2. Lorcan
Lorcan
Thirty Minutes Earlier
If I could, I would have this meeting on fucking Zoom or something.
I wouldn’t be here at all.
I lean against the railing of the balcony in the executive suite, watching the Atlantic churn. I hate this weather. It’s unpredictable. In Vegas, the heat is honest. It wants to kill you, and it tells you so to your face. Here, you don’t know what you’re getting.
“Sir.”
I don’t turn around. I knew the voice. Kieran. He’s been with the Syndicate since he was eighteen, and he’s one of the few men I trust to watch my back when I’m three thousand miles away from the Mojave.
“The O’Sheas are late,” I say in a monotone voice. “It’s been twenty minutes. I don’t like being the one waiting, Kieran.”
“Traffic on the coast road, apparently,” Kieran mutters, stepping up beside me, his hands folded in front of his suit. “But they’re confirmed. Five minutes out. Neutral ground, just like you wanted. They won't bring more than three men inside.”
I grunt. The meeting is a formality, really.
A ‘handshake’ to ensure the transition of the Dublin-to-Vegas pipeline remains smooth.
I moved the core of the operation to Nevada years ago—displacement is the best form of security.
If your enemies have to buy a plane ticket to find you, they usually just stay home.
“Where’s Maeve?” I ask.
“The little mistress is in the garden. She wanted to look for fairies or some such things,” Kieran says, his tone softening just a fraction.
Everyone in the organization has a soft spot for my daughter and why not?
The little girl is filled with happiness and sunshine, things my men and I don’t see much of.
“Check on her. Now. I don’t want my daughter anywhere near the lobby when the O’Sheas arrive. They’re snakes, even for Irishmen.”
Kieran nods and retreats into the room. I stay on the balcony for a moment longer, lighting a cigarette. The smoke is immediately snatched away by the wind and I grunt in annoyance.
This meeting better be worth coming here or there’ll be hell to raise.
I am thirty-eight years old, and most days, I feel a hundred. I’ve spent two decades building a kingdom out of blood and dirt, and the only thing I have to show for it is a massive bank account and a five-year-old girl I’d use my life to protect.
Surprise is a luxury I haven’t been able to afford since the night Elara’s blood flowed on my floor and dripped down my hands. Since then, I’ve lived only by the numbers. Logic. Protocol.
Then Kieran’s voice comes over the comms in my ear, and the logic shatters immediately.
“Boss! We’ve got a problem. M-Maeve… she wandered off!”
Fuck… no.
I’m moving before he finishes the sentence. I ignore the elevator and hit the stairs, my boots thudding against the carpet as my hand already reaches for the holster at the small of my back.
“How?” I snarl into the mic.
“Since the minder fell ill, she’s been running amok. I’ve searched, but she’s not in the garden. We’re tracking the GPS on her coat now…. We found her! She’s on the cliff path!”
The cliff path. The one with the crumbling edges and the two-hundred-foot drop.
By the time I burst out of the resort’s side entrance, I’m no longer in business mode. I don’t care about the O’Sheas. I don’t care about the meeting. I just need to find my daughter right now.
I see the flash of yellow first. Maeve’s raincoat.
She isn’t alone.
There’s a woman with her. She’s crouched in the grass, her back to me. Even from this distance, I can see she’s a mess. She’s wearing a silk dress that’s torn at the hem, and her hair is a wild, dark nest of curls being whipped about by the wind.
What the fuck?
I’m thinking about snapping my gun to her head and asking what the fuck she’s doing with my daughter, but I force myself to slow my pace as I approach, signaling my two guards to hang back.
My heart is still beating hard, a rare, uncomfortable sensation that makes me feel things I really don’t need right now.
I reach them just as the girl begins to talk to my daughter.
“The flower isn’t worth falling into the ocean for,” the girl says. Her voice is surprisingly steady, despite the way her hands are trembling.
Maeve finally sees me, and it takes all I have in me not to turn into a caveman and snatch my daughter from this stranger.
“Dada!!” My daughter grins, and finally, I can’t take it anymore, so I scoop Maeve up. The weight of her in my arms usually calms me, but right now, it just heightens the rage vibrating in my marrow. My eyes are locked on the stranger.
I look her over. She’s young. Early twenties. She has a pretty dress on, now stained with mud. She looks like she crawled out of a shipwreck and decided to go to a gala.
“Maeve,” I say, my voice low and dangerous. I’m angry—mostly at myself, but it’s easier to aim it at her. “What did I tell you about running off alone?”
