“Sadie!” Her heart rattled, threatening to give out.
And then every single bit of color drained out of the world.
Later, she’d try and fail to recall exactly what had happened.
There had been tears. Sadie’s as she pleaded from the bus window, “Mama, please. Please understand. You want me to stay here forever, but I’ve got to try for something more.”
But Claudine couldn’t understand, couldn’t form coherent thoughts or words over the crazy lady screaming. Screaming so loud.
That crazy lady was her, calling Sadie every name outside the good book as her worthless best friend Naomi’s even more worthless father, Danso, held her back, along with three other full-sized males.
And even then, she’d managed to break away, thanks to the strength she usually kept hidden. “SADIE! SADIE, NO! NO!”
But by then, it was too late. The bus was already pulling away. She barely managed to claw at its metal exterior before it trundled down the road, kicking up dirt and pebbles behind.
Only then did the right words find their way to her mouth.
“YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT YOU ARE!” she screeched after the bus. “YOU HAVE TO COME BACK. YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT YOU ARE!”
These were the right words. What she should have said. Finally. Sadie didn’t hear her, though. The bus kept going along with the spinning of the world.
But Claudine did eventually have to stop. Her arms dropped uselessly to her sides as she struggled to catch her breath.
Her daughter was gone.
And there was nothing she could do about what most certainly would come next.
The Potential
Tadhg
“Heya, Tadhg. Heya.”The second I stepped off the elevator on the top floor of the Dublin KaCh€ng App offices, my assistant, Eileen, all but pounced on me.
My COO alarm instantly went off. She looked rattled—more rattled than the one time we had to reschedule payroll due to a company-wide software glitch.
Bloody PR nightmare that was for a fintech app. “What’s wrong?” I doubled my speed toward my office suite at the end of the long hallway. “If there’s a fire to put out, we’ll want to turn an extinguisher on it immediately.”
“Not a fire, exactly. There’s…” Eileen huffed as she struggled to keep up with me, letting me know she hadn’t been taking better advantage of the treadmills in our company gym as she’d sworn she would toward the beginning of the year. “There’s someone in your office! I walked in ten minutes ago to find him just sitting there behind your desk, looking as if Edward Scissorhands and Professor Severus Snape decided to have a right grim and completely silent child. Who’s grown up now and holding awhiteboard that says ‘Cian Mahoney here to meet with Tadhg Ryan.’”
I stopped walking. “The Shadow Kin—” I caught and corrected myself before I could call him by his official, but largely unknown, title. “Cian Mahoney, our CTO, is here? Waiting for me in my office?”
“Well, that’s who he claims to be. According to the log, he let himself into the C-suite using a working badge with the highest level of security clearance. But he’s so pale. I’m not even sure he’s corporeal.” She leaned in, voice pitched low. “Should I call security, just to be safe? Or maybe those Ghostbuster fellas? I mean, he’s just... sitting behind your desk. Like a wraith who thinks he owns the place.”
“Well, technically, he does,” I pointed out, glancing toward my office. “A one-third majority stock holding, anyway.”
“So, that’s really him, then?” Eileen whispered. She had no idea our kind could hear even a whisper from behind a closed door. “I never would have guessed from looking at him that he used to be on the rugby team with you and Declan.”
That was because Cian hadn’t actually played—just consulted with our coaches. Same way I hadn’t technically been married to a plus-sized supermodel.
Well, I was. But only for the couple of weeks it took to get it annulled after the drugs and alcohol from my IPO funding celebration week in Koh Samui wore off and we both came to our senses.
As for Cian, he’d only “joined the team” to test an algorithm that might have earned him millions in the sports analytics market—if he hadn’t pivoted to creating a global financial product to compete with PayPal, Venmo, and Wise instead.
But now wasn’t the time for a correction to the bio he hadn’t bothered to update since we founded KaCh€ng from our shared Trinity University housing.
I waved her off. “It’s alright. I’ll handle it from here.”
“Should I bring you anything, then?” Eileen asked with another fretful glance toward the door. “Tea? The blood of a virgin, perhaps? I hear wraiths like that.”
