18. Tiernan
TIERNAN
Jeff keeps talking. I don’t hear a word he says, but I nod along like it’s the most riveting meeting in history.
Lorcan knows I’m not listening, but he does nothing about it, because he isn’t listening either.
This one-hundred-and-forty-million-dollar contract to build a small and exclusive set of houses on land we own is a priority, but nothing, and I mean nothing, is getting past the feel of my cock inside Elle’s cunt last night.
Jeff is still going. Slides on the screen, numbers in columns, projected timelines and cost breakdowns. I watch his mouth move and think about the sound Elle made when I pulled back, and she lost contact. That small, involuntary sound of loss that she didn’t plan on making.
I want to hear it again.
I want to hear it every day for the rest of my life, which is a thought I don’t examine too closely because it will make me useless for the rest of this meeting, and I’m already about seventy per cent useless.
“The planning approval comes through in six weeks,” Jeff says, clicking to the next slide. “Assuming the council doesn’t push back on the density specifications.”
“They won’t,” Lorcan says, his voice perfectly present and controlled.
I envy him that control. I genuinely do. I have been sitting in this glass-walled boardroom for forty minutes, and the only coherent thought I’ve managed to form is that Elle’s thighs shook when she came on my tongue.
Jeff clicks to another slide.
I pick up my pen and write a number on the notepad in front of me to look engaged. Lorcan glances at it and then at me, and his expression tells me he knows exactly what I’m doing and if he were in a position to roll his eyes, he would.
69.
Sue me.
“The infrastructure costs are front-loaded,” Jeff continues. I catch the words and lose them again immediately. “But the return on the backend is significant given the location and the current market appetite for—”
“Send the full breakdown to my PA,” I say, cutting across him. “We’ll have responses to you by the end of the week.”
Jeff blinks. He is a decent architect and a terrible reader of rooms. He looks at Lorcan, who gives him a nod that confirms the meeting is over without bothering to say it out loud.
Jeff starts gathering his papers, knowing better than to argue with a Keane, never mind two of them.
He closes the boardroom door behind him, and Lorcan turns to me before the latch has even clicked.
“You wrote sixty-nine on your notepad.”
“I was taking notes.”
“You were thinking about her.”
“I was thinking about both of them simultaneously.” I cap the pen and stand. “Don’t tell me you weren’t.”
Lorcan says nothing, which is confirmation enough.
He straightens his jacket and moves to the floor-to-ceiling glass that looks out at the top-floor offices.
A hundred people working. Phones, screens, numbers.
A legitimate empire that funds the less legitimate one, and right now neither of us cares about any of it.
“Why are you convinced someone hurt her?” I ask suddenly. He seems overly fixated on this issue.
Lorcan turns from the glass. His expression stays controlled, but his eyes do the thing they do when he’s considering how much truth to hand over. He weighs it the way other men weigh money.
“She’s been trained to expect rejection,” he says finally.
“Rejection,” I murmur. Now that he says it, I can see he’s assessed her correctly. She finds it hard to accept attention. She feels she is worthless because someone taught her that wanting anything is a weakness people can use against her.
I don’t like the twist of the knife that brings.
“She expects to be discarded,” Lorcan continues. “So she bites first, makes herself difficult and forces the other person to decide she isn’t worth the effort.”
“And you think fucking her into submission helps with that?”
His stare cuts to me. “You participated.”
“I know what I did.”
“Then don’t get moral on me now.”
“I’m not getting moral. I’m asking a question.”
Lorcan studies me for a long second. “No, Tiernan. I don’t think fucking her fixes it. I think keeping her does.”
“That is not the same thing as caring for her.”
“It is for us.”
That shuts me up because he’s not wrong. In our world, protection is ownership. Devotion comes with locks on doors and men with guns downstairs. We don’t ask permission from the people we decide to save. We take them out of the line of fire and deal with their anger later.
Elle doesn’t understand that.
Worse, she understands enough to be terrified.
“When is Fintan due in?”
“Why?”
“I want to go to her, but I think two of us overwhelms her.”
“You don’t want her left alone?” he asks.
“Do you?”
