“I’m sorry about this, son,” Rory interrupted. “I’m not going to force you to do this. I just don’t know...any better way to do this.” He shook his head again, as if racking his brain for any other solution.
“I mean, you have an advantage with your uniform, after all,” Sophie reasoned, shrugging. “It’ll be a lot easier for you to get back there since you’ll have an excuse to investigate.”
“Are we sure we want to screw with the Walshes like this?” Kilian asked, his voice becoming shaky and a tiny bit fearful. “If we do this and it goes poorly, we could be looking at a serious issue.” He paused for a second, rolling his eyes before continuing. “I got into a scuffle with Grace earlier, and she nearly knocked my goddamn teeth out. They’re no joke, Dad,” he said somberly, becoming very serious upon realizing his family was actually intending to go through with their plan.
“Oh, I know full well how tough the Walsh family is,” Kilian’s father replied dryly. “That’s why I was so hesitant about this, but we’ve been talking…” His voice trailed off at first, but he cleared his throat and continued. “We just can’t come up with any other way to do this.”
“Yeah,” one of the younger brothers chimed in. “We didn’t include you at first because we didn’t know how you would take it.”
“I’m sorry, Kilian,” the old man sighed, his voice cracking slightly. “I know tangling with the Walshes is a huge risk.” He approached Kilian, looking up into his son’s piercing blue eyes. “But having you to help us would give us the best chance we’re ever going to get.”
“Jesus,” Kilian groaned, shaking his head in disbelief. “There are so many ways this can go so, so very wrong.” He chewed his bottom lip pensively.
“You don’t have to do this,” Kilian’s father replied.
“Dad!” Daniel and Liam hissed.
“I’m not going to force him to do this!” Rory said firmly, anger rising in his voice. “I don’t like that this is our best option, but I’m not going to make Kilian--”
Before he could finish his reasoning, however, Kilian interrupted him. “I’ll do it,” he answered, swallowing a lump in his throat. “I’ll do it, okay? I get it.”
His father’s eyes widened for a moment in surprise. “You’re sure?”
“Yeah. We’re all in this together, I guess,” Kilian sighed in a resigned tone. “I’m not letting you guys do this without me, anyway. You all will be way worse off without my help.”
A collective sigh of relief broke out amongst the family, followed by another awkward silence. Finally, Kilian nodded to himself, as if accepting his fate.
“So,” he started, looking around the room at each of his siblings. “I’m thinking that if Peter is going to hide anything, he’s probably going to stick it in one of his safes in the back offices.”
Sophie nodded. “That makes sense. He’s a pretty careful guy.” She looked worried as she continued. “The book is probably being kept in a safe, but how the hell would we get a safe out of there? They’re huge, heavy, and not very easy to move discreetly.
“That’s the main issue I had in mind, too,” their father piped up, bringing a hand up to his face to stroke his chin thoughtfully. “I think we should have Kilian pick the safe. He’s done it a dozen times before. It’s fairly quick, discreet, and it may be some time before they notice the book is missing.”
“Maybe,” Kilian replied. “Or it might have an alarm system.”
“Maybe he’s got the combination or an extra key hidden away somewhere,” Liam added and Kilian paused again to ponder his options. “Or maybe we can just get his primary key or whatever off of him.”
“We want to avoid a fight if we can, you know,” Kilian’s father stated firmly. “I honestly don’t think any of us can win in a brawl with anyone in the Walsh family, and we don’t want to risk Kilian being caught and losing his job on the force which would have long term ramifications for the family too. We need to be careful, sneaky, and quick.”
“That’s probably the best way to go about it, yeah,” Kilian agreed, nodding. “This is really risky, guys.”
A knowing silence fell over the room once more, with the siblings and Kelly family patriarch impatiently looking to one another for suggestions.
“Or maybe we just need a really good distraction,” Sophie suggested, shrugging. “We don’t necessarily have to fight them for the book.”
“Regardless, we don’t have much time for planning,” Rory replied, nodding sagely. “The Walshes fight to kill. They aren’t going to give up easily. Aside from everything else, they have a reputation to keep up.”
7
The warehouse wasunrecognizable to Grace these days. She’d been in the space many times throughout her life—easily recalling the stale, almost peppery scent that lingered in the air from the earliest parts of her childhood.
But today, standing next to the wall that had once hosted a series of large garage doors to make up the space’s loading dock, Grace felt as though she was in a completely different space.
The doors had been removed and sealed with more drywall and the tall, concrete walls that had once been lined with heavy duty, steel shelving units were stripped back and left bare. The rows upon rows of storage units in the center of the warehouse, the ones they used for their most-anticipated imported goods had been thrown aside—Grace couldn’t remember a single time she’d been able to see from one end of the warehouse to the other. The black-and-yellow striped sheets of plastic that had outlined the corners of the concrete loading docks had been pulled away, and the more that she looked around the room, the less Grace saw it as just an industrial storage complex.
As much as she hated to admit it, she was impressed by what her father had been able to accomplish in the few months he’d been renovating the space, especially considering he had owned the place in secret, and traveled here in secret throughout the last twenty years.
Dealing with contractors under the table, Peter Walsh had created his own private network of handymen looking to complete work underneath the table. Whether they avoided working through normal channels to avoid working for other people or taxation, Grace wasn’t entirely sure, but the more she looked around the renovated warehouse, the more Grace realized the exact change that really troubled her. Carpeting had been layered on top of the smooth stone she’d always associated with the warehouse. When she was younger, she’d associated walking on it with the sensation of skating atop a frozen lake, especially in the way that her steps would echo when she was alone on the floor.
