“Send them straight to my house.”
He arched a brow. “You want them there? I was going to set them up in one of our buildings.”
I shook my head. “The second I’m out of here, you know what’s going to happen.”
“She might not want to marry you,” Conor pointed out, ever helpful.
I growled at him. “She won’t have much of a choice.”
He snorted, then cut Brennan a look. “You can tell he didn’t get to meet her, can’t you?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I snarled, when Brennan’s smile made an appearance. Sure, it was only a twitch of his lips, but with my elder brother that was pretty much a clown’s grin.
“It means she’s not exactly the biddable type,” Conor answered wryly, as he wrapped his hands around the foot rail and leaned into the bed.
“She never was,” I argued, and any idiot who thought otherwise was exactly that—an idiot.
Brennan tipped his head to the side, but he agreed, “No, he’s right. She never took much bullshit, even from you, did she?”
I narrowed my eyes on him. “How the fuck do you know that?”
“Big brother has eyes and ears everywhere,” Conor intoned, his tone mocking.
“There’s more than eyes and ears. Me and Aela were sneaking around—”
“For a year, Dec. Maybe longer,” Brennan interjected. “Jesus. And you weren’t exactly smart about it. You were lucky no one else picked up on it.”
Someone had.
I pursed my lips. “I wasn’t as bad at hiding her as you’re making out then, was I?”
“You were boning her for a year?” Conor ground out. “What the actual fuck? I thought you were into Deirdre.”
My mouth tightened at just the mention of that cunt’s name. I scowled down at my blanket-covered feet, hating that I was here, hating that I needed to be here.
I’d take this kind of treatment for a week maximum before I’d go home. I didn’t give a fuck about what the doctors said either. I could rest in my own bed, in my own building without needing to be in the center of a goddamn warehouse.
And if my kid was there too?
Even better.
I could get to know him, and he could get to know me. If he wanted to, of course.
A wave of resentment hit me for the first time as I thought about how much I needed to learn, but I decided to shuck it off. That had no place in the here and now. Not yet anyway. Maybe if she was as much of a pain in the ass as Conor was making out, that resentment might come to the fore again, but I was going to try not to let it.
From what Brennan had told me of the night’s events, they were close. If I alienated her, then I’d alienate him, and I was the outsider here. No matter that I might want to break through the walls that were between us, walls she’d put there by lying to me, I had to protect their relationship.
She might not have considered mine with him, but I wasn’t about to give her any shit on that score. I mean, I might want to at some point, during my recovery when I was hurting. It might seem like an easy thing to do, but reality sucked because I knew what I’d been like the last time I’d seen her.
Cold. Hard. Mean.
Why would she tell me she was pregnant? Why would she share anything with me?
I was lucky she’d even come to us now. Lucky that I would get to know my son before he was a full-grown man, and even then, that was only happening because Aela had been good people.
That was her problem though. She’d always been good people. Had always given a damn about folk when she should have been selfish, when she should have thought about numero uno, because that was how this miserable world worked.
If you didn’t think of yourself, you were screwed.
And I was right, because she was.
I ached. Deep inside. Not just from the pain, not just from the stupid heart attack, but from loss.
I’d missed out on so much, so much that I wished I could take out on Deirdre’s hide. It was her fault. All of this was. But she was dead, and I could only be grateful for that fact, even if her memory still lingered on with the ten grand payment I had going out every month, which made her a thorn in my side even in death.
In the grand scheme of things, ten grand was nothing. Didn’t mean I didn’t begrudge it. Getting used to shedding that kind of dough was simple when you earned as much as I did, but when I thought about what I’d lost out on? When I thought about what someone else’s greed had driven me to? I knew I could shit a brick.
And because, at the moment, my heart was dicey, rather than give myself another cardiac goddamn arrest, I decided to burst Brennan’s bubble.
Because even though he thought he knew everything about the family, even though he prided himself on knowing all.
He didn’t know this.
But it was time he did, and it was time my blackmailer died a nasty, painful death. Something that was definitely a long time coming.
Seven
Conor
If I had any more programs running on my laptop, I figured the RAM on it would send it flying into outer space.
It was already throbbing like a motherfucker on my lap, and I might as well have invited the Sahara to come and bake my balls.
Did my brothers give a fuck, though, as they breathed down my neck, trying to get information out of me?
A big fat fucking no.
They didn’t give a crap about the fact I probably wouldn’t be able to have kids after this clusterfuck.
And it wasn’t only my brothers’ fault that the future Mrs. Conor O’Donnelly was going to have to visit a sperm bank to get her some baby Conors. Nope, it was that bitch Lodestar.
After the fourteenth round of malware she’d sent my way, I was currently working to disinfect thirty grand’s worth of kit, all while I had my brothers harping on at me about hacking into bank accounts.
This petty shit was so below my paygrade, but fuck, what was I supposed to do? Say no? This was for Dec, after all.
“Why’s it making that noise?” Brennan asked, peering at my laptop pretty much like it was an alien. Or it was about to do as I’d already said—take off and soar into the stars.
“It’s working.”
“Harder than you, dipshit,” Aidan grumbled.
