12. Wolfe
WOLFE
I should be working. I should be focused. But my brain doesn’t care about should. It cares about the fact that Eva’s knuckles brushed against mine in the hallway twenty-two minutes ago, and I haven’t had a complete thought since.
Lochlan set her up at the conference table with access to Adriana’s property data.
She sat down, cracked her knuckles, and dove in like she’d been craving the challenge.
This is the kind of work her brain was built for.
I’m good at breaking into systems. Eva is good at reading what’s inside them.
Different skillset. And right now mine is tied up with Dmitri, so Adriana’s data needs someone who can see the patterns I don’t have time to look for.
She’s cross-referencing Renaldi’s calendar against the property layouts, looking for which building Dmitri is likely to target.
For something we still need to determine.
Her fingers move fast, flying over the keys.
Her spine is straight, shoulders forward, her sharp eyes focused on the screen.
She’s got her hair pulled back and there’s a pen stuck behind her ear that she keeps reaching for and putting back without using.
Gavin walks through the room with a sandwich on a plate and stops behind her chair. “How’s it going?”
“Fine,” she says without looking up.
“You want a sandwich?”
“No.”
“They’re really good. Italian cold cuts on Tony’s sourdough.”
“Who’s Tony?” she asks.
“My brother’s chef. Well, technically, the family’s chef. He makes this thing with prosciutto and—”
“Gavin.” She still doesn’t look up. “I’m working. Not eating.”
“Right. Yeah. Cool.” He takes a bite of his sandwich, backs away, and leans against the wall, still watching her screen. “Is that a security rotation schedule?”
“Yes.”
“For which building?”
“The one on Federal Street.”
“You think that’s the one Dmitri’s probably going to hit?”
Now she looks up. “Yeah. That’s the one.”
“Sick.” He takes another bite. “You’re kind of scary, you know that?” he mumbles through his chewing.
“I’ve been told.”
He grins and wanders out. Eva turns her attention back to the data on her screen. But I catch the tiniest twitch at the corner of her mouth. She liked that. She won’t admit it, but she liked being called scary by a Molloy who has no idea what to do with a woman who isn’t impressed by his last name.
Ronan comes in about twenty minutes later.
He stands behind Eva the way he stands behind everyone.
He hovers close enough to see her screen, far enough to remind you he’s watching.
Eva doesn’t flinch. She doesn’t adjust her posture or her keystrokes.
She just keeps working like the head of a crime family isn’t breathing down her neck.
I respect the hell out of that.
“What have you found?” Ronan asks.
“Three buildings have overlapping vulnerabilities in their security schedules,” she says. “There are gaps in coverage that line up with the dates on Renaldi’s calendar. Two of them are in the Financial District. One’s in Back Bay.”
“Which one is the most likely target?”
“Back Bay. It’s the only one where the security gap coincides with a known meeting between Renaldi and an outside contractor. If Dmitri wanted a window where the building is most exposed, and the one person who’d notice is occupied with something else, that meeting is it.”
Ronan looks at Lochlan. Lochlan nods once.
“When?” Ronan asks.
“Based on the calendar, the gap opens in eight days.”
“Eight days.” Ronan’s jaw tics. He turns to me. “Can we confirm this?”
“Her analysis matches what I’ve already been tracking on my own,” I say. “This seems like his big play.”
“So we have eight days to set a response.”
“Or we let him walk into a trap,” Eva interjects.
Every head whips toward her. Even mine.
“You let him hit the building,” she says, taking the pen out from behind her ear.
She taps it against the table. “But you know he’s coming.
So you control what he finds when he gets there.
Bad intel. Wrong files. A building that looks empty but isn’t.
You give him what he wants, and it blows up in his face. ”
Ronan stares at her.
“Or you just beef up security across the board and he picks a different target we’re not tracking and we’re back to square one,” she adds with a shrug. “Your call.”
Gavin sticks his head back in from the hallway. “Did she just suggest we bait Dmitri into a trap?”
“Yeah,” I say.
“I fucking love her.” He disappears again.
“Gavin,” Ronan calls after him.
“I know, I know. Shut up.”
Ronan looks at me. Then at Eva. Then back at me.
“She stays in the room when we plan this,” he says. That’s damn shocking, mainly because it’s the closest thing to a compliment Ronan has ever given a stranger.
