Chapter Five
Sophie…
“I have to say, my Miles dressed is much less fun than Miles undressed,” Maisie complains the next morning. “That date night was scunnert until I got him home and peeled him out of his suit.”
I’m sitting on the rooftop of the MacTavish office building, where they’d put in a generous garden area with tables and space heaters so their employees could catch a breath of (relatively) fresh air during lunch breaks.
We’re Facetiming and my girl looks rough, her red hair looking a bit like a stray cat’s and mascara still generously smeared under her eyes.
“I think you still win for the most entertaining end to the evening,” I say dryly.
“Ach, really?” She clicks her tongue disapprovingly. “Nothing to tell me? Bryce is a braw lad.”
“Yeah, and a cokehead,” I say. “He tried to offer me a bump on the ride home.” A mean-spirited smile creeps across my face. “I still think Celia’s date night sucked worse, though. Did you see her expression when your brother cut the evening short?”
“Even better, did ye notice his look of relief when he jumped for his mobile the minute it went off?” she cackles. “I stand by my belief that I dinnae think Celia’s getting her monogrammed MacTavish china anytime soon.”
“Really?” I despise myself for sounding so eager.
“He had the same expression he always gets when he’s ready to, oh, so politely, tell a girlfriend to shove off,” Maisie says heartlessly.
“I think he would have done it sooner, but things have gone to shite recently at work. He’s been flying from one end of Scotland to the other, clearing up shite tonne of disasters. ”
I move to the far corner of the garden, putting in my earbuds. “You mean at work, or you know, work?”
She frowns. “Every time I stop by the house, there’s another meeting in Da’s office, shouting, everyone’s all in a radge. It seems like MacTavish property keeps getting blown up or set on fire. We always have setbacks, but this shite dinnae let up.”
I don’t have to be in the inner workings of the business to know there have been problems. I’ve been doing a lot of filing over the last week or two while the legal team has been in meetings up on the top floor in the executive suites.
None of the higher-ups seem to be going home and I found Amanda, my direct supervisor, dead asleep on her office couch for the last three mornings when I brought in her coffee.
“Your family is the biggest…” I nod and smile politely as two guys from Developmental Finance walk by, waiting until they leave. “Your family is the most powerful organization in Scotland, there’s always some ambitious idiot coming after them. The Chieftain and your brother will figure it out.”
“I hope so,” she sighs. “Because Michael just doubled my security.”
There’s a beep and I see that Mom’s calling me. “Can I check back with you? Mom’s on the line.”
Maisie waves her hand, yawning. “Go. Talk later.”
Taking Mom’s call, “Hey, how are you? I want to take you to the new cafe you were talking about-”
There’s silence and a shuddering sigh.
“Mom?” My throat tightens. “Are you there?”
“Can you come home?” she manages. “Right now? I need you, it’s- it’s serious.” She seems to come to her senses as she adds hastily, “Don’t drive too fast! Be careful.”
I’m already scooping up my backpack and heading for the elevator. “I’m on my way.”
It takes twenty-five minutes in city traffic to get from MacTavish International to the turnoff into the posh neighborhood the MacTavish estate dominates.
I make it in sixteen.
I push my jeep faster than is safe for this winding road, but Mom sounded terrified. What could have possibly happened?
When I pull up to the back gate of the MacTavish mansion, I know something’s going on. Something serious. The amount of guards is nearly double and no one is smiling.
“Hey, Angus,” I roll down my window, trying to smile at the guard coming up to my car. “Is everything okay?”
“Did ye notice anyone following ye here, lass?” He’s looking in my back seat as another guard runs a mirror to check the underside of my jeep.
“No.” I shrug helplessly. “I wasn’t really paying attention, I’m sorry. I was in a hurry to get home.”
His gaze sharpens. “Why?”
“To see Mom?” I hate that it sounds like a question.
“Very well, then. In ye get.” Angus waves me through the gate. There’s staff parking just a bit behind our cottage, so it doesn’t take me long to rush into the house.
She’s sitting in the kitchen, staring blankly out the window. Her normally tidy bun is sideways, bits of hair sprouting out and her skin is gray.
“Mom, what's wrong?” Her head turns to look at me, she’s staring like she doesn’t recognize me. “You're scaring me, here.” I dump my backpack on the table and sit next to her, taking her hands. “What happened?”
Like a dam breaking, she starts sobbing so hard that I can barely understand her. “I've done something horrible, sweetheart. Something I can't take back.”
“You can tell me anything, you know that! Whatever it is, we'll fix it okay?”
“I need to- I have to explain. It will make more sense if I explain,” she stammers.