On the brink of snapping back at him, I cast him a look and watched him rub his thigh. We all knew what that meant. His knee was hurting him like a bitch, which always made us go easier on him.
I was half certain that was the reason the prick had turned into an opiate junkie, because we’d stopped giving him ten tons of hell all the time. When a man was raised with that kind of constant infighting, it had to be a culture shock to lose it.
Huh.
That was a thought.
Maybe I should give that hypothesis a go?
“I’m working plenty hard,” I told him softly. “Unlike your junkie ass.”
The silence in the waiting room at my declaration was heavy. Hell, it was like I’d let off a fart worthy of a mushroom cloud.
But no one said anything. In fact, no one said shit.
We all knew Aidan had been dropping the ball since the drive-by shooting that had put him in the hospital for months on end, and we’d let him get away with it.
That no one argued with me told me they agreed, but that no one backed me up told me they were too chickenshit to stand with me.
Cowards.
I huffed at the thought, and feeling a little self-righteous, I cast him a look and stared him square in the eye when I saw he was glaring at me.
I didn’t even shrug, by no means did I even think of apologizing, even by expression only.
I wasn’t sorry.
I loved my brother, but he was being a dick. And he needed to get help. Tiptoeing around the fucker wasn’t going to get us anywhere.
Finn, ever the pacifist, not, muttered, “Have you found anything on Aela?”
Shrugging, I said, “I’m in her bank account.”
“Because I’m in, doesn’t mean I don’t have to figure out her incoming and outgoing payments. Jesus, I know I’m smart, but I’m not a computer.” I rolled my eyes at their expectations, and while I usually lived up to them, I wasn’t AI.
Yet.
Grousing at him under my breath, I ignored the weighted stares of the five people who I cared most about in the world.
I loved Ma and Da, but these were my brothers. We’d been raised together, cured together like the finest Iberian ham—my favorite—and they were the only people I could stand for more than a few hours.
They were pains in my asses, but that worked both ways. I figured they felt the same because, in the grand scheme of things, none of us had that many friends. We all hung out together, and then did our own lone wolf shit before coming back to the clan.
Of course, that was normal considering we were at the top of the tree. It wasn’t like there were many people we could shoot the shit with when everyone in our vicinity was under us and, therefore, not to be trusted with everything we knew.
I sniffed at the thought, but my sniff turned into a curse when the antivirus program I’d created especially for Lodestar’s bullshit had an alarm pinging through the waiting room.
We were sitting in the warehouse where Declan was being treated, and I’d been working on his messed up life ever since he’d told us he had a blackmailer.
Not only did I have to find that fucker, I also had to work out if Aela O’Neill was some kind of Mafia stooge, and then I had to deal with this Lodestar bullshit.
I’d come across the hacker when she’d managed to break my code and had penetrated Eoghan’s security system on his apartment. It had caused a real shitstorm for him with his new wife, because Lodestar, being a cunt, had tripped his phone too and had sent his mistress a text.
When he and Inessa, his new wife, had walked into the apartment, the slut had been waiting, legs spread, for Eoghan to ‘service’ her. Leticia was dead now, on my orders—the slut had known what she was doing so I felt no guilt. But Lodestar?
A bona fide bitch, and while I might otherwise be impressed by her abilities, mostly she was a burr under my skin. A mosquito dancing around my ears while I tried to sleep at night.
Of course, as irritating as mosquitos were, they were also one of the top killers in the world… Lodestar was dangerous. That made her all the more fun to play with though. It would also make it even better when I squashed her with my tennis shoe.
“What the hell is that?” Eoghan hissed, rubbing his ear as my laptop carried on sounding the alarm.
Last thing I needed was Lodestar getting into my computer, so I shut shit down, defragged my system, and quickly cleared it. My program had already isolated her presence, and I knew it would be analyzing how she’d jacked into my system, but it was annoying that she kept on managing to do it.
Muttering under my breath as my computer restarted, once it was back online, I quickly logged into Aela’s bank account again.
“Okay, so Declan doesn’t have to worry about money anymore,” was how I started the analysis.
“Huh?” Brennan asked, his brow furrowed when I peeped a look at him.
“She’s richer than him,” I stated dryly.
Finn, being our money man, got to his feet and wandered over to me. When he saw all the zeros in her account, he whistled under his breath. “Jesus. Wonder if she’d let me play with it. Haven’t fucked with the stock exchange in a long while.”
“Married life is slowing you down,” Eoghan joked, but when the two of them glanced at each other, sharing wide grins, I knew they were happy about that.
And I couldn’t blame them.
I didn’t want to be tied down. If anything, that was the last thing I wanted, but when I saw Finn with his wife, Aoife, and Eoghan with Inessa? It made me think about things I really didn’t need to be thinking about.
Scratching the stubble on my chin as I scanned through her payments, through her income streams, and spotting a few red herrings, I arched a brow and declared, “I don’t think she knows she’s a patsy, but I figure she is. There are a lot of Fuoco Corp subsidiaries who’ve paid her for artwork, yet she gets a lot of commissions. It could simply be that one dick in the Famiglia happened to see a piece of hers in a friend’s house, and his wife decided she wanted an O’Neill in their home too.” I shrugged. “No way of correlating—”
“There was enough to warrant an undercover operative being dumped in their lives for years,” Brennan pointed out gruffly.
