Chapter 17
Seventeen
Onyx
The hood comes off and my uncle is smiling at me.
That tight, practiced smile he wears when he's about to ruin someone's life and wants them to know he's enjoying it.
Behind him, my father stands against the wall with his shoulders caved in and his hands shaking at his sides, looking every bit the broken man he's always been too proud to admit he is.
Great. A family reunion. Just what I needed with a bullet graze throbbing above my left ear and zip ties cutting grooves into my wrists.
The warehouse is freezing. Industrial steel rafters overhead, fluorescent lights buzzing, that flat white glow that washes the color out of everything.
The chair they've got me bolted to is metal and cold against my bare arms. My head pounds in slow, nauseating waves and dried blood crusts along my hairline, pulling at my skin every time I move my jaw.
The air reeks of rust, diesel, and the salt-rot stench of the Chicago River somewhere close.
Four armed men stationed near the two exits I can clock from this angle. Loading dock on my left with a rusted pulley chain. Side door on my right, cracked open. Journalist brain won't shut off, even now. Maybe especially now.
But underneath the cataloging and the measuring and the adrenaline keeping my vision sharp, one image plays on repeat behind my eyes and I can't make it stop.
Kon on his knees in crushed roses. Blood pooling beneath him on the gravel. His hand reaching for me while his body gave out.
Two bullets. I watched two bullets hit him.
My nails dig into my palms behind the chair. He's alive. He has to be alive. The man survived four years of barbed wire and trafficking and a childhood that would have destroyed anyone else. He did not survive all of that to bleed out on a rooftop because Brennan got lucky with a gun.
He's alive.
I need that to be true more than I need oxygen right now.
Seamus circles my chair, hands clasped behind his back, silver hair perfect, charcoal suit pressed and spotless. He dressed for this. Pocket square and everything. My uncle kidnaps people the way other men attend charity galas.
"Hello, Onyx." He stops in front of me and adjusts his cufflinks. "You've caused me an extraordinary amount of trouble."
I spit blood on the warehouse floor. It lands an inch from his polished shoe and watching his jaw clench is the best thing that's happened to me all night.
"Good."
"Your mother had that same defiance." He tilts his head, examining me the way he'd examine a stain on his shirt. "That stubborn refusal to accept how things work. It didn't serve her well in the end."
The mention of my mother sends fury roaring through my chest so hot it burns away the head wound and the cold and the dread.
"Don't talk about my mother." My voice is shredded from screaming Kon's name on that rooftop. "You don't get to say her name. Not after what you did to her."
"What I did?" Seamus raises an eyebrow, all wounded innocence, and the act is so polished I want to claw it off his face. "I protected this family. Every decision I've made for forty years has been to protect the Malone name."
"You destroyed her. You isolated her, controlled her medication, threatened to hurt me if she talked." My jaw shakes but my voice holds. "I've read the therapist's notes. Every single one. She didn't die of a broken heart. You broke her on purpose and my father stood there and watched."
The mask slips. Just for a second. The real Seamus surfaces, cold and reptilian, before the performance slides back.
"Catherine was a liability. Liabilities get managed."
"She was a person. She was my mother." Tears press behind my eyes and I shove them back. He feeds on tears. I refuse to give him anything.
I look past him to my father. Declan Malone.
Half in shadow, shoulders hunched, trembling like a man standing in his own grave.
He looks a decade older than the night I climbed out my window.
The silver at his temples has gone full white and the lines around his mouth have carved themselves into permanent grooves.
"Dad." The word tastes like copper. "Here to watch? That's usually your role, right? Standing in the corner while Seamus does the dirty work."
He flinches. His wet eyes find mine and the shame in them is so heavy it presses the air out of the room. His mouth opens, closes, chews on words he's been swallowing for decades.
Seamus reaches into a cardboard box beside the chair and pulls out a stack of papers.
Manila folders, printed documents, pages covered in my handwriting.
That cramped, hurried script I used during late nights in my old bedroom, documenting every crime, every connection, every rotten thread I could pull from the Malone empire.
My investigation files. The ones I stashed behind the drywall when I climbed out my window and ran.
Six months of work in his manicured hands.
