Chapter 11
CALLEN
I’VE SAT AT this table a hundred times. Big black laminate-wood slab, the unnecessary ergonomic chairs, whiteboards on one wall and corkboards on the other, the whole over-lit conference room buried in the heart of the compound where we plan the work and divide the jobs and, once, where I watched a whistleblower named Eden force a group of hardened killers into a corporate icebreaker game.
That day, this conference room felt like a threshold. Like a welcome. Eden came in scared and left as family.
Tonight the same room feels like a tribunal.
Same table. Same chairs. But the air’s gone wrong, tight and low, and the woman sitting at the far end with her sister’s hand locked around her wrist isn’t being welcomed.
She’s being assessed. And I’m sitting three seats down pretending I’ve never seen her naked on my coffee table, pretending my whole chest isn’t caving in, pretending the words she’s Cricket’s sister have stopped detonating in my skull, which they have not, and won’t, possibly ever.
Sylvie. Saoirse. Whoever she is tonight.
She’s still in the red dress. It’s obscene in this fluorescent light, glamour under interrogation lamps, and she’s holding herself with the flat stillness of a professional who knows she’s outnumbered in a room full of killers and has decided not to show it.
I know that stillness. I’ve been watching it fool people for weeks.
It isn’t fooling me anymore, and that’s the worst part—I finally understand what I was looking at, and it’s too late to un-know it.
Lance, God bless his complete inability to read a room, is the one who breaks the silence.
“So,” he says, tipping back in his chair, arms behind his head.
“I want everyone to appreciate the sacrifice being made here. I had plans tonight. Big plans. Wedding night, first-class tickets, a hotel suite with a view, the kind of activities that would’ve had housekeeping filing a complaint.
” He gestures grandly at Sylvie. “And instead I’m at work.
Because my brand-new wife’s dead sister rose from the grave at the open bar.
” He shrugs. “Honestly? Fair trade. Barely.”
“Lance,” Cricket says, not looking at him, not letting go of Sylvie’s wrist.
“I’m just saying.” He points at Sylvie, finger-gun style. “Coming back from the dead at my wedding reception does not count as a present, though. We’re still taking cash. Registry’s online.”
“Fair enough,” Sylvie says. “How’s twenty-k for you? Is that enough for whatever egotistical man toy you want to buy?” It’s the most she’s spoken since we sat down. Her tone is dry, a little dangerous, and I watch Lance grin like he’s found a new toy.
“See, I like her,” he announces to the room. Then, squinting: “Why don’t you have the accent? Cricket’s got hers—”
“I do not.”
“—but you sound like you’re from Ohio.”
“I trained it out,” Sylvie explains. “It’s easier to disappear when you don’t sound like anyone, I suppose.”
“Yeah.” Cricket nods along. “I did the same thing. Been American for years.”
The whole table looks at her, stunned. How does she not hear it? Nobody says anything for a beat.
“Cricket, honey…you’re one coin short of the whole pot of gold. You still have the accent,” Eden says.
“I do not,” Cricket retorts, contradicting herself. “And a leprechaun joke? Really? While I’m armed?”
“It was not a joke, baby. You just said ‘leprechaun’ with four extra syllables,” Lance adds.
“I will end my groom at my own wedding, Lancelot. Don’t tempt me.”
For a second the room breathes. It almost returns to what it usually is—the bickering, the warmth, the family that argues because it’s safe to. Almost. Everyone at the table loosens a notch. Except me.
Because I can’t loosen. I have to hold my secrets tight. All I want to do is look at Sylvie, and yet all I need to do is never set eyes on her again.
“What happened to your date, by the way?” Lance turns to me, and my stomach churns. “Cricket said we were going to meet your little piece. She stand you up or did you ditch her?”
Everyone looks at me.
Sylvie looks at me with wide eyes, silently asking if we’re keeping the silent pact we made in ten seconds of eye contact over Cricket’s shoulder at Martinis.
It’s the agreement that we don’t know each other, that me with my face between her thighs is a secret we both have to bury alive.
The alternative is not an option. Even if Sylvie could explain this all-too-convenient coincidence away, Cricket would slice me in half if she learned I saw her baby sister naked.
For the first time all night, I allow myself to hold Sylvie’s green eyes. Swampy as fuck.
“She didn’t show,” I say flatly.
Sylvie nods once. A silent understanding passing between us.
“Her loss,” Lance says, and mercifully moves on.
Vesper clears her throat. She’s been as quiet as me this entire time seated at the head of the table.
