35. Wolfe
WOLFE
I stare down at my phone screen, my gut knotting tighter with each word I read.
House. Eight o’clock. Tonight.
That’s it. No context. When Ronan sends a text that short, it means something happened that he doesn’t trust to say over a phone screen.
I text back that I’ll be there and pour a second cup of coffee while Eva showers.
We left the cabin and moved her into the apartment I own in Back Bay about six weeks ago.
I gave her one of the empty bedrooms to use as her office so she can have all of her computing equipment in one space.
But we still end up tooling around on our laptops next to one another in my office.
Shoulders brushing, both of us finding the same comfort in each other as we work.
She comes out of the bathroom in my shirt, her dark hair wet and snaking down her back. She takes the cup of coffee I hand her.
“What happened?” she asks, her eyes narrowing.
“Ronan called a meeting. Tonight.”
“About Viktor?”
“He didn’t say. But it’s always about Viktor these days.”
She leans against the counter and takes a sip of the steaming liquid. “Be careful.”
“It’s a meeting at the house, not a raid.”
“With the Molloys, what’s the difference?” she scoffs.
She’s not wrong.
I get to the house at eight. Cillian is already in the dining room spinning a pen between his fingers. Gavin is next to him working through a plate of whatever Tony left in the fridge. Lochlan sits to the right of Ronan’s chair, which is empty.
Interesting. He’s usually the one waiting for us.
I sit down and Lochlan catches my eye. He gives me a look that says he already knows what this is about. Of course he does. If Viktor reached out through Adriana, Lochlan heard about it the second his wife did.
“I’m guessing you already know,” I say to him.
“Adriana told me this morning,” Lochlan confirms. “Viktor wants a sit-down. He’s calling it a realignment.”
“Realignment of what?” Cillian asks. “We already drew the lines. The whole arrangement Adriana brokered months ago was supposed to settle any territory issues between the three families after that contract marriage fiasco.” He winks at Lochlan because that’s the kind of pain in the ass he is.
“Hey, easy with the fiasco bullshit,” Lochlan warns, shooting him a glare.
“Sorry,” Cillian says in a tone that tells us he’s not the least bit sorry. “I know how sensitive you get.” He waggles his eyebrows at Lochlan to taunt him, and I think there’s a solid chance Loch might throttle him when Ronan walks into the room.
“That arrangement was based on a balance of power,” Ronan says, dropping into his chair at the head of the table. “The balance just shifted.”
“Because of Dmitri,” I say.
“Because of what Dmitri knows.” Ronan leans forward, his fingers steepled.
“When Eva was working for Dmitri, she gave him three months of intelligence on both families. Finances, operational details, personnel, weak points. Dmitri had all of it. And when we took him down, we assumed Viktor got the full debrief.”
“But we don’t actually know that,” Lochlan says. “We assumed Dmitri reported everything back because we assumed he was Viktor’s probe. But if Dmitri was holding back intel to protect his own position, Viktor might not have the full picture.”
“Which means Dmitri is sitting on a pile of intelligence about all three families,” I say. “And he’s got no money, no protection, and no way back into Viktor’s circle.”
“So what does a desperate guy with nothing left to lose do when the only valuable thing he has is information?” Cillian says, his pen going still between his fingers.
“He sells it,” Gavin says. Everyone looks at him and he stops eating. “What? It’s obvious. The guy is broke and burned. Some third party is going to pay good money for what he knows about us and the DiMichelis and probably the Kozlovs too.”
Fuuuuuck. G just nailed it.
“If Dmitri sells that intel to an outside organization,” Ronan says, “all three families are exposed. Us, the DiMichelis, and the Kozlovs, because Dmitri knows his uncle’s operation from the inside.
Viktor might be reaching out because he senses the same threat.
Or he might not even realize that Dmitri held anything back; although, that would make him a fucking idiot if he knows his nephew at all. ”
“Either way,” Lochlan says, “the biggest danger right now isn’t Viktor or his plans to take over the city, which we already know he’s still hanging onto. It’s Dmitri holed up in some fucking godforsaken place with enough information to burn every power player in the city.”
“A man with nothing and everything to sell,” I say.
Ronan nods. “Adriana and I will take the meeting with Viktor. Lochlan, you’ll be there, too, since Adriana is already involved. We ‘ll go in, listen, and give away nothing until we understand what Viktor knows and what he doesn’t. We have to be really careful about how we handle this.
“And there’s something else,” Lochlan says, looking around the table. “Viktor’s people made a comment to Adriana. Something about unresolved debts. The ‘sins of the father’ are the exact words they used.”
Eamon. Our double-crossing scumbag father. Nobody says his name in this house anymore, but his shadow still falls across every room.
“He’s holding that over us,” Cillian says, his jaw going hard.
“He’s reminding us it’s there,” Ronan says. “Whether he plays it depends on how the meeting goes.”
“So Viktor has a grudge, Dmitri has a hard drive full of secrets he can sell to the highest bidder, and some third party we don’t know about could be shopping for it right now,” Gavin summarizes. “Fucking great. Love that for us.”
“Wolfe, I need you deep in Dmitri’s digital trail,” Ronan says. “If he’s reaching out to buyers, there’s a trace somewhere. Find it.”
“On it,” I say.
