23. Cillian
CILLIAN
By the time my men get to the coffee shop, she’s long gone.
No one has to tell me this.
I can feel it in my bones as I watch my men fan out across the surrounding blocks.
I’m standing on the sidewalk with glass still in my hair and blood seeping through the makeshift bandage someone pressed to my shoulders.
I’ve been in enough situations to know I’ve been outplayed.
And I fucking hate it.
I don’t move, standing there while the street churns around me.
There are sirens somewhere close, a woman crying on the curb, someone’s coffee still dripping off an overturned table visible through the blown-out window.
I clench my fists so tightly I can feel my nails bite into my skin, waiting for my men to come back and tell me what I already know.
Nothing. No one saw a woman leave with a young boy. No one remembers anything.
In ten seconds of chaos Claire Murphy picked up her son and walked out of my life like she’d never been in it, and not one person on a busy Midtown street can tell me which direction she went.
I send two guys to the address she had given me, to an apartment in Queens. I thought it had been an Airbnb, which on reflection I should have done some fucking digging on that.
I don’t expect my men to find anything, but I send them anyway because I need to know if there’s any clues left behind.
When my phone rings, Ryan tells me the news I already knew. The apartment was professionally cleaned out. Not packed-in-a-hurry, not grabbed-what-she-could—professionally.
There’s no fingerprints. No personal belongings. No indication that any human being had ever set foot inside.
Whoever prepped that apartment knew we’d eventually send someone there, and they wanted us to find absolutely nothing.
They succeeded.
My private investigator—Cal—calls me while I’m still on the sidewalk.
“Tell me something good,” I say when I pick up.
Cal pauses and I close my eyes. That’s never a good sign. “The offshore accounts are closed. All of them. Communications are wiped. Cillian, it’s—everything’s gone. Every thread I had, every trace. It’s like the whole operation just—”
“How long?” I grip the phone harder.
“It had to have started when she came to meet you at the coffee shop.”
I hang up.
Suddenly, there’s a paramedic in front of me, picking glass out of my shoulder with tweezers. “You doing okay, sir?”
Am I doing okay?
I look at him in irritation and he looks down again to focus on my shoulder. Am I okay?
I got fucking outplayed. Me, the con artist got outsmarted and I still don’t even know who the fuck she is.
She’s certainly not the Claire Murphy I remember.
Rage bubbles under the surface. It’s been there since the window blew in, since Claire and Finn disappeared.
It doesn’t do anything except simmer. I’m liable to explode at any second if I get any more bad news.
Valentina sits on the curb a few feet away, one of my men standing nearby, protecting her. She’s got her arms wrapped around herself like she’s cold. She catches me looking and holds my gaze for a second.
“I’m fine,” she says, before I can ask. She narrows her gaze at the paramedic near me. “I don’t need him.”
The only reason I don’t argue is because when the paramedics arrived, I bellowed that my wife is pregnant and they immediately checked on her, much to her chagrin.
She got a clean bill of health, even though they strongly encouraged her to go to the hospital.
I wave off the paramedic irritably and awkwardly shrug off my jacket, wincing at the discomfort. I walk toward her, my guy stepping back.
“Move,” I tell him, jerking my chin. He scuttles away, giving Valentina and I some privacy.
I sit down next to her on the curb and drape my jacket around her shoulders before I pull her into me. Her head rests against my jaw and I wrap my arm around her.
She lets out a long and slow breath and sags against me. She smells like her perfume underneath the dust and cold air, and it’s comforting.
I press my cheek to the top of her head and close my eyes for one moment, letting myself pretend I’m anywhere but here.
“I’ve got glass in my hair,” she says but she doesn’t move.
I chuckle dryly. “I know. Me too.”
Valentina goes silent.
Somewhere down the block someone is still crying.
My men are moving and talking, doing what they’re supposed to be doing. Police officers are taking statements.
“Cillian?”
“Yeah?” I don’t open my eyes still.
“She’s really gone, isn’t she?”
I don’t answer right away, tightening my arm around her instead. She doesn’t pull back but instead presses a little closer. I think about how easily this could have gone differently.
“Yeah,” I murmur, opening my eyes and staring at the street, as if willing myself to see where Claire and Finn went. “She’s gone.”
On the ride home Valentina is tucked against my side, her head on my good shoulder, my arm around her. She hasn’t said much since we got in the car, but then again neither have I. The city slides past the window, and I keep turning the events of the coffee shop over and over again, examining them.