“Sorry, Daddy,” she whispers into my neck, her small hands clutching my coat.
I turn my gaze to the girl. I expect her to be scared. Most people are when I look at them like this. I have ANGER written all over my face, too many scars, too much ink peeking out from my collar, eyes that have seen too many things die.
But this girl? She doesn’t even flinch.
She stands up, and I realize she’s tiny. Her head barely reaches my chest. But she stands with her shoulders back, her jaw set in a way that is almost… defiant. Oh?
“You,” I say. “Who are you?”
I mean it to be a dismissal. A 'get out of my way before I decide you’re a witness' kind of word.
She crosses her arms. Her dress is ruined, her knees are covered in dirt, and she looks like she’s been through a war. But she doesn’t move. She doesn’t look away.
“Me?!” she snaps.
I blink. It’s the first time in years someone has snapped at me. My men behind me stiffen, the sound of their leather holsters creaking in the silence.
“You have a lot of nerve,” she continues, and her voice is rising now, fueled by what looks like pure, unadulterated indignation. “Actually, no. You don’t have nerve. You have a massive, glaring lack of common sense.”
I shift Maeve to my other hip, stunned into a rare, heavy silence. “Excuse me?”
“You heard me,” she says, stepping closer.
She smells like rain and some kind of floral perfume that’s fading fast. “You’re walking around with your suit and your expensive watch and your ‘do-not-touch-me’ attitude, and you can’t even keep an eye on a five-year-old on your own child?
Do you have any idea how close she was to falling? Do you not care about your daughter?!”
“I have people for that,” I say, the words coming out more defensively than I intend, and I grit my teeth in annoyance.
“Oh, you have ‘people’?” She lets out a sharp, hysterical laugh that contains zero humor.
“Well, your ‘people’ suck at their jobs. And you suck at yours. You don’t get to outsource parenting, especially not when there’s a two-hundred-foot drop involved.
What were you doing while she was trying to pick a weed on a crumbling ledge? ”
She pokes a finger toward my chest. She doesn’t touch me, which is good, because my men might have actually reacted, but the gesture is enough to make my pulse jump.
“You should be ashamed of yourself,” she says, her eyes flashing. They’re a bright, piercing brown, like whiskey held up to the light. “She’s a child, not a briefcase you can just leave in the lobby. If I hadn’t been here, you’d be looking for a body, not a daughter.”
I stare at her.
My brain is trying to process several things at once.
First, she’s fucking beautiful. Even covered in mud and wind-whipped, she’s the most arresting thing I’ve ever seen.
Her skin is like cream, flushed pink from the cold, and her hair is a chaotic halo of dark ringlets.
The teal silk of her dress is damp, clinging to the curve of a high, firm chest and the swell of hips that look like they were designed for a man to sink into.
Her face is all sharp angles and soft edges—a straight, stubborn nose and a mouth that looks like it was made for sinning.
Second, this girl is currently shredding the ruthless head of the Irish Syndicate on a public path. And third, that I don’t want to kill her.
Usually, when someone talks to me like this, they die in the next minute.
But looking at her, this messy, vibrant, furious creature in her ruined silk, I just feel…
fascinated. It’s like watching a small bird try to take down a hawk.
She’s completely unaware that I could have her disappear before the sun sets, and that lack of awareness is the most refreshing thing I’ve encountered in a decade.
“Are you finished?” I ask. My voice is quieter now. More controlled.
“No, I’m not finished,” she scoffs incredulously, though she seems to be losing some of her steam as the adrenaline starts to dip.
Her lower lip wobbles for a split second before she bites it hard.
“But I have better things to do than explain basic human decency to a man who clearly thinks his time is more valuable than his kid’s life.
Take her. Go back to whatever it is people like you do.
Buy her a toy so you don't have to talk to her.”
She turns on her heel, her ruined dress swirling around her legs, and starts walking back toward the resort.
I stand there for a long beat, the wind whipping my hair across my face.
“Sir?” Kieran asks, stepping forward cautiously. “Do you want us to…?”
“No,” I say, cutting him off. I watch her go. She has a slight limp, probably from the slide on the grass. She looks exhausted.
“Get the O’Sheas to the conference room,” I say, finally turning back toward the hotel. “Tell them I’ll be there in ten minutes. And Kieran?”
“Yes, boss?”
“Find out which room she’s in, get her name. I want to know everything about her. All of it.”
