"Are you alright? You were in there a while."
"Fine. Bad oyster."
She looks at me for one beat longer than the question requires. Her eyes hold mine with an attention I've always read as friendship and which, in this moment, I'm too exhausted to analyze further.
"You sure?"
"I'm sure."
She drops it. Reaches across the table and squeezes my hand. "You'd tell me if something was wrong, right? We're friends."
"Of course."
We finish lunch. She pays. We walk out into the February cold, and she hugs me goodbye and tells me to take care of myself and the warmth in her voice sounds real. Almost is.
In the car. Alone in the back seat. The detail up front, eyes on the road, the practiced blindness of men who are paid to watch perimeters, not passengers.
I put my hand on my stomach. Press. The first knowing touch. The first deliberate contact between my palm and the secret growing beneath it.
I'm carrying the heir to the Konstantinos empire.
And I can't tell a soul.
Chapter 25
Siobhan
What He Took
* * *
Two days of holding the secret.
Two days of Nico's hand drifting to my stomach in sleep. Two days of swallowing nausea before he wakes, brushing my teeth twice, and smiling when he asks if I'm okay. Two days of sitting across from him at breakfast and watching his mouth move and thinking: you're going to be a father, and I can't tell you because telling you means losing you. Not his love. His respect for my autonomy. The distinction matters more than anyone who hasn't been traded between powerful men could understand.
Then… daythirty-two.I'm at the kitchen island with my laptop, rebuilding the risk matrix for the healthcare startup whose board meets Friday. Normal morning. Coffee I can't drink; replaced with ginger tea, which I told Nico I'm trying because Elena recommended it. He accepted this, a small lie stacked on the first.
My phone rings. The ringtone I assigned to Cormac. A specific sound I've used since Dublin, different from the default,because when Cormac calls, it's never casual, and I need the half-second warning to brace.
"Cormac?"
Breathing. Hard and controlled. The breathing of a man keeping himself from putting his fist through a wall. I've heard this breathing exactly twice before: the night our father was arrested, and the night Declan came home with broken ribs.
"Get to Elysium. Now. Bring Nico."
"What happened?"
"Viktor took Finn."
Three words.The kitchen doesn't change. The laptop screen still glows. The ginger tea still steams. But the world behind the world — the one made of threat assessments and probability calculations and the particular mathematics of violence. It reshapes itself around those three words.
Finn.
My brother who sat stone-still in the Elysium meeting while Cormac raged, and Declan reached for his weapon. The one who gave me the smallest nod in the lobby afterward, the nod that meant:I see what you did and I respect the play. The brother who understands strategy the way I do, who reads rooms the way I do, who once talked Cormac out of a bar fight in Southie using nothing but a perfectly timed joke and a round of whiskeys for the table. The fixer. The one who calls with information he knows will detonate and then hangs up before you can argue.
Viktor has him.
I don't scream. I don't cry. I go cold. The Ward Risk Advisory crisis protocol engages automatically: assess, prioritize, act. Emotion is a variable that gets processed later, after the situation is stabilized. I learned this from textbooks. I learned it better from being Padraig O'Brien's daughter.