Eva doesn’t react. No nod or smile. But I see her shoulders drop about half an inch, the tension slowly leaving her body.
I notice these things. Everything about her, really. Her posture, her jaw, the pen behind her ear, the way her hair falls over her shoulder, how she twists it when she’s stuck.
Kind of like my thumb tell.
I notice all of these details and my brain catalogs them, files them, and pulls them later when I’m trying to focus on something else.
That’s my big problem. I scrub a hand down the front of my face.
I can’t stop cataloging her.
And I’m not entirely sure I want to acknowledge what it all means.
Lochlan and Adriana take Eva to a side room to go deeper into the property layouts a little while later. Ronan disappears into his office and closes the door. I walk into the kitchen and pour myself a glass of water when Cillian appears in the doorway.
“So no basketball again,” he says with a roll of his eyes. “Is your pretty little hacker friend to blame?”
“Did I—?” I sweep a hand through my hair. Shit. I did miss.
Cillian nods. “Yeah, brah. Second time. But don’t worry. I’ve been practicing, and next time you actually show up, Imma beat your nerdy ass.”
“I won’t hold my breath for that. I could take off half a year and you’d never even come close to beating ‘my nerdy ass.’”
“We’ll see.” Cillian chuckles. “Now tell me what I missed.”
“She suggested baiting Dmitri into a trap.”
“Holy shit,” he says, then lets out a long whistle. “How’d that go over?”
“Ronan said she stays in the room to plan the trap.” I run my finger along the smooth countertop, sliding the boxes so that the edges are lined up.
“Get the fuck out of here,” Cillian says. “That’s basically a marriage proposal from Ronan.”
“Yeah,” I say.
“And how’s she hanging in there with Ronan and Lochlan? She freaked out at all?”
I shake my head. “No evidence of that. She seems…herself.”
“And you like…herself.” Cillian waggles his eyebrows at me.
“She’s helping me out with this Dmitri intel. That’s all,” I say. But as I speak the words, a tightness in my chest strains them.
Mainly because it’s a big fucking lie.
It’s not all.
But since I don’t have a category for these feelings, I’m not ready to talk about them. Even to Cillian.
Tony left sandwiches on the counter for us. I turn away from Cillian, hoping to deflect his attention to the food. I pick one up.
“You’re having a sandwich?” Cillian says. “Are we out of Honey Nut Cheerios?”
“I’m hungry and it looks…interesting.” I examine the sandwich, the crispy crust of the bread, and take a cautious bite.
Sourdough. Prosciutto. Some kind of cheese I don’t recognize that has a sharp, salty bite.
My brain files the texture the same way it’s been filing new food since I started eating at Rosario’s.
Like it’s waking up to something it didn’t know it was missing.
Kind of like what Eva does to my brain.
This is all Eva’s fault. Before her, I ate my Cheerios and didn’t think about it.
Now I notice bread and cheese, and the way garlic smells when it hits a hot pan, and the difference between a good tomato sauce and a great one.
She didn’t do this on purpose. She just exists in a world where food means something, and being near her rewired something in my brain that I didn’t know was disconnected.
I hear her voice from a nearby room. She’s explaining something to Adriana. I can’t make out the words, just the tone. It’s confident, direct, and matter of fact. Just like her.
I turn when footsteps pad along the floor behind us.
Eva stands in the kitchen doorway. Cillian looks at her, then at me, and grins. “Looks like you guys have some heavy stuff to talk about. I’m gonna take off.”
He piles sandwiches on his plate, grabs a beer from the fridge, and walks out of the room.
Eva watches him leave, then turns back to me. “They don’t need me for the next part,” she says. “Lochlan’s running security scenarios now based on what we talked about.”
“Okay.”
She walks in, leans against the counter across from me, and folds her arms. There are about four feet between us, which is both too far and too close at the same time.
We haven’t really been alone since last night in her apartment, since she opened the door and told me to get the fuck out. I don’t count the car ride this morning because she was still pissed as hell, and the only thing we talked about was my brothers.
“You’re eating a sandwich,” she says, pointing at my plate.
“Yeah.” I look down at it as if I’m just as shocked. I kind of am, if I’m being honest. The Cheerios are comfortable and they’re right in the cabinet. “Definitely not Cheerios.”
