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The last person to be that close was Sera Tallon. The memory shoots through me like a live current. My hand curls into a tight fist, and I shake her off.

Graves appears behind me in the mirror, arms folded, his expression too familiar with my silences.

“What’s wrong with ya today?”

I head to the sink in the far corner, turn the tap on, and wash the blood from my mouth.

“Weddings aren’t my thing,” I say.

Water drips from my chin into the basin, and for a second my mind gives me Sera’s mouth, her throat under my hand, and my cock hard against her hip when I should have been teaching her a lesson.

I turn the tap harder.

“I’m used to playing up to the crowd.” I turn into him. “Now I’ll have to learn how to deal with a wife I don’t give a fuck about.”

Graves shrugs. “You’re on your own with that task, Fionn.”

I take a clean towel from the shelf, dry my face, and unscrew the lid from a bottle of water.

“Your father wants you in the house by ten,” he says. “Security walk-through before the florists finish turning the place into a botanical garden.”

“Fine,” I say, heading straight to the shower room. “You better be there later.”

“Wouldn’t miss it,” I hear him say as I turn on the water and step under the jets.

Once I’m done, Graves is already gone.

I redress and leave the barn, moving past armed men in black coats doing security checks.

My phone vibrates before I reach the gravel path.

I answer without slowing. “Talk to me, Donnelly.”

“The old haulage yard by the dock road,” Donnelly says. “The seller’s solicitor wants to know why the buying company changed.”

“Because the yard isn’t buying itself.”

“He needs a reason.”

“Give him one. The first company holds the lease. The second buys the land.”

“That makes it look like two separate deals.”

“It is two separate deals.”

A delivery van idles near the side entrance while staff carry crates of champagne under canvas. Flowers pass through the doors in armfuls, their scent fighting the wet air.

Donnelly lowers his voice. “Once this completes, you’ll have the haulage yard, the back road into the warehouses, and the storage units beside it.”

“I’m aware.”

“That gives you control of the whole run from the dock road.”

“Not the whole run,” I say, looking left and right, my voice low.

“No,” he replies. “Not yet.”

I glance at the house, where my father’s men move through the rain with guns under their coats and orders in their ears.