“Gavin, you’re on physical tracking. If Dmitri surfaces anywhere, I hear about it first. Don’t try to beat anything out of him. Just get me a location.”
“Done,” Gavin says, a smirk on his lips. “But it’d be tempting to beat the hell outta him. Just saying.”
“Cillian, keep your ears open everywhere. People talk, and you’re the one in this family who can get them drunk and loose-lipped.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment.”
“Take it however you want. Just bring me something useful,” Ronan says.
He stands up and pushes his chair away from the table. “We’ll talk again after the Viktor meeting. Nobody moves on anything alone. We do this as a team.”
The meeting breaks up. Gavin and Cillian shove each other through the doorway. Lochlan separates them with a look before someone knocks over a lamp.
I stay seated.
Ronan sees it. He always does. He closes the door after the others leave and sits back down across from me.
“Something on your mind?” he asks.
“I need to talk to you about Eva.”
“I figured.”
“Not about what she knows or what she represents to the family. About what she is to me.”
We’ve been avoiding this for six weeks. Eva moved into my apartment and Ronan didn’t say a word about it.
No arguments. No ultimatums. Just a cold silence between us that we both pretended wasn’t there.
But tonight, sitting in this room with Viktor closing in and the stakes getting higher, I’m done pretending.
He folds his hands on the table and waits.
I shift under his piercing stare, gritting my teeth. “She’s permanent, Ronan. I need you to know that. Not temporary. Not conditional. Not someone I’m going to walk away from when things get complicated. She’s my future, and I need to know that you’re okay with that.”
“You’re asking my permission?” He lifts an eyebrow.
I shake my head. “I’m just telling you how it is. But I’d rather have you with me on it than against me.”
His jaw works. He looks at the table for a long time, then drums his fingertips on the surface.
“You treat everyone who isn’t blood as a threat,” I say. “Adriana. Eva. Anyone who gets close to this family. And I understand why. Dad beat that into us. He taught us that letting people in is how you lose control.” My chest tightens because I know that better than anyone.
“He wasn’t entirely wrong.”
“He wasn’t entirely right either. Lochlan married someone outside this family, and it made us stronger.
Eva mapped the operation that saved us. Every move we’re making right now against Viktor is built on intelligence she gathered.
” I hold his gaze. “These women aren’t threats.
They’re the reason we’re still standing. ”
He’s quiet for a while. Then he says, “You sound different when you talk about her.”
“Different how?”
“Like someone who figured out what matters.” He looks up, his eyes not stony like they normally are.
When he looks at me, there’s something else flickering in the depths, something that looks like disappointment.
Fuck me, Ronan does have a shred of humanity somewhere in there after all.
“Dad never figured that out. He believed loyalty was about control instead of choice.” Another second passes. “I don’t want to make his mistakes.”
“Then don’t.”
He nods, stands up, and walks around the table. Then he puts his hand on my good shoulder and gives it a squeeze. “She’s family,” he says. “I’ll treat her that way.”
“That’s all I’m asking.”
“Your shoulder still tight?” he asks.
“I got shot two months ago,” I say. “What do you think?”
“I think the medic gave you exercises that you’re not doing.”
“Cillian told you?” I roll my eyes. “Can’t keep that guy’s trap shut for shit.”
“It’s part of his charm,” Ronan says, the corner of his mouth twitching. A half-second later, his lips are back to their tight line. “Wolfe.”
“Yeah.”
“If she ever does anything to put this family at risk, I’m not going to look the other way.”
“She won’t.”
He holds my gaze and nods. Then he walks out of the room.
I sit at the table for another minute. The house is quiet. Not the old kind of quiet that felt like a held breath because Dad was on one of his ragers. It’s a comfortable quiet. I sit there for a few minutes, enjoying it.
A little while later, I get into my car and drive home. Eva is on the couch with her laptop and a glass of wine, her feet tucked under her.
“How’d it go?” she asks, looking up from the keyboard though her fingers never stop moving.
“Viktor is making noise. Dmitri is a bigger problem than we thought. And Ronan and I talked.”
She stops typing. “About me?”
“About us.”
“And?”
“He said you’re family.”
She holds my gaze for a beat. “That’s honestly terrifying.”
“Welcome to the Molloys.”
“God help me.” She goes back to her screen. “Sal texted. Fourteen times. Saturday’s menu is apparently a matter of life and death.”
I sit next to her on the couch. She shifts her legs across my lap without looking up. It’s automatic. Like her body already knows where it fits next to mine.
“He’s nervous about meeting your brothers,” she says. “Now that he knows who they really are.”
“My brothers should be nervous about meeting him.”
She shrugs. “Well, he’s going to interrogate every single one of them.
And I’ve already been working on the seating arrangement.
Gavin will sit at the far end because he’s the wildcard and needs to be contained.
Cillian will be next to Sal because they’re the most likely to hit it off.
Ronan sits where Ronan always sits, at the head. ”
I grin. She didn’t ask his permission about that. She just put him there because she already figured out what took me twenty-four years to learn. Ronan leads. That’s not going to change. The best you can do is make sure he’s leading us all in the right direction.
I look at her, sitting on my couch in my apartment with her laptop and her wine and her feet in my lap and the future mapped out in a seating chart on her phone.
She’s here. And my brain has finally stopped running scenarios for a world where she isn’t.
That’s the only fact I need.