Then Nico Konstantinos's eyes land on me.
Not a glance. Not a sweep. Helands—with precision and intent and the absolute certainty that what he's looking at belongs to him. Those gold eyes pin me to the floor, and I feel it everywhere: my chest, my throat, the backs of my knees.
"Her. Siobhan O'Brien."
The room detonates. Cormac's chair scrapes back. Declan's already halfway to standing, hand moving to his hip where I know the Sig lives. Finn goes perfectly still, which is worse—Finn still is Finn calculating, and a calculating Finn is the most dangerous version.
And then my father's voice. Crackling through a prison phone line from a facility three states away, still controlling every room he touches like a hand reaching through the walls.
"Smart match. The girl has spine. She'll do it."
Cormac leans toward the phone. "That's her call, Da. Not yours."
"It's the family's call. And I'm still the head of this family last I checked." A pause. Static. "Unless you've taken my chair while I'm away, Cormac."
Cormac's jaw works. He doesn't answer. He doesn't have to—we all know Padraig wins. Padraig always wins, even from a cell.
The girl.Not Siobhan. Notmy daughter.Not evenher.The girl—a commodity, a card to play. The same way he traded Cormac's twenties for loyalty, sent Declan into fights that left him bleeding on our kitchen floor at seventeen, bartered Finn's conscience for political leverage, and ignored Ronan so completely that my youngest brother learned to disappear into a sketchbook rather than compete for attention he'd never win. We're all currency to Padraig O'Brien. I've known it since I was twelve years old and watched him sell our mother's jewelry to fund a territory war and tell her it wasfor the family.Everything is for the family.
Nothing is for us.
The rage is instant and familiar. A hot wire that runs from my stomach to my jaw, the same current that's been live since the first time I sat at the kitchen table and realized no one was going to ask me what I thought about anything, ever. I've spent twenty-six years being decided for—where I live, what I'm worth, who I belong to. My father from prison. Cormac from the head of our table. Even Declan, who thinks standing between me and danger is the same as respecting me.
I could fight it. I could scream, refuse, make a scene. Walk out.
But here's what none of them understand: I've already done the math. The alliance makes strategic sense. A marriage between the O'Briens and the Konstantinos family creates a bloc that Viktor can't break without a full-scale war on two fronts.It protects our docks. It protects Cormac's construction sites. It protects Finn, who's been taking meetings in places that make my skin crawl.
I can fight the decision. Or I can own it.
I stand up straighter. The room notices.
"I'll do it."
Silence. Cormac turns to me with an expression that's half fury, half something that might be pride if he'd ever admit to it. Declan's hand drops. Finn nods, barely.
"On my terms," I add, looking directly at Nico Konstantinos. "I want a meeting. Just us. Before I agree to anything."
His mouth does something. Not a smile—I've seen his smile, or the thing he uses in its place, and this isn't it. This is slower. More considered. Like I've said something that surprised him, and Nico Konstantinos doesn't get surprised.
"Agreed."
One word. Low. Definitive. And underneath it, something I wasn't expecting—interest. Not the kind that makes my skin crawl, the kind I've gotten from every connected man in Boston since I turned sixteen. This is different. He's looking at me the way he looked at the intelligence reports: with attention. Calculation. Respect.
Or maybe I'm projecting, because my heart is hammering and I need this to be something other than a transaction.
The room begins to move again—voices, logistics, the machinery of war grinding into gear. Cormac grabs my arm on the way out. "We need to talk."
"Later."
"Siobhan—"
"I said later, Cormac."
He lets go. He always does, eventually. That's the difference between my brother and my father—Cormac lets go. My father never learned how.
Declan falls into step on my other side, a wall of fury and Celtic knots. He doesn't say anything. Doesn't have to. His silence is a monologue:I'll kill him if he touches you. I'll kill him if he looks at you wrong. I'll kill him on principle, because you're my sister and he's a Greek and Greeks don't get to own O'Briens.
"Don't," I say.