Chapter 8 #2
I crowded over her, my arms caging her against the seat. “I always get what I want.”
“Sorry, mari chéri.” She patted one of my hands. With one unexpected tug and twist of my arm, she took the advantage, got to her feet, and slipped past me. “Not today, you’re not. I’m not sure I like you yet.”
She brushed off invisible lint from my sweater, the cloth still moist in patches like her own outfit. When I caught her hand, she chuckled a husky little sound that zipped straight to my cock.
“I don’t like my time wasted.”
“Wasted how? This is a meet and greet. No matter what, I’ll never again sign anything on a first date.”
She tracked the walk of her fingers up my chest, but I still caught a flash of vulnerability in her gaze before she reeled it back in. That look called to me. It was eclectic and intriguing until her shoulders deflated, her smile turned forced, and she put distance between us.
I grunted. “Give me your name at least.”
She called over her shoulder, “Next time, Mr. O’Leary. Don’t worry. I shall be seeing you again.”
She winked at me, and I had this flummoxing urge to lift my hand and wave. In front of my men. Like a damn eejit. Ach, no. I shoved my hands forcefully into my pockets, my fingertips on fire with the need to do something.
I watched her leave, my sweater collar suddenly tight, the fabric prickly. It felt like I’d gone ten rounds in the ring. Fuck if I didn’t want more. That was the single most electrifying conversation of my life, doing absolutely nothing at all.
The space where she’d been lay empty, but her teasing grin, the spark of intelligence in her eyes, and that huffy tone underlining every single one of her words stayed long after the bell trilled and the door clacked shut.
Something about her niggled the back of my mind, leaving me more unsettled than I’d been in months.
I found my brothers in the breakroom with half a crew full of distant cousins and trusted men, Brody in the middle of a poker game—probably counting cards—and Liam arm-wrestling his way to free cash.
The cloud of smoke crammed its way down my throat.
I tapped my fingers twice on the table, the room going silent, and walked to the office.
Firm footsteps shuffled after me as I relaxed into my chair behind the desk and swiveled to face the charcoal walls and the sole painting in the space.
The mystery guest in the bar reminded me of the painting’s wrath-like woman, reaching out with wispy fingers toward the castle in the distance.
She was a survivor. Broken but not beaten down, yet always coming back for more and never giving up.
The door rattled shut. Chairs scratched along the linoleum. I swiveled around to face my two brothers.
“Who do we know in the chemical trade?”
“Chemicals like floor cleaner?” Liam flipped a spare pen off the desk into the air. “Riveting stuff.”
“No, weapons.”
Liam whistled. “That’s not our usual market.”
Brody’s eyebrows dipped as he fixed his gaze on the wall behind my head, likely running through his database of knowledge. He liked to memorize facts with his eidetic memory.
“There was one in Indonesia,” he said after a moment of silence, direct and dry, “recently shut down. Another in China. Quality’s not great but gets the job done. One in Russia but with thief prices. And there’s one more in Europe, not sure where. Has small quantities but novel goods.”
“That’s the one. In Europe. Who runs it?”
Brody rolled up a tuft of his beard, eyes shifting. He shook his head. “The owner calls themselves the Toxic Fiend, but I never found any records, pictures, or voice recordings of them. Details about the contacts change every month, and they always wear masquerade masks.”
A memory flashed up front and center of a dark silver-and-gold mask from the one and only masquerade ball I’d ever attended.
It had been worn by a woman unlike any I’d ever met before or since, with a strength hidden behind an enticing frailty, frocked in a killer dress with a slit to her upper thigh I’d fully taken advantage of.
We never saw each other’s faces. We never exchanged names.
But one night of the most livening conversation and the sexiest fuck I’d ever had made me chase her memory ever since.
That had been a decade ago. In a way, this chemist reminded me of her.
“Is a woman possible?”
