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I don't answer.

She pushes on. “How good are you at self-defense?”

“I’m okay,” I say.

In ten seconds, she sweeps me off my feet. I don't see it coming. One minute I'm talking to her, and the next, my legs are swept out from under me. I fall, but she catches me and pins me to the wall.

“Goddamn, woman,” she says. “You don't have an ounce of self-protection, and you're going to walk away from the family that will save you from your enemies?” She shakes her head. “Do you know what my brother's going to do to the men who captured you when he finds them?”

I shake my head.

Her voice drops low and menacing. “He's going to make them rue the day they were born.”

I swallow hard.

Holding my gaze, she makes a phone call. “Valentina has my permission to leave. She wants to go for a walk. Don't follow her, understood?” She hangs up. I stare at her.

“Just a bit of advice,” she says. “I wouldn't run. Or if I were going to run quietly, there are a few things I'd do first. Make damn sure I knew how to use a weapon.” She says it without drama. “But before that, I would use what I had at my disposal. You're a tiny little thing. Eat some Irish food. Drink some Guinness. It’s a meal in a bottle.” She leans in. “As painful as it will be, you should tell my brother what those men did to you in explicit fucking detail. Let him murder them, Valentina.” She shrugs. “And then do whatever the fuck you want.”

She smiles coldly.

“You know what we women have that men don't?”

She stops with a wily smile, her head tipped to the side.

Against my better judgment, I like her. I shake my head.

“The art of seduction. Use it.” She leans forward. “And one more thing. I happen to know that Seamus and Torin are having a meeting in Seamus's office at about”—she glances at her watch—”seven o'clock, which is about now. If it were me, I'd want to know what they're talking about.” She nods toward the hall. “Seamus's office is the second one on the right. Used to be my dad's.” She smiles. “We kids found it fairly easy to listen in. Almost as if he wanted us to.”

With a shrug, she turns and leaves.

I stand in the kitchen alone, the cat watching me from the counter.

I reach for the bread and take it with me.

Chapter Twenty

TORIN

Seamus is always up early, especially now that he’s a father. So when I make my way down to his office and see light spill out from under the door, I know he's there. I knock.

“Yes?”

“It's me.”

“Come in.”

The office has changed since I've been away. Seamus has taken over our father's role entirely, and it shows. Three monitors, two computers, an enormous lineup of screens behind the desk, and a row of our father's old leather-covered ledgers lined up beside them, as if he's keeping one foot in the old world out of loyalty. He looks up and nods.

At first, I thought the biggest change in Seamus was the gray in his beard and hair. But it isn't. It's the lines around his eyes. The furrow in his brow that looks like it hasn't moved in years. Family. Children. Responsibility. All of it written on him in ways he didn't have before I went inside.

“You're up early,” he says, setting a ledger aside.

“I don't sleep much anymore.”

He nods. “Cavin said prison will do that to a man.” He leans back in his chair. “What's on your mind?”

I pull out the chair across from him and sit. “First, the Boston Irish. Declan ran the photographs I sent from the hotel.”