“That’s new.”
I meet her icy but curious gaze. “Lots of things are new to me lately.”
Our eyes lock. Four feet. My thumb starts tapping against the counter and I let it because stopping it takes effort I don’t have right now.
“You told Ronan to use what I’ve got,” she says. “Back in that early meeting. You shut him down.”
“Yeah.”
“Why?”
“Because he was wasting time interrogating you when he should have been listening to you.”
She shakes her head. “That’s not why.”
So damn perceptive.
Maybe too damn perceptive.
I don’t answer. Because she’s right. That’s not the only reason.
“You also just backed my trap idea without a second thought,” she says.
“It was a good idea.”
“You backed it before you knew it was a good idea. You backed it because I said it.”
Shit. She’s right about that too.
“I’m still angry at you,” she says. “In case that’s unclear.”
“It’s very clear.”
“Good.” She picks up a sandwich from the counter, takes a bite, and lets out a low moan. “Wow. This is really good.”
“Yeah.”
“Don’t tell Sal. He’ll lose his mind if he thinks I’ve enjoyed someone else’s cooking.”
I smile and the knot in my chest loosens. Not a lot. Just enough that I can breathe without thinking about breathing.
“Your brother’s scared of you,” she says.
“Which one?”
She cocks her head to the side and takes another bite before answering.
“Actually, all of them. In different ways. Ronan’s scared of what you know.
Lochlan’s scared of what you’ll do with it.
Gavin’s not scared of anything, but he respects you, which I’m thinking for Gavin is the same thing.
And Cillian...” She trails off, a smile lifting her lips.
“What about Cillian?”
“Cillian loves you. That’s different from the others. He actually just loves you.” She shrugs. “I can read a room really well.”
My throat does the thing where it tightens so much, I can barely squeeze out a breath.
“You can read a room,” I say. “But you can’t read me.”
“I’m working on it.” She puts the sandwich down, grabs a napkin, and dabs her mouth. “You’re harder than most.”
“So I’ve been told.”
“Not hard like complicated. Hard like... you don’t give things away. Your face doesn’t move the way other people’s faces move. So I have to read you differently. Your hands. Your shoulders. That thing your thumb does.”
She points at my thumb, which is still tapping against the counter.
“You’re stuck on something right now,” she says.
“Yeah.”
“What?”
I look at her. Standing in my family’s kitchen, eating a sandwich, reading me like I’m a system she’s learning to crack. She knows who I am now. She knows what my family does. She watched me defy Ronan and back her play without hesitating.
She’s still angry. But she’s still here.
“You stayed,” I say.
“Yeah.”
“You know who I am and what my family is, and you still stayed.”
“I told you why.”
“You told me it was because of Sal and Dmitri. That’s why you came to the meeting.” I hold her gaze. “That’s not why you’re standing in my kitchen right now.”
She stares at me, her jaw tightening. The pen behind her ear shifts when she clenches.
“Don’t push it, Wolfe,” she says in a quiet voice.
“I’m not pushing. I’m just noticing.”
“Well, stop noticing.”
“I can’t.” That comes out before I can swallow it back. “I’ve tried. Really hard. But I can’t stop noticing you. It’s a problem I haven’t figured out how to solve yet.”
She holds my gaze for three seconds. I count them. Her eyes flicker through things that I can’t name. Then she picks up her sandwich and heads out of the kitchen.
“Eva.”
She stops in the doorway.
“For what it’s worth,” I say, “the trap idea was really good.”
“I know it was.” She doesn’t turn around. “That’s not the compliment you think it is. You’re just stating a fact.”
“That’s how I give compliments.”
“I know.” She pauses. “It’s growing on me.”
Then she leaves for real. And I’m left standing in my family’s kitchen with a half-eaten sandwich, and a thumb that won’t stop tapping, and a chest that’s doing the knotting thing again.
She’s in my family’s house. She held her own with Ronan. She read my brothers in twenty minutes and got every single thing right. She suggested an idea that made my oldest brother shut up and listen when he doesn’t do that for anyone.
“It’s growing on me.”
I don’t know what to do with that.
I finish the sandwich, go back to work, and try not to think about the fact that Eva Moreno just told me she’s learning to read me, and instead of being completely flipped out by that, it’s the best thing anyone’s said to me in years.