“I’d say. Symbol’s a succubus. Traditionally, a succubus represents a woman in an alluring shape to tempt or seduce men with their base desires.”
“Aye, we know, Gloss.” Liam twisted the pen through his fingers, focus taken.
Brody rocked himself. “Don’t call me that. You know I don’t like it when you call me that.”
“That’s why I do it,” Liam said.
Brody’s eyes flitted across the room. With the way he was cradling his fists under his armpits, tension must have been thrumming through his mind. I shot a glare at our younger brother.
When we were teens, Da made us tag along to his business deals, both over and under the counter.
It had been his way of teaching by doing.
Each time, one of us would take point, and we had to prove that we weren’t wet behind the ears, that we deserved our place, so that others feared or respected us, preferably both.
Jeers and insults were the easy part. If they toyed with us or roughed us up a bit, Da didn’t intervene.
He was an adamant believer in no pain, no gain.
Every encounter was meant to hone our fighting instincts yet restrain responses.
“Show ’em nothing” was his motto. No hate, no anger, no pain.
We’d get a beating if we did. If we lost our tempers with his business partners, he sent us to work under them for a week, with no limits on how they handled us.
If we lost him a deal, not only were we forced to work the dangerous, shit jobs on the streets for a month, but the beatings would be twice as bad, and whoever fucked up would be on first rotation for the next deal.
Out of all of us, Da used to push Brody the worst. No matter what any of us told him, he refused to understand that Brody saw and grasped the world differently from us.
Overstimulating him with threats only ever made his reactions that much steeper.
Da finally understood that the day he forced Brody to a deal at the airport with the Lebanese, and I tagged along.
Brody had one of his meltdowns right in the middle of negotiations—screaming, pacing, and kicking at the asphalt.
When the Lebanese pulled their guns on him, he attacked one.
I shot the rest down, before putting the gun to our father’s head, and making him swear that this ritual of his was over.
“Oi.” I wrapped my arms around him tight, then rubbed my hands up and down along his biceps. It usually helped calm him down if he hadn’t disappeared too far into his head. When his breathing calmed, I pulled back. “You good?”
“Chemical agents. Succubus. Aye.” Brody nodded. “I am. Good, I mean.”
I gave Liam a dark look. He knew better than to tease Brody the day after we’d visited Da. He shrugged and tossed peanuts in the air, catching them in his mouth.
“Don’t make me say I’m sorry. I’m not. Best way to desensitize is exposure. He knows I say it with love. Don’t you, deartháir?” Brother.
Brody ignored Liam, staring at a spot on the wall, a frown buried between his brows.
“Why?” he asked. “Why did you ask that? About the woman? Why do you want to know that?”
“Because I think I just met her. The owner. She came to talk business.”
“Here?” Liam straightened in his chair. A peanut bounced off his face and skipped along the floor.
“Aye, here.”
Brody pulled out his phone and scanned through the security footage. It was his way to keep busy and occupied so he could shut out the rest of the world now that he had something specific to focus on.
Liam swiveled his seat around. “You sure it’s her and not…”
I shook my head. She was too young to fit the profile and European-born-and-raised to boot. We’d know more about her once Brody cross-referenced her image with facial recognition through every database available, but I highly doubted we’d find anything linking her to the Love Knot Killer.
The FBI knew five things about LK. The killer was female over forty and likely a flower enthusiast, given her choice of poison was a tea brewed from hellebore and foxglove petals.
She was either a mother or avenging a mother, and most importantly, she had a personal grudge against the O’Leary family.
All her victims had been intimate with either my da, my brothers, or me.
“Did you get a DNA sample?” Brody asked.
“No.” Not the most practical thing to do in a pub.
“You need to get one.”
I rolled my eyes. As if it were that easy.
“Well, tell us then.” Liam stooped over the back of his armchair. “How was this succubus? She tempt even you?”
“She was…” I leaned against the edge of my desk and cocked my head, trying to find the words to describe her. “Unexpected.”