2. Wolfe
WOLFE
Cillian thinks he can guard me from the left. He’s been wrong about that for three years, but he keeps trying, which I’d find kind of lovable if he weren’t currently standing between me and my next shot.
I fake right, wait for him to come after me, then cut the other way and make the jump shot. The ball drops clean through the net, and the swish it makes is one of my favorite sounds in the world, right up there with a quiet room after everyone’s gone.
“That’s eight,” I say.
“Bullshit. It’s only seven. The one off the backboard didn’t count.”
“What the hell are you talking about? The ball went in the basket. That is literally the only criteria.”
“It went in ugly,” he says with a shrug, dribbling the ball.
I push back my hair. “Show me where in the rulebook ‘ugly’ is a disqualifier and I’ll give you the point back.”
He throws the ball at me, hard, which is how I know the score is pissing him off.
We always play to eleven on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
He’s won maybe six times total in the three years we’ve been doing it.
But he keeps showing up, and that’s one of my favorite things about my older brother.
He doesn’t need to win to think something’s worth his time.
Most people aren’t like that. Most people quit when the math stops working in their favor.
He drives hard down the court, and I let him edge past me because I already know how this ends. He pulls up, shoots, and misses left. I’m already standing where the ball lands because he misses left about seventy percent of the time, something I figured out a long time ago.
“Stop doing that,” he snaps.
“I’ll stop when you stop making it so easy.”
“You fucking suck, Wolfe.” He wipes his face with his shirt, grinning because he’s annoyed about the fact that I pummel his ass into the ground more often than not when we play.
Cillian always grins when he’s annoyed and grimaces when he’s happy.
It took me years to crack that backward-assed code.
But knowing him as well as I do makes it easy to understand what’s happening beneath the surface.
With most other people, even my brothers, it’s hard for me to get what they really mean when they say or do things a certain way.
It’s cold out here. March doesn’t care about your outdoor plans, but I like it. My head works better when the rest of me is uncomfortable. I’ve never really understood why, and I’ve stopped trying to.
I sink my ninth shot and Cillian catches the ball before it bounces on the court.
“Ronan wants us inside in ten. The ghost stuff,” he says, reading something on his phone.
“Yeah, I know.”
He lifts an eyebrow. “You know about the meeting, or you know about the ghost stuff?”
I shrug. “Both.”
He gives me the look. The one that says I’m being a pain in the ass on purpose, which is half true. I’m not trying to be a pain in the ass.
“Just try to be helpful in there. Give him what he wants,” he says, and what he really means is don’t piss Ronan off.
“I’m always helpful.”
“You’re helpful when you feel like it, which isn’t the same thing, and you know it.”
I sink my tenth shot instead of answering.
“Fuck,” he mutters, shaking his head as he stalks toward the house. I follow with the ball tucked under my arm. I always carry it in since he always forgets to grab it. It’s one of those patterns that I find comfortable instead of annoying.
There aren’t many of those in my life, so I’ll take this one as a win too.
A couple of years ago, our family was completely fractured, and our father was the main cause of it. But you’d never know it by walking into this room right now. We actually look like a functional unit. Kind of.
Ronan was Dad’s loyal soldier for a long time, and even though he doesn’t want anything to do with his toxic legacy, he stepped into the role as boss when Dad disappeared without a trace.
Nobody fought him on it, not because we agreed that it should be him, but because fighting Ronan is like standing in front of a wall and asking it to move.
You can do it, but the wall doesn’t care what you think.
I thought he’d thaw out a little bit after Dad took off.
He patched things up with Lochlan and started to show up more for the rest of us.
But you could still freeze ice on his ass.
He sits at the head of the table, grunts greetings, doesn’t make small talk.
He can be a real prick, and that’s his MO on a good day.
“The intrusions,” he says with a pointed look at me.
“We know someone’s poking around our and the DiMichelis’ systems. Adriana’s security team flagged another hit last week.
And we’ve been tracking the ones to ours.
” Ronan’s jaw twitches from clenching it so hard. “So, the ghost. Where are we, Wolfe?”