The meeting with the O’Sheas is a total wash.
Not because of them—they’re as boring and predictable as I expected—but because I can’t focus.
Every time Liam O’Shea talks about the percentage of the take from the docks, I see a flash of green silk.
Every time I look at the maps on the table, I think about the way her eyes looked when she called me a failure.
I’m a man of systems. I like things in boxes. I found out her name is Atara Ross. She’s a mess of contradictions. A graduate. A girl in a fancy dress who wasn’t afraid to get her knees dirty to save a stranger.
“Lorcan?” Liam says, leaning forward, his brow furrowed. “You with us, man? We’re talking about the Vegas distribution. You said you wanted to increase the flow through the southern hubs.”
I look at him. Liam is sixty, with a face like a dried-out piece of leather. He’s been in the game long enough to know when something is off. He’s looking at me with curiosity and concern that makes me want to punch him.
“The southern hubs are fine,” I say, standing up abruptly. The chair screeches against the floor. I can’t do this. Not right now. “Kieran has the contracts. Sign them or don’t. I’m done for the day.”
“You’re leaving?” Liam blurted out. “We’re halfway through the negotiations.”
“The negotiations are finished when I say they are,” I say, not even looking back as I walk toward the door. “My men will see you out.”
I go straight to my suite. Maeve is there, sitting on the sofa with a new coloring book.
“Daddy?” Maeve asks, looking up. “Is the lady okay? She looked tired and messy.”
“She’s fine, Maeve,” I say, walking over to ruffle her hair. I feel a strange tightness in my chest when I look at her. The girl was right. I am a category of failure. “She just had a long day.”
“She was like superwoman,” Maeve says, turning back to her book. “She ran really fast.”
I retreat to my office and close the door. I sit at the desk and open the digital file Kieran already uploaded to my tablet.
Atara Ross. 23. Born in New York. Graduated today, Magna Cum Laude. Degree in Finance. No criminal record. No ties to any known organizations.
She’s a civilian. A ‘normal’ person. The kind of person I usually spend my life avoiding because they’re soft. They break too easily. They don't understand the rules of the world I live in.
But she hadn’t looked soft on the cliff. She’d looked like she was made of steel.
I lean back in my chair, staring at her graduation photo. She’s smiling in it, she looks happy. Untouched.
I pick up my phone. “Kieran. What’s she doing?”
“She… Miss Ross is in the bar, sir. Or she was. She just ordered a double whiskey and went out to the terrace. She looks… well, she looks like she’s crying, boss.”
“Send a bottle of the best Irish whiskey we have to her room,” I say, and then pause. No. That’s too easy. That’s what a man like me does. I buy my way out of things.
I tap my fingers on the desk. I shouldn’t do this. I should stay in my suite, finish my work, and fly back to Vegas tomorrow.
“Boss?” Kieran prompts.
“Invite her to breakfast tomorrow,” I say. My heart does a weird, heavy thud. “In the private dining room. Tell her… tell her it’s a thank you for saving my daughter. And tell her if she doesn’t show up, I’ll assume she’s afraid of me.”
“She didn't seem afraid of you on the cliff, sir.”
“Shut up, Kieran,” I mutter and hang up.
I spend the rest of the night pacing the floor of my suite. I try to read. I try to watch the news. I try to sleep.
But all I see is that teal silk. All I hear is her voice telling me I suck at my job.
I’ve spent my whole life around people who say ‘yes’ to me. People who bow their heads. People who are terrified of the shadow I cast.
And then Atara Ross comes along and treats me like a negligent parent who can’t read a fucking map.
I stand by the window, watching the rain start to fall again. Tomorrow, I’ll see her. I’ll be the 'proper' Lorcan. Cold. Controlled. I’ll thank her, maybe give her a reward she can’t refuse, and that will be it. Box closed.
But as I look at the reflection of my own eyes in the glass, I know I’m lying.
I don’t want to close the box. I want to see if I can make her eyes look at me like that again, with that fire, that heat, that utter lack of fear.
I want to see if I can break her and see what’s underneath.
“May the gods fucking help me,” I whisper to the empty room.
I go to bed, but I don’t sleep. I just wait for the sun to come up over the Atlantic, so I can see the girl in the teal dress again.
I don’t even know if she’ll come. I don’t know if she’ll tell me to go to hell.
But for the first time in ten years, I feel a spark of something that isn’t rage or duty.
It’s curiosity.
And in my world, curiosity is the most dangerous thing of all.