His gaze doesn’t falter. “I do, so she knows she cannot run. I want her to test the door, try the lift, attempt to open the windows. Crawl in the vents if she has to. I want her to know that there is no getting out of that apartment without me.”
“So we leave her alone this afternoon,” I say, able to see the reason behind that. She will break that much quicker than if she clings to a hope she can’t test because we are always hanging around.
Lorcan nods once. “To answer your question, Fintan is leaving after breakfast.”
“Do you think she will panic?”
“I think she will,” he says. “Then she will calm down and look for weaknesses. After that she will realise I don’t leave weaknesses.”
“That sounds like a theory from a man who hasn’t spent enough time with her.”
His eyes narrow. “Meaning?”
“Meaning she beat me with a shoe last night.”
“I’m aware. You deserved it.”
“I know.” I smile despite myself. “She doesn’t quit, Lorcan. That’s the point. She’ll try the obvious things first because anyone would. But then she’ll start thinking sideways.”
“She can think in whatever direction she wants. She isn’t getting out.”
“You sound very sure.”
“I am sure.”
The arrogance reassures me because Lorcan doesn’t leave gaps in a system once he decides it matters.
Elle matters.
The thought lands hard and clean.
I turn away from him and head for the door.
“Where are you going?” he asks.
“To my office.”
He gives a short laugh. “Try not to write anything else obscene on your paperwork.”
“Try not to scare the staff with your emotional unavailability.”
He gives me the finger, and I leave him to brood, or whatever it is he does when he thinks no one is looking.
I pull my phone out and dial Fin.
“Yeah?”
“How is she?”
“Fed and feisty. I took her fork away, and she used my tee to wipe her greasy hands on.” He sounds amused.
“You took her fork away?”
“I thought she might try to stab me. Blame yourself. You set the precedent with your shoe beating last night.”
“That’s fair. I accept the blame for allowing her to think she can attack us with household objects.”
“I removed all the sharp knives and scissors.”
“Good thinking. Are you still there?”
“Leaving now.”
“Fully clothed?”
“She washed the tee. I put it in the dryer. It’s a bit damp. I’ll live.”
“Lock up tight; Lorcan wants her alone and checking for ways out.”
“Noted,” he says carefully. I hear the lift door slide closed, and he hangs up.
I push into my office and shut the door behind me. The city spreads beyond the glass, grey and wet, a thousand people moving around below with no idea that we’re discussing a woman trapped in Mayfair because my brother decided she belonged to us.
A decision that I don’t refute. She is ours whether she says the words and means them or not. I sit down and see a file on my desk labelled Alex Snowden.
I stare at the label for a second too long.
Snowden has been a problem for years. Not an urgent one, not until now.
He operates on the edge of everything we do, never quite stepping over the line far enough for Lorcan to justify cutting him down.
Old money gives men like Alex a protective coating.
Police commissioners take his calls. Judges attend his charity dinners.
Politicians let him whisper in their ears because his family name opens doors ours kicks in.
I open the file.
The first page is nothing I don’t already know. I flip through photos of him at events with women in gowns and men who smile with dead eyes. He’s always polished, controlled, and positioned close to power, never in front of it.
That is what makes him dangerous.
Lorcan likes being seen. I like being underestimated. Fintan likes silence.
Alex Snowden likes proximity.
I turn another page and stop at a photo. The man is younger than Snowden by a couple of years, maybe. Styled messy brown hair, glasses. A bit nerdy in a professor-type way.
“And who are you?” I murmur, holding the file up as I sit back in my chair.
Harry Thompson. Maths teacher at Banksfield High School.
Married, three kids, stay-at-home wife. Her picture is a treat.
Cute, savage in that way mums get when the school run is five minutes past schedule because someone can’t find a shoe.
It shows her outside the school, the kids’ faces all blurred out.
“What do you two have to do with Snowden?” I murmur, setting the file down and peering closer at the printed-out notes.
What I find is interesting only because it made its way into the file for reasons unknown.
Siobhan Thompson, 34. Cousin to Snowden. Grew up wealthy but was cut off after a scandal with her husband nine years ago. He was fired from his position as a maths teacher at an elite school in Bedfordshire, Pembrooke Academy. The record is closed, which means only one thing. It involved a minor.
