26. Lorcan
LORCAN
I thought pain would clear the noise. It always has before. A clean, brutal exchange of damage, blood on the floor, and the world sharpens back into something I can manage. It’s worked every time for fifteen years.
Not last night.
Last night, every hit I took just made her face clearer.
Every time my skull rattled and my vision whited out, there she was.
Bloodshot eyes. Fingers locked in my shirt.
A woman asking to be loved with the same voice she uses to tell me she hates me, like she already knows the answer and is asking anyway because she is braver than anyone I’ve ever met.
Fintan is in the kitchen, making toast. “That went well,” he remarks.
“It went fine. We’re leaving.”
He pauses. “She hasn’t eaten.”
“She is a grown woman who has lived on her own since she was fifteen. She can make herself food.”
“If she remembers, or even cares to,” he says.
“We’re leaving,” I say again.
Fintan doesn’t argue further. He drops the toast onto a paper plate and slides it to the end of the counter where she’ll find it, and then he wipes his hands and picks up his jacket from the back of the chair.
I press my card to the lift panel and the doors slide open.
The ride down is silent, which suits me. My ribs are screaming. My eye feels like it’s been inflated with a pump. I keep my breathing even and my face neutral.
“You need to go back home,” he says.
“That is where I’m headed. Tiernan is at the office.”
“What do we do about Snowden and Bastion?”
“Firstly, Linton Farnworth needs reminding he is meant to keep his fucking mouth shut, and then I need to think of something Alex has that I want.”
“So you’re letting him in?”
“I’m letting him in. He wants to play with the big boys, let him.”
Fintan snorts. “We’re going to have to tell Elle at some point that we aren’t just billionaires with an illegal gambling-slash-fighting ring.”
I grimace, and it hurts my fucking face. “I know. But how do you go from that to we’re part of the London criminal underground, aka the mafia, without scaring her even more than she already is?”
The doors ding open, and he doesn’t answer because it’s not something you speak about in earshot of the general public.
The foyer of the apartment block is empty save for the concierge, but that isn’t the point.
Clark is waiting for me at the kerb. “Home,” I say to him as Fintan heads to his Range Rover.
He nods, looking grateful that he didn’t have to argue with me. I don’t know why everyone suddenly seems to think I’m heading into a billion-pound corporation looking like this and therefore having to explain myself.
Fucking idiots.
Everyone is a fucking idiot today.
Including me.
My head works through problems that used to have simple answers on the short drive.
Linton Farnworth has a mouth that needs closing.
Alex Snowden has ambition that needs controlling.
Harry Thompson has a pulse that needs ending.
Eleanor Hargrove-Pierce has a past that makes every rational part of my brain shut down and reach for violence.
That last one is the issue.
Violence fixes many things. It ends threats, sends messages, creates silence. It strips power from men who thought they were untouchable.
It won’t fix what they did to her.
Clark pulls up outside my house, and the gates roll open. He pulls to a stop, and I get out before he can move around to open the door. The rain has eased to a miserable drizzle. I walk up the steps, and the door is opened by the housekeeper, Marion.
She nods but says nothing, disappearing to the kitchen where she is probably having a laugh at my fucking face.
I leave her to it.
I take the stairs slowly and by the time I reach my room, my ribs are threatening mutiny, and my face has started pulsing in time with my temper.
My bedroom is exactly as I left it. Severe and neat with dark wood, white linen, and no clutter. A room designed for sleep and nothing else because I don’t bring warmth into my personal spaces. I never saw the point.
Today, it looks empty.
I strip off my clothes and stop when the movement pulls hard through my side. “Fuck.”
The word comes out between my teeth. I look down. Bruising spreads over my ribs, ugly and deep. Ronan got a few good hits in. More than a few. I’d allowed some of them.
I fall into bed and regret it immediately. Pain tears across my side, hot, sharp, and I go still until it settles into a duller throb. I stare at the ceiling, breathing through my nose, one hand pressed to my ribs.
This is pathetic.
I turn my head to the side and see that Marion has left me some painkillers and a bottle of water on the bedside cabinet.
“Good woman,” I grit out and reach for them, sloshing water over me and the pillow as I take them without sitting up. The ceiling stares back at me. White. Featureless. A blank I have no interest in filling.
The painkillers take the edge off after twenty minutes.
Not enough. Enough to think without wanting to put my fist through Harry Thompson’s face.
He will get what’s coming to him, but it will be slow, so slow he won’t even see it coming.
I want him completely broken before I gut him.
I stay flat on my back with my hand pressed to my ribs and let the silence do what the fight couldn’t.
I’ve dismantled men for less. I’ve ended careers and reputations over a badly placed word, a look that lasted a second too long, a debt that didn’t need to be called in, but I called it in anyway because I could.
Power without application is just potential, and I’ve never been a man who leaves potential sitting idle.
This entire situation gets to me. A grown man—someone who was an authority figure—used a position of trust to destroy a fifteen-year-old girl, and her family sat across a table from him and wrote a number on a piece of paper for him to keep his mouth shut.
