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Amber eyes stare up at me. They are glassy. No Quinn fire behind them. I scan the rest of the body, taking in the bullet wound in the forehead, the broken limbs splayed across the concrete.
Ian.
“Fuck,” I growl, slamming the photo back on the table and dragging a knuckle through my beard. “Who did this?”
I stomp over to the floor-to-ceiling windows that offer a panoramic view of the city below.
My city.
Ian, my second cousin, and one of my henchmen, dead. I taught the kid how to drive. I bought him his first goddamn hooker on a summer trip to Paris.
“What happened?” I manage, eyes never leaving the twinkling lights of the city below. “Revenge for me killing that Bratnov kid,” Donnacha growls, face dark.
My jaw clenches. “How sure are we?”
“This was tucked into his top pocket.”
Donnacha pulls out an orange and black ribbon, tossing it on the table. Small, striped, made of silk.
It’s the Ribbon of St. George. A Russian symbol of fire and gunpowder.
The Bratnov’s symbol of war.
“War is coming, Lorcan,” Antoin says quietly.
Hot tension swirls between the table, along with the thick silence.
“I welcome the war.” I crack my knuckles and scan the faces of my first cousins. Men I grew up with, men who will fight with me to the death.
They are still, unwavering.
“It doesn’t make sense,” Antoin says, scrubbing at the scruff on his jaw. “They will risk losing the treaty because of one trigger-happy kid?”
Donnacha crosses his arms and says, “No. They saw how the Delfinos blew our family apart with one parcel bomb. Bratnov sees us as weaker now, and they want to finish what the Italian’s started.” He refuses to buckle under my stare. “Perhaps they forgot how quickly we massacred the Delfinos.”
Antoin chimes in. “They will be expecting a massacre. We need to think differently.”
“We’ll kill them all,” I roar, slamming my hand against the table. “Every single Bratnov—we’ll squeeze the life out of every single one with our own bare hands.”
“I’m with you on that one,” Donnacha says.
“Please,” Antoin interjects, eerily calm. His eyes meet mine and they plead with me. “Lorc, I’m begging you. We need a plan. For once, we need to think with our heads and not with our trigger fingers. Otherwise, it won’t just be Bratnov blood that’s shed. It’ll be Quinn blood too.”
I look around the table, locking eyes with each of my men. One by one, they give a slight nod of agreement.
The anger relents a fraction. “Then let’s get planning.”
My men jump up into action, pulling out cell phones and opening cabinet drawers, creating a tornado around me.
I sit with my whiskey glass in the eye of the storm.
Bloodshed is the consequence of war. And it’s crazy, sick, and twisted where my poisoned brain goes.
It goes to protecting Poppy from it all.
Poppy
Orna heard about my explosive dinner with Lorcan from her sister who escorted me back to the museum sobbing. Before I woke up this morning, she’d slipped into my room and left a kettle and a box of teabags by the door, along with a note that said, “In Ireland, tea is the solution to every problem.”