I sneer in disgust. “Arsehole. You deserve to be strung up by your balls.”
Apparently, Siobhan stuck by her husband, since there is no record of a divorce.
But there is still no reason why either of them is in this file. A simple family connection to Alex Snowden isn’t anything to write home about. I’m sure he has tons of family.
I pick up my phone and dial the investigator.
He grunts by way of an answer.
“Why is this cousin in the file you sent over?”
“It was flagged by the search.”
“Why?”
“Beats me. You find the connection; I just bring what I find.” He hangs up.
I grimace at the phone before I place it carefully down, resisting the urge to throw it across the office.
A random search on a low-level stay-at-home mum is below his pay grade.
Sealed records are a thing he won’t touch.
He wouldn’t change that even if I offered him a million quid. So this requires a secondary source.
I scroll through my contacts until I see the name I want and dial.
“Peters,” he answers in a clipped voice. I hear a camera shutter go off a dozen times and smile. This is more the speed I’m after.
“Tiernan Keane here. I need you to do a bit of digging.”
“Depends how big,” Peters says. “I’m in the middle of something.”
“You’re always in the middle of something. That’s why I’m calling you.”
Another shutter burst. “Flattery from a Keane. I’m either about to get rich or dead.”
“Potentially both.”
He laughs once. “Name.”
“Siobhan Thompson. Cut-off cousin of Alex Snowden. Husband, Harry Thompson. Fired nine years ago from Pembrooke Academy after a sealed incident; current employment: Banksfield High. I want the sealed records from the Pembrooke incident.”
The shutter stops.
That gets his attention.
“Sealed record?”
“I want everything. Complaints, payoffs, police reports, NDAs, emails, staff whispers, old student forums, whatever’s buried.”
“You know this will get ugly.”
“You up for it?”
“Price?”
“Name it.”
“Five hundred kay.”
“Done. I want it fast, or I go elsewhere.”
“How fast?”
“Fast.” I hang up and pick up the file again, staring at the couple with a dark past.
Lorcan finds me like that several minutes later.
I throw the file at him before he can make a comment. “Peters is on it.”
He picks it up, and his eyebrow goes up. “Connected to Snowden?”
“Cousin. Husband with a sealed dismissal from Pembrooke Academy nine years ago.”
Lorcan’s face changes.
Not much. Not enough for most people to notice. I notice because I’ve spent my entire life watching him not react.
“What is this doing in a file on Snowden’s movements?”
“James only said it was flagged.”
“Flagged. Was that flag big and red?”
I make a noise of agreement.
“Alex came to see me last night after you left with Elle. He wanted her name.”
“You gave it to him?”
He shrugs. “He’d have found out anyway. This way was quicker to find out what he is up to. He said she looked familiar, but he couldn’t place her.”
I close my eyes and breathe in deeply before I open them again. “Do not tell me you think this is connected.”
“Our file on Elle never mentions Pembrooke Academy,” he says carefully.
“No, it mentions she dropped out of school at fifteen.” I frown and pull the file out of my bottom drawer and flick it open. “All Saints Catholic.”
“I’ve got someone digging deeper,” he says, tapping the file. “I’ll hurry them along.”
“Do that,” I say. “Because if Harry Thompson is the reason she looks at men like they’re going to ruin her, I want him breathing when I get there.”
Lorcan’s eyes lift from the file. “You don’t get to him first.”
“Try stopping me.”
His expression goes cold enough to make the glass walls feel less secure. “If this is connected to Elle, I will handle it.”
“We will if he hurt her.”
That is the thing neither of us says enough.
Hurt her. Not irritated us. Not threatened the business.
Not crossed the Keanes. Hurt her. The woman currently locked in the penthouse with no phone, no way out, and no idea that our entire attention has shifted from keeping her contained to digging up a past she refuses to give us.
Lorcan closes the file slowly. “We don’t know that.”
“No. But you think enough to be standing here with that look on your face.”
“What look?”
“The one that gets men buried.”
He doesn’t answer. He turns and leaves, and I sit back in my chair, wondering what hell this woman went through before we dragged her into ours.