I breathe through my nose and out through my mouth.
The bruising across my ribs makes each breath a chore. I focus on that. The physical is manageable. Pain has a shape I understand. What happened to Elle doesn’t. There is nothing in this goddamned world that will make me understand what her parents did to her.
It’s abuse, is what it is.
They will pay. The Bastion has ways which will hit them right where it hurts. Their reputation and their pocket. I won’t kill them. Not unless Elle asks me to. Instead, I will use every underground contact I have to dismantle them until they have nothing left but their memories.
My phone buzzes on the cabinet. I reach for it without moving my torso, which is a special kind of achievement. Alex.
“What do you want?” I ask, answering it.
“I need a decision on what we talked about last night.” His voice is calm, but too calm.
“Why?”
He pauses and then sighs. “I need something moving.”
“So hire a moving company.”
“Hilarious. Having your arse beaten to a pulp makes you a comedian.”
“Not pulped. What do you want moving? Say it or fuck off.”
“A quarter of a mil in unmarked bills.”
I blink and sit up, ignoring the stab of pain. “Oh?”
“I need it moved quietly and fast. Through channels that don’t exist on paper.”
“You understand what you’re asking me.”
“I understand perfectly. That’s why I’m asking you and not someone who’ll take the money and disappear.”
I get off the bed slowly, pressing one hand flat to my ribs. The pain is sharp and bright, and I let it ground me while I think. A quarter million in cash isn’t significant money, not to me, not to Alex. It’s an exact number that means something to someone.
“Where is it going?”
“Cayman.”
I laugh. “You are fucking joking.”
“I never joke about money, Keane. You know that.”
“You want a shipment of bills to leave London and land safely in Cayman, to then what?”
“Buy something.”
“No shit,” I mutter. “You know what? Who the fuck cares.”
“Can you do it?”
“Obviously, or you wouldn’t have come to me. It will cost you.”
“Name it.”
“Knightsbridge.”
A pause. “No.”
“Yes. That is your price into the Bastion; the rest is done as a favour.”
A longer pause this time.
“Knightsbridge,” he repeats.
“The whole block. You know the one.”
“That block is worth forty million.”
“Then you’d better decide how badly you want in.”
Silence stretches down the line. I can hear him thinking, the careful recalculation he has done his entire life of weighing the cost of everything against the value of access.
“Done,” he says finally.
“I’ll have someone contact you about the transfer within twenty-four hours. Don’t call me again until your paperwork is clean.”
I hang up and drop the phone on the bed.
Forty million in property for a quarter million in favour.
Alex Snowden just bought himself the most expensive insurance policy in London, and he knows it.
The fact that he agreed without negotiating tells me everything about how important this transfer of money is and why it needs to stay off the grid.
I weigh up what I know about Alex Snowden against what I don’t.
There is more he isn’t telling me. There always is with him.
The quarter million is a drop in the ocean for someone of his net worth, which means the asset it’s purchasing is worth considerably more than forty million.
He bought his way in cheaply, and I let him because the block in Knightsbridge is a priority acquisition I’ve wanted for two years and couldn’t touch because of the family trust wrapped around it.
Alex just unwrapped it.
My ribs protest when I push off the bed and cross to the window. The drizzle has thickened into proper rain. The garden below is grey and wet and empty. The outdoor furniture is covered in its winter wrapping, making everything look twice as dismal.
“What does a quarter of a million pounds buy in Cayman?” I ask the rain-splattered window.
Nothing that makes sense on the surface.
A quarter million is too small to be a bribe.
Too large to be a gift. Too specific to be anything other than a payment for something that has already been agreed upon between Alex and someone who needs the money in a jurisdiction that doesn’t ask questions and doesn’t keep records that can be subpoenaed by anyone with a British court order.
Alex Snowden moves in rooms I don’t have access to, despite a personal portfolio of several billion, not to mention the company assets.
These are old money, old blood, old English aristocratic rooms. Rooms that plotted the downfall of my home country and people like me.
They are rooms with fireplaces and port and men who have never needed to raise their voices because the world has always bent to accommodate them.
They have their own economy, favours, debts, and introductions.
A quarter of a million in cash, moved quietly, to Cayman.
Someone called something in.
I turn from the window and pick up my phone. I dial Tiernan.
He answers on the second ring. “You’re supposed to be in bed.”
“Alex just gave me Knightsbridge for entry into the Bastion. He wants a quarter mil moved into the Cayman Islands in unmarked bills.”
Silence.
“Yeah,” I say. “It’s a puzzler.”
“Did you ask him what it was for?”
I snicker. “You are an arse, you know that?”
“Sometimes the most obvious solution is right in front of you.”
“True. He didn’t say.”
“You want me to find out?”
“No, I want you to use a Bastion contact in Cayman to find out. This stays off the radar.” I hang up, set the phone on the window ledge, and stare at the rain.
My ribs pulse. My eye throbs. The painkillers are doing their best and losing the fight incrementally, which feels fitting.
I turn back to the bed, fall into it, close my eyes and sleep.