated run-ins with the garda.
He fetched Granny and me from the airport in Dublin the day we arrived, and I couldn’t understand a word of his brogue.
By the time we left, I sounded just like him.
“Robbie Malloy is strong enough to fight the bratva,” I say.
Granny frowns. “Robbie Malloy is a menace. I’d never be responsible for bringing that one here. For seeing him walk on US soil.”
Whatever she fears about Malloy, Nikolai Tarasov is a thousand times worse. “But what would Da want, Granny? Don’t you think he’d rather see an Irishman rule Canton instead of those Russian shitehawks?”
“Language, dear,” Granny murmurs. “You don’t know what you’re asking.”
Before I can argue more, Mrs. Watson appears in the doorway, a tray in her hand. “Ready for some lunch now?”
“Maybe later,” Granny says. “I’m too tired to eat.”
Mrs. Watson shoots me a disapproving glance. As much as I want to press Granny about Robbie Malloy, I know when it’s time to leave. “I’ll come back later,” I say. “To tell Breagha about Danilov.”
Granny shakes her head. “I’ll tell her. Poor little lamb.”
I kiss her cheek as Mrs. Watson moves in to tempt her with just a few bites. Drew Cameron springs to attention as I open the carriage house door. “See?” I say, raising my hands to give him a full view of my intact body. “Safe and sound.”
After carrying his chair inside, he escorts me to the gate.
We manage two steps toward the curb before a car turns onto the street.
It’s a nondescript sedan, exactly like a million other cars in the DC metro area.
Its wheels rumble over the cobblestones, loud enough to drown out birdsong in the trees.
Drew shoots out his arm like a mother corralling a toddler. Rolling my eyes in annoyance, I’m tempted to dash out before the car reaches us, stranding my guard-dog while I reach the opposing pavement.
Before I can do that, though, the car picks up speed. I have one second to realize the driver’s window is down, and then Drew is tugging me down to the ground. His body is heavy on mine and he presses my face into the pavement as he shouts, “Stay down! Stay down!”
Other men are hollering. Something metallic hits the street. Tires spin on the cobblestones, taking a moment to catch before the vehicle squeals away.
There’s a hissing noise, like a nest of vipers, and I start to choke. My nose and eyes are streaming. My throat feels like it’s being attacked by a swarm of bees, and every muscle in my chest grows tight.
“Move, move, move!” shouts a man very close to my ear. Drew rolls off of me, and fingers dig into my arms and ankles. Coughing, spitting, dripping from my eyes and nose and mouth, I’m carried across the street like a splayed sack of potatoes by a team of men. Others ferry Drew to safety.
Chaos boils behind me as we’re deposited by the house. Someone drags out a garden hose. The first blast of water makes everything burn more intensely, but then the torture fades.
“Get the canister,” Drew croaks beside me. “Get the fucking can.”
“Already done,” says the Sawgrass man holding the hose.
“What was that?” I wheeze.
“Tear gas,” Drew answers tersely.
I’m shaking, trembling in the hot summer sun as if I just stepped out of an arctic cave. My hip vibrates where Drew ground it into the sidewalk.
It takes me longer than it should to realize that’s not my hip. My mobile is buzzing.
I fish the phone out of my pocket. It’s a message coming in from a number I don’t recognize. But once I tap the screen, I see that it’s a continuation of an earlier communication.
At the top of the screen, Nikolai Tarasov’s fist is wrapped around his dick. Below that, he’s sent a new message.
Lisichka
I can get you whenever I want you
You
Are
Mine