“Does it matter?” He tilted his head slightly, regarding me with something akin to pity.
I wanted to scream. Wanted to throw something, to shatter the perfect composure he wore like armor, to break through that maddening professional distance and make him feel even a fraction of what I was feeling. Instead, I forced myself to breathe, to think through the panic threatening to consume me, to find some shred of rationality in the chaos swirling through my mind.
That was when I remembered.
The envelope.
My hand flew to my jacket pocket, fingers fumbling for the thick paper Brian Buchannon had pressed into my palm before the fights began. I’d forgotten about it in the chaos; the horror of watching Mimic kill a man with his bare hands overshadowing everything.
I pulled it out, staring at my name written in elegant script across the front. Not Brian’s handwriting. I knew that now.
“What is that?” Sinclair asked, his tone carefully neutral.
I didn’t answer. My hands shook as I reopened the envelope Brian had given me at the fight, pulling out the single piece of paper. The message was brief. Devastatingly brief.
I’m sorry.
Two words. That was all he’d given me.
The paper slipped from my fingers, floating to the floor like a fallen leaf.
“No,” I whispered. “No, no, no.”
Understanding crashed over me in waves, each one more brutal than the last. The cage fight. Mimic killing Michaels. Rowen’s absence. Sinclair’s evasiveness.
Ensuring your future.
“He’s taking over the IRA,” I breathed, my words tasting like ash in my mouth, bitter and acrid. The realization hit me like a freight train, crushing the air from my lungs. “That’s what this is. That’s what he’s doing. That’s what all of this has been leading to.”
Sinclair’s silence was confirmation enough. The way he stood there, perfectly still, his jaw tight, his eyes refusing to meet mine, told me everything I needed to know.
“No.” I lunged forward, grabbing Sinclair’s arm with both hands, my fingers digging into the expensive fabric of his suit jacket. “No, you have to stop him. Please. He doesn’t want this. He never wanted this life. You know that as well as I do.”
“Melissa.”
“He’s aprofessor!” My voice broke, cracking right down the middle as tears streamed freely now, hot and relentless down my cheeks. “He wanted to teach history. To have a family. To be normal. To live a quiet life far away from all this violence and bloodshed. He told me. He told me he wanted out. That he was done with all of this. That he was finally free.”
“Yet here we are.” Sinclair’s tone was flat, matter-of-fact.
The coldness in those four words made me want to hit him, to shake him, to make him feel something. “You don’t understand. I can’t lose another man to this world. I can’t. I won’t survive it. Travis is dead. I can’t—” A sob tore from my throat, raw and ugly. “I can’t watch Rowen destroy himself for me. I can’t watch him become the very thing he spent years trying to escape. I won’t.”
Sinclair gently extracted his arm from my grip, his long fingers carefully prying mine away one by one. His expression softened almost imperceptibly, a crack in that carefully maintained façade. “I do understand, my dear. More than you know. More than you could possibly imagine.”
“Then help me. Please.” I was begging now, and I didn’t care. Pride meant nothing anymore. “Stop him before it’s too late. Before he crosses a line he can never come back from.”
He studied me for a long moment, his piercing gaze seeming to take in every detail of my face, every crack in my composure. Something like sympathy flickered in his eyes, a brief softening of his otherwise stern expression. Then he shook his head slowly, almost regretfully. “I’m afraid it’s already too late. The wheels are in motion, and there’s nothing I can do to stop them now.”
“Sinclair,” I started, desperation clawing at my throat.
“However,” he continued, cutting me off with a raised hand as he moved deliberately to his desk. He opened the top drawer and retrieved a manila folder, its edges crisp and new. “He wanted you to have this. He was quite insistent about it, actually. Made me promise to deliver it to you personally.”
He held it out to me across the polished mahogany desk. I stared at it like it might bite, like it contained some terrible truth I wasn’t ready to face. My heart hammered so hard against my ribcage I thought it might crack a rib, each beat echoing in my ears like a drum.
“Take it,” Sinclair said quietly, his voice gentler now, almost fatherly.
My hands moved of their own accord, disconnected from my paralyzed mind, accepting the folder with numb fingers that barely seemed capable of gripping it. It was heavier than it should have been, weighted with more than just paper, weighted with intention, with meaning, with all the things left unsaid between us.
I opened it with trembling hands, the folder’s flap releasing with a soft whisper.
