It takes me a second to process that. Notyour wife. NotTaryn. Mydaughter-in-law.
“I’ll need to set up extra protection,” he continues, voice back in business mode. “No one touches her. She’s one of ours now. Family.”
For a second, I forget how to breathe. “You believe me now?” I half thought he was on his way here to slap me in person.
“I believe you have grown up faster than I thought.” He sucks in a breath. “And I believe I underestimated you, Liam. The rest is still to be determined. I hope I won’t be disappointed in what I find.”
“You won’t be,” I tell him with more confidence than I feel.
I hear him shuffling papers on his desk. Moving things around.
“We’ve got a few of their men,” he adds after a moment, almost like a casual aside. “Picked them up this week. Low-level enforcers. We’re trying to beat something useful out of them, but they don’t seem to know much.”
My stomach turns—not from the violence, but the futility of it. “We don’t need them at all. Ryan has everything. Every wire transfer. Every front company. Every goddamn IP address that pinged their offshore accounts.”
“That’s a bold claim.”
“It’s not a claim. It’s fact.”
He exhales heavily, then mutters, “It still rattles me, trusting a kid like him with this. I’ve never understood that boy. Doesn’t look you in the eye. Doesn’t speak unless spoken to. Half the time he seems like he’s off in his own little world.”
“Because that’s where he builds it,” I say sharply, defending Ryan before I can think better of it. “That ‘little world’ of his is full of code and math and traps and logic that none of us can even begin to understand. You know why Bobby couldn’t get in? Because he was too busy playing by the same rules the Greeks expected.”
“And Ryan wasn’t?” He sounds skeptical.
“No. Ryanrewrotethe rules. Quietly. For me. You think his brain doesn’t work because it’s not like yours. But it works, Da. Christ, it works better than any of ours. You always want to talk about soldiers? About assets? Ryan is a one-man war machine. And he doesn’t need blood on his hands to take an empire down.”
There’s a pause on the line.
“That sounds like pride,” he says, almost amused.
“It is,” I admit. “He’s my brother. And right now, he’s holding the fate of the Greek financial network in the palm of his hand.”
He’s silent again.
“We can do this, Da. We can cripple their laundering operations. Shut down their access. Confuse their crews. Throw their upper echelon into chaos while they scramble to regain control.”
“And then what? What would you do next?” It sounds like a genuine question. I’ve piqued my father’s curiosity.
“Then we decide how we want to hit them again—after they’re disoriented. We take territory back. We plant disinformation. We make it look like they’ve been played by their own men. We control the narrative.”
He huffs. “Since when are you a strategist?”
“Since I realized smiling doesn’t earn me a seat at the table. A lesson I learned from my father.”
Another pause. Then, his voice is gruff, “Have your brother get everything together. I want to see what he’s got when I get there. If it’s real, I’ll let him do it.”
“You’lllethim?” I snort. “He’s already done it. He’s just waiting for me to say the word.”
“And are you going to?”
I pause at the question. It’s not the vehement order I expected. Not the ridicule asking me who I think I am. There is no reprimand. My father is not shouting his authority. No. He is seriously asking me what I plan to do.
I glance at the clock. Taryn’s in class. Ryan’s probably pacing in front of his monitors, dying to unleash hell.
“I will,” I say. “But I do want your eyes on it. You just told me not to give you another reason to be disappointed in me. In either of us. Let me show you before I pull the trigger.”
“Fine,” he grumbles. “I’ll get a plane in the air. Have security tighten up. I don’t want any mistakes with her safety.”
