Something ugly and familiar twists under my ribs. Possession, yes, and grief as a blade. I’ve seen that mix a hundred times. It’s always the ones left behind who are the sharpest.
“He was alsomine,” I tell her.
Her expression fractures for half a second—just half—and there it is, clean and naked…Purehatred.
“Liar,” she whispers, eyes wide.
“He ran product for me,” I say. Calm. Factual. “He moved weapons through customs labels that didn’t exist on paper. He sat down with men I told him to sit down with, and he watched hands and faces and routes. I trusted him with certain corridors because up until the very end, he was good at it. Better than good. Clever. Charming. Useful. I don’t break what works.”
She swallows, and I watch the muscles in her throat shift. She doesn’t want to hear this, but she’s listening. I can see her doing it against her will. Filing it. She’ll decide later whether to believe me. But she’s taking it in now. After a second she glares at me.
“No,” she says. Quieter. “No, you’re lying. Owen wasn’t like that. He wasn’t—he wasn’t one of you.”
“Everyone is ‘not like that’ to someone,” I say. “Thieves are loyal brothers. Hitmen are good sons. Spies are perfect lovers.People are always softer when you’re not the one holding their leash.”
Her nostrils flare. “He didn’t work for you. He wouldn’t have.”
“He was on my payroll for eleven months,” I say. “Indirectly, and through a shell company, but yes. I have the transfers. I have recordings. I have Owen, Ember, on camera and on wire, taking cash he did not earn and swearing he would deliver more.”
Her eyes snap to mine at his name. I let it sit between us like heat.
“And what?” she spits. “You expect me to believe he deserved what you did to him? Because he took your dirty money and helped you move guns? That’s nottreason. That’ssurvival. That’s living in London and not wanting to fucking starve. That’s—” Her voice cracks. She swallows it down like it burns. “That’s not adeath sentence.”
Her defense of him is instant. Instinct. Angry and loyal and unedited. It hits harder than it should. For a second, something old inside me stirs.
I kill it.
The mask of indifference tightens in place, my voice colder, more distant. “No,” I say. “Running shipments isn’t what got him killed.”
Her breath stalls. Just barely. “Then what?”
Now we get to it.
“The Russians,” I say.
She blinks. Confusion runs across her face fast and honest. She wasn’t expecting that word. Good. That matters.
“You want to know why you’re here?” I ask. “Why I didn’t put a bullet in you in that flat and leave you on your floor the way you found Darren in the warehouse? Why you’re sitting in my sheets instead of bleeding out in the gutter? It’s because you were trying to find something you don’t understand. SomethingOwen didn’t understand when he walked himself straight into hell wearing my colors.”
“He didn’t wear your—”
“Hesoldroute intel,” I say, cutting clean through her protest. “He sold internal run maps, drop schedules, and safehouse locations to a Syndicate contact out of Poplar, and he did it for cash. Cold. Hard. Cash.”
She goes pale in stages. For a heartbeat, she’s just stunned. Then I see it land—the math of it, rapid-fire behind her eyes. Routes. Schedules. Safehouses. Places with people in them. “How much,” she whispers, almost choking on it, “did he give them?”
“Enough to cost me three men,” I say. “Enough to burn a corridor I’d spent a year building. Enough to make me pull everyone and reroute everything I had for six weeks while half of East London tried to eat us alive.”
Her hands are clenched, white-knuckled around her own shins. She doesn’t seem to notice. “Stop,” she says, voice shaking. “Stop talking.”
“What? Would you rather Ilieto you?” I ask. “Would you rather I pat your hair and tell you a bedtime story about how your brother was a saint cut down by cruel masked monsters in the night?”
“Fuck you,” she snarls.
“Already on your mind?” I hum. “Careful, my disobedience.”
Her eyes blaze. “You don’t get to— you don’t get to talk to me like that and then pretend this is you beingkind.”
“I’m not kind,” I say. “I’m honest when it matters.”
