Chapter 2
RONAN
Two months later
The rain falls like bullets on the black umbrellas gathered around Siobhan's grave, each drop hitting with the same finality as the rounds that took her life two days ago.
I stand at the edge of the gravesite, watching them lower my wife's casket into the ground, and I don't know what the fuck I'm supposed to feel.
Grief? For a woman who spent all of the eighteen months we were married making my life miserable at every opportunity? Relief? That would make me a bastard, even by my standards. Rage? That one's easier. That one I can work with.
“Son.”
My father's voice cuts through the sound of rain on canvas. Padraigh O'Malley has never been one for sentiment, but there's something in his voice and weathered face today that almost passes for concern. Almost.
"Fine." The word comes out rougher than I intended, scraped raw by too many cigarettes and not enough sleep over the past forty-eight hours. I quit smoking years ago—my one teenage rebellion, and a failed one at that, since my father never gave a shit if I smoked. “I’m fine.”
"She was a good woman." My father looks heavily down at the grave, and I force myself not to snort in response.
Siobhan Connolly—Siobhan O'Malley for the year and a half that she wore my ring—was many things. Beautiful, certainly. Intelligent. Ruthless, when it served her purposes. But good? That's not a word anyone who knew her would use. Definitely not one I would have used.
"She was pregnant." It's the first time I've said it out loud since the coroner confirmed what we'd suspected. "Twelve weeks."
My father's jaw tightens almost imperceptibly. In our world, an heir isn't just family—it’s legacy, it’s power, it's the promise that what we've built won't die with us. And Rocco De Luca took that away, along with everything else.
He places a hand on my shoulder, and it startles me. I think it’s the first genuine gesture of comfort I've ever received from him, and it feels strange. "We'll make them pay for both."
I nod, watching as they begin to shovel dirt over the mahogany casket.
Siobhan would have hated this—the rain, the hastily thrown together wake, the flowers that don’t follow any theme or color palette, the priest who clearly didn't know her well enough to make his eulogy sound believable.
She would have wanted something grand, something that announced to all of Boston that Siobhan O'Malley had been someone important, someone worthy of remembering.
Instead, we're burying her quickly, quietly, with just enough ceremony to honor her memory and not enough to draw unwanted attention from the feds who are always watching, always waiting for us to slip up. Not enough to make us a target for De Luca, who hasn’t gotten all that he wants yet.
What he wants is me dead, certainly. And Siobhan’s death was the bait to draw me in.
I’m going to take it anyway. Not because I loved her, but because killing him is the best way to both answer the gauntlet he’s thrown down with the violence that’s expected of me, and to avoid the complicated feelings that have been crowding into my head from the moment my wife’s body was brought home to me.
"Ronan."
I turn to see my brother approaching from the side of the crowd, his bespoke suit perfectly tailored to his frame and smooth despite the unexpected flight from Miami.
Tristan looks polished and sophisticated as always, the bright shock of his copper hair dulled by the cloudy weather.
He stops next to me, the appropriate sympathy on his face, though he knows as well as I do that there was no love lost between Siobhan and me.
He has his own territory now, in Miami. Territory that, as the middle son of the family, he should never have inherited. But criminal politics and my father conspired to make a woman and her empire available to him, and he took both with an appetite for power that I’ve always known he had in him.
“Sorry Simone couldn’t make it,” Tristan says apologetically.
“The early stage of pregnancy has been hard on her. The doctor didn’t recommend flying—” He breaks off, seeing the warning expression on my father’s face.
“Sorry,” he adds, and he sounds as if he means it.
As if he realizes that whatever grief I feel isn’t for my wife, but for the child that neither of us even knew existed until they were both already dead.
“It’s fine,” I manage, my voice sounding dull to my ears. I turn to him, clasping him in a quick, hard, brotherly embrace. "Thanks for coming."
"Course I came. She was family." He doesn't sound any more convincing than our father did, but I appreciate the effort. "I was over there with Annie.” He nods toward where our baby sister is standing—not a baby any longer at twenty-two, but she’ll always be our little sister to us.
