“Aoife?!” Logan called out to me. My name sounded equally like a question and a prayer. I still couldn’t move. Even whenLogan wrapped his arms around me and held me together when I thought I might fall apart, I wasn’t able to hold him back. I was numb. Totally and completely numb.
“Well, it looks like you beat us to the job at hand,” a woman whose voice was oddly familiar called out. She had a slight lilt to her voice that I recognized and I glanced around Logan’s shoulder to find my grandmother and a few strange men standing in the doorway of my father’s apartment with guns trained on them. Those guns belonged to Lucian, Adrian, and Gideon. “You can put your weapons away boys, we mean no harm to my darling Aoife.”
“Grandma?” I asked as my body started to work again.
“I see you couldn’t listen to good advice, child.”
I blushed profusely at her chastisement, since she was the one who went through the trouble of hiding me away to begin with. What did I do? Blew it all by changing my name to something entirely predictable by anyone and everyone except the one man whose name I stole.
“Aoife?” Logan questioned.
I patted his hand and stood with him beside me. He took my hand in his and we walked together to the other side of the room to greet my grandmother. The whole thing felt surreal. I refused to think about the fact that my father was dead on the other side of the room, or that it was an outcome he had planned for. He tried to paint himself as the good father, but how could that be true when he lured me to his apartment to watch him be murdered. I shook the thought off as my grandmother stepped forward and wrapped her arms around me.
“It’s been too long, my beautiful girl.”
“I’m sorry,” I whispered in her ear.
“No, I’m sorry for not doing this sooner and giving you the life you truly deserved. I thought you could find a new place in the world while you were hiding. You couldn’t be happypretending to be someone else, though. I should have known because I wouldn’t have been happy in that existence either. I failed you.”
“You didn’t. You allowed me time to really grow up and be my own person, even if I couldn’t do that using my own name.”
“You are too good to this old lady,” Aine said as she finally dropped her arms and held me in front of her. “You grew up so beautifully, my dear, and now you’re free of this life.”
Introductions were made and we all agreed to take the heavier conversation that was due back to Logan’s office, so that my grandmother’s men could handle the cleanup. There had been a quick argument about that, too. Lucian stayed behind while we left to do whatever he did to make sure no one ever knew he was the one who pulled the trigger. Apparently, my father’s death wasn’t Lucian’s first kill. Far from it, if I read the room correctly. Still, it was something I knew they would never fill me in on. Whether to give me plausible deniability or because they didn’t fully trust me with that information. Either way, I wasn’t willing to ask the questions nor did I want the answers.
By the time we made it to Logan’s office and got everyone settled into his conference room, I was equally starved and exhausted. Logan ordered food from Don Fratelli’s, a swanky restaurant on the lower levels of Maddox Towers, when he heard my stomach rumble for the third time. After we all ate our fill, everyone seemed to settle in and wait for my grandmother to fill in the blanks on everything that was missing from today’s events.
“We were planning to usurp William’s rule here in the states. There were too many complaints. He lost a lot of the faith needed to stay in charge the day Aoife ran and every year after that she remained in hiding. If anything, the fact that the Connolly asshole tracked her down only made Bill appear weaker.”
“He was weak,” I admitted.
“We know, dear,” Grandma said as if placating a small child while she patted my hand that rested on the table.
“No, I don’t think you do. My father informed me he had both stage four pancreatic and lung cancer. His prognosis was not good, there wasn’t a treatment that could help him, and he arranged for me to come for him because he knew it would force the Maddox brothers into action.”
“Are you saying that getting you there was his own version of an assisted suicide?” Logan asked.
“That’s exactly what I’m saying.”
“What else did he tell you before we showed up?” Gideon asked.
“He explained that he was never going to force me to marry anyone else.” I rolled my eyes and nodded along as various people in the room scoffed or offered other sounds of disbelief. “I know. I did accuse him of trying to rewrite history, but it was a moot point when he was dead before he could argue.” Logan winced, but I tucked the pain away and recounted the other important points of our conversation. “He said that Faye was never his daughter.” I turned to my grandmother for confirmation.
“That much was true,” she said.
“That was his excuse for why he had no problem selling her off to the highest bidder - if only she had lived long enough.” I felt Logan’s hand slide across my thigh and squeeze. It gave me a little bit of warmth of comfort I needed. “He said he killed my mother’s lover and that was the only reason I ended up being his daughter. I was needed to try to save my sister’s life and as it turned out, we were not a close enough match. Apparently, that was why her cancer came back. I don’t know if any of that is true. I do know that the reason my mother loved Faye and not me wasbecause Faye was the child of the man she loved and I was the product of the man she was forced to be with.”
Grandma tsked as if what I said was distasteful. I couldn’t disagree with that sentiment, but that didn’t make it any less true. I turned to face Logan who was on the opposite side of me from my grandmother. “He also said that he gave his blessing to you the minute you came for me and took out Drew.”
“I don’t need his fucking blessing. You’ve always been mine.” He gave me another reassuring squeeze and then leaned back so that he could look around me to lock eyes with my grandmother. “We need to know what the plans are for the Sweeney family now. The whole reason Bill wasn’t taken out with Drew was because we were concerned about the power vacuum it would create.”
“No need to worry yourselves about my family’s mess. We have it well in hand. My own little sister had a daughter who managed to produce three sons. The middle son is going to take over here. There may be a few ripples in the water while they get used to the way things will change, but many of Bills’ people wanted to step in a new direction anyway. Organized crime isn’t what it once was. There was a time and a place for it. Now, all the money is made inside a computer.” She winked at Logan. “As you well know.”
He gave her a slight nod and pulled me so that I slid back to lean on him. We all sat back quietly for a few minutes until Logan’s brothers trickled out of the room and just left Logan, my grandmother, her right hand man - who I assumed was charged with her security, and me. We sat in companionable silence until Grandma finally got up and stretched a bit.
“I remember how heartbroken my girl was the night I came to rescue her from the fate her father intended - whether he lied about that on his deathbed or not. I’ve kept tabs on youthrough the years, though I never contacted you about my granddaughter, as per her request.”
“Why didn’t you do that?” I asked, though I already knew the answer.