“She stalled us,” I say finally, my heart sinking as everything finally makes sense.
Valentina shifts slightly. “Huh?”
“Claire. The whole time we had those results on the table, the whole time you were going at her—she wasn’t trying to get out of it. She was stalling. She kept us sitting there asking questions while whoever hired her had a car already waiting outside.”
Valentina is quiet for a second, but I can feel her thinking. “The sob story,” she muses. “About being approached and having no choice.”
My hands clench into fists. “Yes.”
“I thought that was real.”
“It might have been,” I agree, letting my fingers trail over her arm. “Parts of it might have been. But it doesn’t matter. Real or not, she used it to buy herself time.”
Valentina sighs and tips her head back to look at the ceiling. “Fuck.”
“I keep going back to her face,” I say, closing my eyes.
Fuck me, I can still see it. “When I first opened that folder she went white. That was a real reaction—that I’d stake anything on it.
She was genuinely scared.” I pause, still replaying the moment in my mind.
“Then she just…snapped out of it. I really thought we had her, goddammit.”
“We both thought that.”
“I should have moved faster,” I say, anger rising in me at myself. “I should have pushed harder for the name instead of letting it play out.”
Valentina shifts beside me. “Cillian,” she says gently, but I’m too far gone.
“Connor’s going to lose his fucking mind when he hears this,” I bark out a laugh, shaking my head in disbelief.
“I had her. She was sitting right there and I was so focused on watching her squirm that I didn’t…
” I run a hand over my mouth. “I thought I’d won.
I sat there thinking I’d one-upped her and the whole time she was just—” I abruptly stop, digging my nails into my palm.
“Connor would have had a name within five minutes.”
“Connor would have put her through a wall and traumatized a child,” Valentina says flatly.
I scoff. “It would have been effective though.”
Valentina lifts her head off my shoulder and glares at me, her eyes dark and her mouth set in a grim line. “Stop it,” she snaps.
“Why?” I shoot back. “I’m just—”
“Shut up, Cillian,” Valentina says firmly. “You need to stop self-flagellating. You could have done this. Should have done that. You act like if you’d just been smarter or faster or more like Connor none of this would have happened.”
Yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying. I open my mouth to argue, but she presses a finger against my lips.
“Excuse me, I’m not done,” she scolds as she turns to face me properly. “A car was waiting for her, Cillian. Shooters. Her apartment was cleaned out—if that even was her actual apartment and not just a bullshit address she gave you.”
My stomach bottoms out. I didn’t even think about that.
Valentina seems to see where my mind is going and she reaches forward, grabbing my chin with her hand so I’m focused on her brown eyes.
“Listen to me,” she says, her cool, minty breath washing over me.
“Her accounts were closed. That doesn’t happen because you weren’t fast enough in one meeting.
This was planned. This was ready to happen before she even walked through that door.
That’s probably why she brought Finn with her. ”
All of it makes sense. Everything Valentina says is probably one hundred percent accurate. But it doesn’t stop the thoughts I’m having. I sigh tiredly.
“Hello? Earth to Cillian. Do you believe me?”
I focus back on my wife’s eyes, the brown with flecks of gold near the pupils. God, they’re the most beautiful eyes. “Yes, I believe you.”
“Good.” Her eyes warm slightly before she glares at me. “Then stop acting like Connor would have done it better.”
“You can’t deny that he would have,” I argue, feeling her nails dig into the soft flesh of the underside of my chin. I wince slightly.
My wife smirks. “Connor could have thrown her across the coffee shop and she still wouldn’t have talked. Then we’d have a mess to clean up and still no name. Claire wasn’t going to talk, Cillian. Not even the KGB could get her.”
I laugh softly at that. “Somehow I doubt that.” My shoulder throbs and I probably should have gone to the hospital, but it’s too late for that now. I’ll get some Tylenol when we get back to the penthouse.
“Here’s what’s bothering me,” I suddenly say. Valentina turns her head toward me.
“How did she know?” I spread my fingers wide on my dirty and dusty pants.
“I can’t wrap my mind around that. How did she know today was the day?
I sounded normal on the phone—you were there.
I said nothing about DNA tests or confrontation.
As far as she knew, she was walking into a coffee shop to talk about money. ”
I shake my head, nearly dazed. “So how does she walk in there with a car already outside and an exit already planned?”
Valentina’s mouth opens before it shuts. She looks just as lost as I do.