"You’re paying me to do my job, so let me work."
Connor holds my gaze for a long moment, then his expression softens into regret and he nods.
Killian doesn't nod. Killian looks like he wants to put his fist through my nose. But Liam cuts him a look, and Killian swallows whatever he was about to say and turns back to the window.
"I'll bring her home," I say.
Liam searches my face. I don't know what he's looking for. Sincerity, maybe. Proof that I'm more than the empty reputation that precedes me. He won't find it. My face doesn't give things away. I stopped allowing that years ago.
"If anything happens to her..." he starts, but can’t find the words to finish the sentence.
"I've never lost a target,” I say. “Your sister won’t be the first."
Rafferty's head comes up. Killian turns from the window. Even Aidan shifts from behind his chair.
I know I've said something wrong. I've reduced their sister to an operational noun, and every man in this room wants to kill me for it.
I don't amend or soften the statement. Softening is a luxury for people who traffic in comfort, and I am not in that business. I'm in the business of retrieval. Of elimination. Of making problems disappear so quickly and quietly that the world never knows they existed in the first place.
That's what I am. A solution. A tool.
The Bratva Ghost.
The door slams open beside me, my hand instantly going to the weapon I have concealed at my side. It’s a knife, but it would get the job done.
“Is this him?” The woman demands, gathering her shaking frame and standing tall.
“Yes, ma. You should be resting.” It’s Rafferty who says it, calm and soothing even though the tension in the room is palpable.
The woman turns to face me fully. Her hair is dark with streaks of russet and white. There are lines on her face that don’t look like they belong there. Her eyes are so starkly green they don’t look real.
“You will bring my daughter home,” she says on an exhale, like speaking costs her too much energy, so she steals it from her breath. From the one bodily function that doesn’t stop in the darkest hours of your life.
Oddly, I want to reach out to this woman and touch her. Give her comfort, even if it’s just a pat on her arm. Her eyes narrow at me as her nostrils flare with the exertion of pulling in another breath.
“Yes,” I say, noticing the deeper shades of green in her eyes. I imagine what she must look like in the sunshine, when she isn’t being ripped apart by the fear of her only daughter being kidnapped by the Mafia. I wonder if Iris’s eyes are the same as her mother’s.
Then she reaches out and holds each of my shoulders in her hands, closing the minimal distance between us and bringing her face right up to mine.
“You will bring my daughter home.”
It’s not a question. She is stating it. Weaving her will into the fabric of time so that no other outcome is possible.
I wonder what it costs her. But I suppose there’s not a lot a mother wouldn’t do for her children, even when those children are grown.
She releases me, dropping her hands from my shoulders and stepping back. But she doesn’t take her eyes from mine. Not until I nod my head and break the eye contact to nod at Liam. A sign of respect, and also confirmation that I’m taking the job.
I leave the estate the same way I arrived. Quietly. The driver takes me to the airstrip where I board a different plane, this one heading to Europe. I sit in the same position. Still. Silent. Running the operation in my head.
The compound. The guard rotations. The approach vectors. The extraction routes. I plan and discard and replan, building the operation in my mind the way an architect builds a sky scraper, testing every joint, every load-bearing wall, every point of failure.
I don't think about the photograph.
I don't think about auburn hair and green eyes and a laugh that looked like it could fill a room.
I don't think about the way Liam said her name like a plea. Like a wound that might never heal.
I don't think about any of it.