“Okay, I’m listening,” I squeeze her hands, suddenly not wanting to hear it. Childishly, I don’t want to know. I have a sickening certainty that whatever she tells me is going to change everything for the worse.
“I haven't been honest with you about our past,” she says, wiping the back of her hands against her wet eyes in a motion that breaks my heart.
“I know this is going to sound crazy, but it’s true.
Your father wasn't a lawyer. He was the head of the Graves Mafia back in San Francisco.
He and your brother were murdered. I ‘m sure it was his second in command, Robert Taylor, who ordered it.”
It’s like reality just turned sideways as I try to understand what she's just told me. I’ve always known there was more to why we left San Francisco so quickly and moved abroad.
Even a ten year old knows something’s not right when my last name is suddenly different from the one on my passport and I’m told never to use our real one again.
But… My mouth is moving silently, like a goldfish, trying to make this make sense.
“Dad ran a mafia? Like the MacTavishes? How could this... Do the MacTavishes know?”
“Oh my god, no!” Mom gasps. “They never would have hired me. That scum Robert found us in Italy, that's why we had to run. I thought hiding behind another Mafia would keep us safe.” She laughs bitterly. “It worked for ten years, anyway. I’d hoped that he'd given up looking for us ages ago.”
I vaguely remember Robert. He never came to the house, but I’d seen him a couple of times when I visited Dad at work. Shorter, sandy-colored hair and a mean little smile, like he knew the punchline to a joke I wouldn’t understand.
“So that car accident…” I ask numbly. “That wasn’t an accident at all. That’s why you changed our names. Why we had to leave so fast.”
She nods, her head down and hands compulsively smoothing her dress over her knees. I do that too, when I’m feeling overwhelmed.
“What happened?” A sickening thought hits me. “Did he find us again?” I put my arm around her, squeezing tight and it seems to give her strength.
“Yes. Robert got to me when I was shopping a couple of weeks ago. He pulled me into a car and pointed a gun at me. He told me that he knew where you were every minute of the day. He h- had men following you. He told me that he wanted information about a shipping deal the MacTavishes were doing with a Japanese mafia.”
She cries harder and I rest my forehead against hers. She’s been carrying this secret for years, and that bastard used me against her.
Mom looks at me sadly. “I got a little information for him, I hoped it wouldn’t be enough. The deal went wrong, very wrong. Xenia and Georges have been in the mansion all morning. They’re tracking every possible breach in the MacTavish intelligence system.”
Oh, shit. “Did you send him the information on a MacTavish device?” I wheeze.
“I opened a different email account,” she says miserably. “I deleted everything the moment I sent it.”
Mom’s computer skills have never been strong, but…
“The MacTavishes control the network,” I sigh, “hell, they likely control the entire internet. How bad do you think this breach was?”
“Everyone was furious this morning,” she says. “People have been storming in and out of the Chieftain’s office. I think it was really bad. I opened my laptop today and it had a red screen, I was locked out of everything.”
“Then, they know. Or, at least they’re narrowing it down.” My stomach feels like a fist grabbed it, squeezing it tighter with every second. “Okay, we can…” I don’t know what we can do. We can’t run. They’d be on us before we got through the gate. I’m sure the estate is locked down by now.
I’d only seen something like this happen once before, when I was eighteen. There’s an underground concrete bunker on a corner of the estate that was likely built during World War Two. It’s not used as a bomb shelter now, though.
I was up late one night and watched some of the guards drag six writhing, terrified men into the shed that concealed the steel door to the bunker.
Michael was standing there with an expression I’d never seen before, his mouth tight and eyes narrowed.
The warm, pleasantly distant man I’d always known looked like a terrifying stranger.
“We have to go to the Chieftain.”
“We can’t, we can’t do that!” Mom violently pushes her chair back.
“This is the only way,” I nod firmly, trying to look like I know what the hell I’m doing. “Let’s just- we’ll make a list of what we want to say and it will be so much better than them narrowing it down to us.”
Hands shaking, I grab my notebook.
Taylor killed my dad and brother twelve years ago, Mom took me and ran to save my life.
We’ve been loyal clan members for ten years.
Mom was kidnapped by Taylor, he threatened my life if she didn’t get information about the Yakuza deal.
She only did it to save my
The front door slams open and we both shriek. My pen skids across the paper, hard enough to tear. The Chieftain is standing there, along with Michael, so tall that their heads nearly brush the top of the doorway, blocking the light and casting us into shadow.
***
Scunnert - Scottish slang for boring.
In a radge - Scottish slang for angry or pissed off.