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“No. Use the Galway company.”

He turns at the foot of the stairs and glances over his shoulder to check I’m following.

With the dish in my hand, the fork tucked against the edge of it, I pick at a piece of chicken because my belly needs obedience in the most irritating way possible.

Fionn starts up the stairs.

“I don’t care what his solicitor thinks,” he continues. “Buy the debt first, then the land.”

Land.

Debt.

Solicitor.

“I’m not letting those northern fuckers put a footprint south of the river.”

He’s talking about the Crowe brothers, I know he is.

I follow him along the first landing, past a window where dark glass throws our reflections back at us. Him ahead, broad-shouldered and barefoot, phone to his ear. Me behind him, leaking his cum and carrying leftovers through his family house like I’m his girlfriend.

Which I’m definitely not.

“And if Alasdair asks?” the voice on the other end says, faint but just loud enough for me to catch.

Fionn stops on the next set of stairs.

I stop too.

His hand rests on the banister, and he stares up at the dark sweep of the top floor, jaw set.

“If my father asks,” he says, “you tell him you know nothing about it.”

Something tightens beneath my ribs.

This conversation isn’t Fionn acting as his father’s son moving pieces for the Harringtons. He’s moving pieces around his father, too.

I should listen carefully and consider how to use it against him. Instead, I want to know what he’s building beneath his da’s nose and why he’s letting me hear him.

He starts walking again.

“No,” he says. “Nothing that connects to me until I decide it does.”

I glance at the food in my hand, and my stomach knots.

Truth is, I don’t really know this man.

This situation is just a pull of the forbidden. The danger of wanting something that only feels alive because it’s out of reach.

Something that would die the second it became available.

When we reach the top floor, the air changes, and the space becomes private with lower, slanted ceilings. There are zero portraits, and all the doors are shut tight on both sides.

Fionn stops outside the last door on the landing.

“Email me everything by midnight," he says. “I want the boundary maps before breakfast.”

He ends the call, pushes the door open, and looks back at me, knowing exactly how much I heard.