"Looking for these?" He fans the pages so I can see my own handwriting, my own annotations, spread across his fingers like a card trick. "Found them in your room. Behind the drywall. Clever. Not clever enough."
He drops them into a metal drum in the center of the warehouse.
Strikes a match. Tosses it in. The flame catches the edge of a page and my work starts curling into ash.
Heat from the drum reaches my face and the acrid, bitter smell of burning paper fills my nose. Six months of my life reduced to smoke.
"All that effort." He watches it burn with satisfaction. "And all for nothing."
The loss settles in my chest for about half a second before I remember the truth and almost laugh.
"You think that matters?" The laugh comes out harsh and real and it makes his smug expression waver. "Burn it all. Every page. It doesn't change a damn thing."
"Excuse me?"
"You think those were my only copies? Burn it.
" I lean forward against the zip ties and hold his gaze.
"Your shipping routes. Your shell companies.
Your trafficking network. Every body you've buried and every cop you've bought.
All of it. Documented, verified, and sitting in the hands of men who make you look like a hall monitor with a god complex. "
The color drains from his face. "The Syndicate."
"Every file Luca Valentina built on you. Every dirty secret you thought was untouchable." I let my bloody smile spread wide. "You can burn my notes. The Syndicate has that and more. And trust me when I say you will not survive what is coming for you."
His hand connects with my face before I can brace for it. The backhand snaps my head sideways and stars burst behind my eyes. Fresh blood fills my mouth from my split lip.
The pain is sharp and clarifying. I've been hit before. This is nothing new. What's new is the rage building behind my ribs that says I am done being the person who takes the hit.
"You will be on a container ship by morning." His voice goes sub-zero. "Destination: the middle of the fucking cold Atlantic. The doors open, you go in the water. No body. No evidence. No traitorous niece."
"Wanna bet Kon finds me before you finish getting your rocks off killing your own family, dear uncle?" I deadpan.
There’s a long pause I feel goes on forever before Seamus speaks again.
"Your Russian?" Seamus adjusts his lapel where my blood spotted the fabric. "My men put two bullets in him. He's bleeding out on a rooftop surrounded by his precious flowers." His mouth curves. "No one is coming for you, darling."
For one airless second, the doubt rushes in. Kon on his knees. The blood. The way he reached for me. I saw it happen. I know Seamus isn't lying about the bullets, but if Kon were dead, my uncle would have dragged his body in here to break me. The fact that he hasn't tells me everything.
No. I crush any thought of Kon being dead and bury it deep where this man can't touch it.
Kon is alive because the alternative doesn't exist. Not in any world I'm willing to live in.
I look at my father again. And his expression stops me.
His face changes. The hollow obedience drains away and is replaced with an expression I've never seen on my father's face before. His wet eyes lock on mine and his jaw starts to tremble.
His eyes dart between Seamus and me and then to the blood drying on my face. Behind the shame on his face and the trembling I watch his jaw set into a tight line of what I hope is defiance. It might be wishful thinking on my part at this point.
But I'm desperate enough to bet on it.
"Dad." I say it differently this time. I leave out the bitterness I feel for the man and go with the honest truth. I’m a daughter asking her father for the one thing he never gave her. "Please. For once in your life. Choose me."
The warehouse goes quiet except for the crackle of burning paper in the metal drum and the distant lap of river water against the dock beyond the cracked side door. The guards shift their weight, glancing between Seamus and my father.
Seamus turns to his brother. "Declan. Don't."
Declan doesn't look at Seamus. He looks at me. At the blood on my face. At the zip ties cutting into my wrists. At the daughter his wife died protecting.
"Catherine would have wanted me to do this a long time ago." His voice barely reaches me, but I hear the truth in every cracked syllable and it nearly breaks me.
"Declan." Seamus's voice goes blade-sharp, the same commanding tone that's kept his brother in line for forty years. "I am warning you."
It doesn't work this time.
My father lunges for the nearest guard with all the grace of a man who has never thrown a punch in his life.
The move is clumsy and desperate, his feet tangling as he grabs the knife from the guard's belt in a motion so awkward the guard barely reacts.
This is not the bold action of a hero. This is a lifelong coward trying to be the man his daughter needed him to be all along.