A quiet Vesper is the most dangerous of all because it usually means she’s calculating consequences in her mind.
So, when she leans forward and folds her hands and levels those ancient eyes at Sylvie, the room goes cold again.
“Let’s hear it,” Vesper says. “All of it. You were a child at the O’Leary estate the night it burned. Your father, his men, dead. Your sister was taken. And you”—she nods toward Sylvie—“you disappeared. What happened? Were you involved with the Accardis?”
Sylvie doesn’t flinch at the accusation.
“I took a bullet through the chest,” she explains plainly, like she’s reciting someone else’s file.
“I was just as much a victim as anyone else that night. They shot me and I went down in the brush at the edge of the property, and I laid there and bled out into the dirt and waited to die.” A pause.
“I don’t know how they found me. But all of a sudden, I wasn’t dying anymore. I came through. I was rescued.”
“Who?”
“It doesn’t matter. They’re gone now.”
Vesper’s eyes widen—actually widen, a crack in the granite I’ve almost never seen. “I don’t believe you.”
“Clearly,” Sylvie snarks.
“I searched for you myself.” Linc’s voice comes through sharp.
He’s been silent and coiled this whole time and now he sits forward, ice-blue eyes fixed on her.
“I remember that night. That mission. Vesper and I searched that property for at least a full day. We walked every inch of those four acres. We looked until there was nothing left to look at, and there was no you. If you were waiting there to die, how come we didn’t find you first? ”
“Perhaps search and rescue is not your skillset,” Sylvie shoots back. “What do you want me to say? I was gone, then I was found. I bet I was dying somewhere you never thought to look.”
“Enough,” Cricket hisses. The temperature drops another ten degrees, and Cricket’s had it.
But she’s not hissing at her little sister; she’s angry at Vesper and Linc.
“We’re done listening to this interrogation.
” She says it hard, both hands flat on the table now.
“This is my sister. This is my blood, sitting right here, alive, after ten years of me thinking Luca put her in the ground. This is family. End of story.”
“Right now, she’s not family, Cricket. She’s an outsider with a story full of holes.
Think about it with your head, not with your heart.
A trained killer we’ve never heard of appears out of nowhere, at your wedding, the exact night we’re all in one place, and we’re supposed to just…
open the door?” He shakes his head. “That’s how families like ours die.
We can’t trust her yet. It doesn’t add up. ”
“Lance,” Cricket says flatly, calling her husband to her defense.
He sighs, then teeters his head side to side, reluctant. “It’s a little suspicious, babe. I love you. But the timing’s weird.”
Eden lifts both hands, peacemaker, calm as still water.
“Okay. Let’s slow down. There’s no timeline of this return that would make sense under any circumstance.
Perhaps we’re all jumping to conclusions.
So, maybe we get some rest and calm down before we vote on her soul.
Does that sound okay, Sylvie?” She turns to her, and her voice softens all the way down.
“Or, what do you want us to call you? Sylvie, or Saoirse?”
“I think we call her a liar,” Linc says.
“Stop, Linc.” Eden doesn’t raise her voice. She never has to.
“My mistake,” Vesper says slowly, and every head turns to her, because it’s her call and always has been. “I shouldn’t have brought her here, into the compound, before we know who she is and what is going on. We may need to hold her somewhere else until I can corroborate a few things.”
I say nothing.
I hate that I say nothing. Sylvie’s eyes flick to me.
It’s a quick, involuntary flash of “help me” but I sit there with my jaw locked and my hands flat on the table and I say nothing, because I don’t know what I’d even be defending.
I’m the one person here who has answers, and I’m the one person here who can’t say a word.
That’s when Cricket pulls the knife.
She moves fast, pulling a blade out of somewhere on her body, and she drives it point-down into the middle of the table, hard enough that it stands there quivering, buried an inch deep in the wood.
The room goes dead silent.
“Have I made myself clear,” Cricket asks very quietly, looking around at each of us in turn, “or do I need to use smaller words?” She leaves the knife where it is.
“She is not going anywhere. She is not being held anywhere. She is my sister, she is my family, and the next person who suggests otherwise is going to have a very bad night.” She lets that settle.
“Family,” she repeats, softer, like a prayer, like a threat.
Nobody moves. It’s obvious to everyone at this table that Cricket will open a throat before she lets anyone decide anything about her little sister.
Linc looks at Vesper. A long look, the two oldest instincts in the room consulting each other without words.