“MacTavish sired me, that worthless prick. Not my father. My mother never told either of them. She said that my birth made my father a better man, a more loving one. MacTavish Senior walked right into my gun that night, pressing it to his forehead and told me to shoot him if that would make it right for me. All the while, Alastair, Sorcha, my mother begging me to stop. I… couldn’t do it, so I threw everyone out.
“But oh, the fucking irony that MacTavish killed my true father and now I’m faced with these presumptuous bastards thinking we’refamily!”I spat.
“I lost my father to them. I lost Alastair, the man I considered a brother. Yet still, they pop up like poisonous toadstools, expecting me to welcome them with open arms.”
There was silence, just the sharp rasp of my breath as I stared out the window. In the reflection of the glass,I watched Fee approach me, cautiously winding her arms around me and pressing her cheek to my back.
“My name is Fiadh. You never would have figured that one out.”
Something unclenched enough in my chest to release a laugh.
Chapter Twenty-Two
In which the past starts to catch up with Alec.
Lancashire, the Lee Ville / Davies server farm building site…
Standing over the pit, looking down into a bit of a nightmare, Bob Dobbins, Lee Ville’s handpicked foreman sent all the way from Saugus, MA to run things, was glad the workers were mostly gone. He waved off the few men who had remained, ignoring the fire suppressant equipment they had carried.
The fire had put itself out almost immediately, thanks to how wet the sticky black ground was in the area and the steady rain that had been pissing down on them since the whole rotten project had started.
Most of the crew had never returned after running for their lives from the smallish explosion that had scooped out a large portion of the only almost completed structure on the build.
“I still think we should call emergency services,” one of the local men working on the build, whose name Bob hadn’t bothered to learn, called out to him.
“No one was hurt, right?” Bob didn’t bother to look at the man, but rather kept his eyes on the pit, as if waiting for what he was looking at to change. Or to disappear. Or to prove it was a figment of his overworked brain.
“It's a fucking miracle.”
“Then let's not question the ways of the Lord. The rest of youtake off. Take tomorrow. Take the day after. With pay.We all need a rest. Send Elkins over before you go,” he added, never looking up. He needed his chief of security, also an old hand on Lee’s projects, though not one that Bob had worked with previously. Lee had said Elkins was a “difficulty” specialist, whatever that meant.
Hell, he needed a fucking drink.
There were soft, English grumbles from the remaining workers but no one was going to argue with paid days off and they were gone in moments.
The explosion had been the infamous final straw after a series of construction mishaps that had plagued the build for weeks. Ever since the Davies side of the collaboration had stepped away from the project, leaving Lee Ville to run things as he liked. Which was too fast and on the cheap.
Supplies that were not up to spec led to collapses of walls and electrical fires. Shifts being extended to the point where the work that was done by the exhausted crews often had to be started over from scratch by the next crew, putting them further behind than they would have been if they hadn’t been pushed into longer hours in the first place. Smaller issues caused contracts broken with local businesses in order to work with more ‘economical’ suppliers from overseas had meant they were working around delays of needed parts and equipment.
For the first time the work site was quiet and there was a soft, cheeping birdsong that could be heard, that had been suffocated by the sounds of the machines and the earth being moved.It came closer and the tiny bird that produced it landed on one of the tumbled down bits of wall next to the pit, cocking its head side to side.
Another bird joined the first, and then a third. A little choir in a broken church.
It was kind of pretty.
Bob knew how cheaply - he would say efficiently - Lee liked things run, even by those standards the project had devolved into chaos. Normally the things they built didn’t start to glitch and fall apart untilafterthey were done building them. But something about this site, about the whole project, had gotten into Lee’s head in a way that was driving him from being greedy to being erratic or worse.
And now…
“You wanted me, Dobbins?”
Elkins appeared at Bob’s side, startling him so badly that he almost pitched headfirst into the pit.
At least he wouldn’t be lonely down there.
Unlike most of the Lee Ville security Bob had worked with, Elkins wasn’t a big ex-cop with uniform, a bit of a belly, and a touch of jaded swagger. Elkins was tall and slender, always dressed in an impeccable suit of undertaker black, his light brown face expressionless, his deep voice not merely calm, but sounding as if he’d had all of his emotions surgically removed.
More than any of that, there was just some intangible thing about Elkins that made Dobbins - hell, the whole crew - feel like a monkey who knew there was a massive snake nearby that they couldn’t see but could sense.