Ours to protect and to shelter, to keep safe from all the harsher realities of life—which I take very seriously and she hates.
I glance over to see her staring down at the grave, tears on her cheeks.
Siobhan was a bitch to her—one of the many strains on our marriage and the cause of many fights, since I love Annie dearly and didn’t have a single emotion for my wife that wasn’t disdain—but Annie, soft-hearted as she is, is crying for her all the same.
She can be ruthless when it comes to her job—managing the family’s finances—but in every other aspect, she’s gentle as a doe.
She runs the books for the Boston operations, and she has a talent for making money disappear that would impress the shadiest of accountants.
Her skill with numbers is the only reason our father let her go to college, something he declared inappropriate for a woman like her.
But her intelligence and usefulness were undeniable, and he eventually gave in.
“We need to put her under heavy guard,” I say flatly, my jaw tensing at the thought of who else Rocco De Luca could go after that would cut deeply at me—more deeply than the loss of my wife.
I’m surprised he didn’t go after Annie first, honestly, but maybe Siobhan was a warning.
And she made herself a target, too arrogant to follow the rules, too proud to listen when I told her to be more careful and curb her outings in the wake of the beginning threats from the De Luca family.
Annie, at least, is smart enough to know her worth and the danger our world presents.
And, of course, there was more to the story of why Siobhan was caught out away from the estate. More that I should have picked up on, except I didn’t care enough about her to keep as strict an eye on her as I should have. I was glad for space from her, glad for her to make herself scarce.
Now she’s dead. And when my father finds out the rest of the details, what led to her death, there’s going to be hell to pay for me, too.
I grit my teeth, flinching with every strike of dirt against the coffin’s lid.
We stand there in silence until the mourners file away, Annie coming over to give me a gentle hug before retreating with her security detail to go back to the family mansion.
I stop her head of security, Oskar, before they can go too far.
“I want her detail doubled,” I tell him firmly. “Make sure they’re the best men you can get. She doesn’t stir a step anywhere without being surrounded by guards.”
“On it, boss,” he says gruffly, before heading toward the car.
My father, Tristan, and I remain standing at the graveside as the rain comes down harder.
It’s early December, which means it’s fucking freezing out here, the ground a mess of slush and mud, but I feel like I deserve this—this wet cold that sinks down into my bones and makes me feel like I’ll never be warm again.
I didn’t love Siobhan. She didn’t love me. It was an arranged marriage, a fulfillment of duty for both of us. She didn’t like me any more than I liked her. But it was my duty to protect her, not just marry her, and I’ve failed in that.
Not only in protecting her, but also our child.
The shame that washes over me feels colder than the rain or the frigid air possibly could.
“How did this happen?” My father’s rumbling voice cuts through the tension, and I feel Tristan twitch next to me.
I know he’d rather be anywhere else than here with our father—preferably back in sunny Miami, with his drop-dead gorgeous wife, and enjoying the respite of Padraigh being somewhere else, not looking over his shoulder.
But he’s still here, supporting me, and I’m grateful for that.
“De Luca will pay for this,” Tristan bites out, looking at the raw mound of dirt in front of us. “For both of their lives. In blood.”
“Of course he will,” Padraigh says, his voice terse. “An attack on one of us is an attack on all of us. Rocco De Luca crossed a line. But that doesn’t answer my question.” He turns toward me. “How did this happen, son?”
I suck in a breath, feeling the icy air sting my lungs as I try to banish the too-present vision of Siobhan’s body on a cold table in the morgue, waiting for me to identify her—her and two of the three guards she’d taken with her that day, not nearly enough, but now I understand why.
They were her personal security, brought with her into our marriage.
They were the ones she trusted to keep her secrets, to keep their mouths shut.
The third guard, the one who made it back and gave me the news, is dead too, but not from De Luca’s bullet.
I came home from the morgue an hour later and put him on his knees outside of the guard shack, before shooting him in the head in front of the rest of my security.
For keeping secrets from me that might have saved Siobhan’s life, if I’d known.