Everyone calls them the ghost now. That started as my word and I didn’t give anyone permission to use it, but that battle’s long lost.
Gavin spins a pen between his fingers the way he always does during these meetings when his ass isn’t the one on the chopping block.
Lochlan’s on speakerphone from his office because Adriana has a meeting at her consulting company this morning and he doesn’t like being too far from her, just in case.
That’s a math problem I’ve tried and failed to understand since twenty minutes versus forty makes no difference in an actual emergency.
“I’m closer than I was last week,” I say.
Ronan’s brows knit together. “I need more than that.”
“I’ve got a location. Looks like this person is trying to stay off the grid, based on what I can tell. Whoever it is, they’re freelancing. And I don’t think they’re doing it by choice.”
Gavin’s pen stops spinning and he sits straight up in his chair. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
I turn to look at him. “It means someone’s pulling the strings in the background. The ghost is only the one taking the orders. I’m still working out who might be behind the whole operation and why they’re trying to access our data.”
That’s as much as I’m going to give them right now.
Almost a year and a half ago, I started tracking some outside intrusions into our systems. They were small-scale, though.
Nothing urgent that we needed to act on.
I let my brothers know I was watching. And then they suddenly stopped.
Nobody tried to breach our systems again until recently.
About three months ago, I picked up on some new activity, which I reported to my brothers.
But I didn’t tell them I’ve traced this new ghost’s work back to networks that lead to the Kozlov Bratva.
After we negotiated a way to keep peace between all of our families not too long ago, I don’t believe this is the work of Viktor, the pakhan.
I’m pretty sure the person pulling the strings is Dmitri Kozlov, Viktor’s nephew, who’s running his own thing separate from his family.
He’s got his ass in a twist because he wanted a power position, but with the way we settled things between the families, there wasn’t room.
But if I say that name in this room, Ronan will call Viktor, confront him about Dmitri, and then I lose the ghost and my only thread to understanding Dmitri’s endgame. I need to see the full picture before I blow it up.
Ronan’s face stays stoic, like always, as he processes.
“So let’s just go get them,” Gavin says, because for Gavin, most solutions involve showing up and beating the hell out of someone until the problem resolves itself.
“No,” I say.
Cillian and Gavin exchange a look and then glance at Ronan, who is glaring at me. He doesn’t like to hear the word no. Ever. So I explain before he explodes, which is not a far-off reaction.
“Grabbing a coerced freelancer gives us a scared person in a room,” I say. “Watching them gets us whoever’s behind this.”
Ronan stares at me long enough that Gavin starts spinning his pen again. Then he says, “How long do you need to find the person giving the orders?”
“A week.”
“Five days,” he says through clenched teeth.
Then he moves on to the next topic, which Lochlan speaks to.
Something about security, since that’s Lochlan’s specialty.
Under the table, Cillian knocks his leg against mine once.
He’s been doing that since we were kids.
It means nice job without having to say it.
It’s a move I wouldn’t recognize from anyone else, but I’ve had years to learn Cillian’s language, and it was time well spent, in my opinion.
It’s nice that I don’t have to struggle to understand at least one person in my family.
The meeting ends pretty quickly after talk of the ghost.
I didn’t mention Eva Moreno or my suspicions about Dmitri Kozlov, even though both were gnawing at my brain the whole time. There are too many dots that still need to be connected, and my brothers don’t take time to do that. They prefer to blow up the dots first, ask questions never.
So far, I’ve collected Eva’s name, her background, her arrest record, her federal conviction, her current location, and a screenshot from a service corridor that I’ve looked at more times than I can explain away.
I know she’s the ghost. I know she’s being coerced by Dmitri, and I know he’s wasting her talents with the bullshit work he’s given her.
I go home to my private office and sink into a chair I spent too much money on, turning over the details in my mind.
Eva left the gap in her security open. I’ve been thinking about that since four in the morning. I know she found my entry point because I was watching when she did. She traced my path through her system, saw exactly how I got in, and didn’t close it.
That’s not carelessness. That’s someone as good as me deciding to leave the door unlocked, and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about what that means.