"When?"
"Last night. Meeting a contact in Southie. They grabbed him off the street. Left his phone on the sidewalk with a video."
"How long do we have?"
"Viktor wants a meeting with Nico. Forty-eight hours. After that…" He stops. The breathing again.
"I'm on my way."
I close the laptop. Cross to the bedroom. Nico is on the phone, speaking Greek, the low cadence that means business. I stand in the doorway, and he looks at me and whatever he sees on my face makes him end the call mid-sentence.
"Viktor took Finn."
His face doesn't change. Itempties. The warm man who poured my ginger tea three minutes ago vacates and the weapon replaces him in the space between one heartbeat and the next.
"When?"
"Last night. Cormac has a video. Forty-eight hours."
He's already moving. Phone out. Calling Lex. Greek words, fast, clipped, the consonants sharp in a way they never are when he speaks to his mother. He looks at me while he talks. I look back. Neither of us breaks eye contact. The conversation with Lex happens around us but the real communication is in the gaze: I'm coming with you. I know. Don't try to stop me. I won't.
Elysium. The back room. Cormac is pacing the length of the table. Four steps, turn, four steps, turn. The rhythm of a man whose youngest combat-trained brother has been taken by the man they've been hunting for weeks. Declan stands at the window, motionless, coiled, the stillness of the enforcer before the violence starts. Ronan is in the corner with his phone pressed to his ear, speaking low and fast — working his contacts, the youngest O'Brien pulling strings no one ever sees him pull.
Nico arrives with Lex. He crosses the room to Cormac. Doesn't offer a handshake. Puts his hand on Cormac's shoulder. The gesture is deliberate. Public. Every man in the room sees it.
"Your brother is my brother now. This is family business."
The word "family" lands with a weight that has nothing to do with blood. Cormac looks at Nico and for the first time since I married this man, my oldest brother's face shows more than grudging tolerance. A nod. One nod. The acknowledgment that this marriage isn't strategy anymore.
They play the video. Viktor's face fills the screen. Composed. Almost pleasant. The particular calm of a man who believes he's already won. Behind him: a chair, restraints, a room with concrete walls and a single overhead light. Finn is in the chair. Blood at his temple. Left eye swollen shut. His shirt is torn and there are marks on his forearms that suggest he fought before they tied him down.
He looks at the camera. Through the blood and the swelling and the restraints, my brother finds the lens and manages half a grin.
"Told them... you'd come."
My throat closes. The half-grin. The defiant humor of a man who is beaten and bound and probably terrified and who still — still — cracks a joke for the camera because he knows his sister will see it and he'd rather she remember him smiling than screaming. That's the O'Brien inheritance: humor as armor. I do it too. I learned it from watching him.
The nausea hits. Not morning sickness this time. Fear. Or both. The two have become indistinguishable, that churning acid that rises in my throat whether I'm kneeling on marble at dawn or watching my brother bleed on a screen. I swallow it. Hard. Press my lips together and breathe through my nose and force the wave back down.
Across the table, Lex glances at me. Then away. If he noticed, he attributes it to what anyone would: a woman watching her brother's torture video. The gap between his assumption and the truth is a canyon only I can see.
Nico lays out the tactical situation. Three known locations where Viktor operates. Finn could be at any of them. They need to hit all three simultaneously. Greek forces take the harbor facility. Irish takes the warehouse in Dorchester. A joint team takes the industrial complex near the waterfront.
"I'm coming."
The room pivots. Cormac's pacing stops. Declan turns from the window. Ronan lowers his phone. Lex shifts. The fractional movement that means he's recalculating security parameters for a package that just doubled in complexity.
Nico studies me. I wait for the refusal. For "absolutely not."For the argument I've rehearsed in my head since the car ride over.
"You stay with me. You do exactly what I say. And if I tell you to run, you run."
"Agreed."
"Siobhan." His voice drops. The boss voice replaced by something lower, rougher, the voice he uses in the dark when the armor is off. "If I tell you to run, yourun. No arguments. No heroics. You run and you don't look back."
I hold his eyes. The secret presses against my ribs like a hand. I should tell him. Right now. He deserves to know what he's risking. What I’m risking. Two lives, not one, walking into a building where men will try to kill us.
I open my mouth.