I cast him a look, and even though I was usually blind with this stuff, I wondered if the idiot knew he was halfway to sounding like he had a crush on Aela.
I was pissed that Declan had managed to have a side piece for over a year without me knowing. We were all close, close enough to share intimate details of the women we banged. I knew he and Deirdre hadn’t been as close as Ma and Da thought—they’d believed there were wedding bells on the horizon—but Declan had never told me a damn thing about Aela.
And seeing her tat? The brand? That was unusual.
Claiming wasn’t something we did at our rank.
“She’s loaded,” Eoghan drawled from over my shoulder.
That he was impressed was a given. And Finn was too as his eyes scanned over her bank account.
“Jesus,” he muttered out of the blue. “Is that how much academies cost?”
“You’d better get Jacob onto a shortlist. I’d hate for him not to be among Manhattan’s elite as he grows up,” I mocked.
“We never were,” Aidan pointed out.
“Dragged up,” Eoghan joked wryly, even though we’d all gone to Catholic private schools.
Mostly because no way would Da have gotten away with dragging us out of classes the way he had if he didn’t have the diocese in his pocket. We’d spent more time out of school with truancy marks on our records once we entered our teen years and became more acquainted with the life.
Even as I thought about that shit, I wondered if Declan knew what Seamus was coming into.
He was a teenager. Ripe for introduction into our world. Did Declan accept that Da was going to be introducing him into the way of things? Was he happy about that?
I wasn’t sure if I would be.
There were things we’d all done that I wouldn’t wish on any nephew of mine.
Of course, it wasn’t my place…
I cut Finn a look, wondering how he felt. He was clearly thinking of sending Jacob to a private school, so did that mean he didn’t want his kid to be in the life too?
Pursing my lips at the thought, I decided now wasn’t the time for thinking crap like that, and I grumbled, “What else am I looking for? You wanna know how much she spends at Whole Foods?”
Brennan grunted. “No, I just wanted to make sure she was clean.”
“Far as I can see she is. All her money is legitimate—from banks that are based in the U.S. So not even any money laundering is really going down either, because the quantities are all high, and they’d be flagged by the IRS.
“She’s got herself a good business going on. Jesus, they said crime pays. I never knew art was just as beneficial.”
“Why the fuck is she a teacher at a college then?” Aidan rumbled.
I shot him a look. “Maybe it fulfills her?”
He frowned at that, but I got it. Looking for shit that fulfilled us was something that had been whooped out of us as kids.
Dreams and goals were for other people.
We had to work for the family, we had to make the O’Donnellys the most feared clan in the city, and we had to make sure that the Five Points were around for the next generation.
I figured it said a lot about us that we were all in our mid-thirties to early forties and we’d only just started popping out kids. Well, Finn had. Eoghan was the youngest, and his marriage hadn’t exactly been his choice, had it? He’d have s
tayed single if he could, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they didn’t have kids for a long time because Inessa was practically still jailbait.
“Plus, I’ve been looking into her movements too,” I reasoned slowly. “She traveled a lot while Seamus was young—” Christ, it was hard to believe there was a kid in the family now. “Then, when he turned eleven, she started slowing down.”
“That’s when kids start middle school, isn’t it?” Finn asked, his brow puckered.
“So long since you were even in school it’s a wonder you can remember,” I remarked dryly, laughing when he shoved my arm, but his lips were definitely twitching.
“Seems like she was putting down roots for his benefit,” I confirmed.
“With that school, a change of pace, and the look of her house, I don’t think any of us can deny that she’s done right by the kid,” Brennan observed.
I cast him a look. “When Da asks, I’ll make sure he knows.”
“He’s going to be an issue,” Finn concurred.
“We need to keep them all apart until Declan’s better. Until he can keep a handle on things, because Da is enough to make her run,” Brennan warned. “You know how fucked up he gets sometimes, and with almost losing Declan and then learning about Seamus—fuck, it was a cute thing for her to name him after Grandda, but that’s only going to mess with his head all the more.” He rubbed a hand over his brow, and I could sense his fatigue from all the way over here.
Barely refraining from yawning, I decided I was tired too. It wasn’t something I often allowed myself to feel because I had too much shit going on, too many plates to spin to sleep, but as I saw my brother’s exhaustion, I allowed myself to feel it as well.
Things had been hectic since Dec had been brought into surgical care here, and it wasn’t going to lighten up now that we had family to protect.
From family.
Jesus.
I rubbed my eyes. “Ma’s going to be just as bad. She’ll want to meet him.”
“It’s fucked up for Seamus to meet his grandparents before he meets his da,” Finn stated, crossing his arms over his chest.
I nodded. “Agreed.”
Filthy Dark: A SECOND CHANCE/SECRET BABY, MAFIA ROMANCE (THE FIVE POINTS' MOB COLLECTION Book 3) Page 9