The Devil’s Keepsake by Somme Sketcher
Lorcan
I wash down Poppy’s revelation with another swig of whiskey. But even the burning sensation as it slides down my throat doesn’t take the edge off the shock.
Poppy doesn’t have a relationship with Marcus Murphy.
Marcus Murphy doesn’t know that his daughter is here.
In my head, it was obvious. Marcus Murphy would find out I had his daughter when she stopped replying to his texts. Stopped FaceTiming him every Sunday to give him updates about college life.
It explains why he hasn’t come.
I have a lot of emotions toward Poppy right now, but the whiskey haze is making it hard to make sense of them.
Admiration. She took herself from a slum kid with a pathetic lackey for a father to the best business school in the country. There’s clearly more to her than a beautiful face and a razor-sharp tongue.
And anger. It’s not directed at Poppy though. It’s directed towards Marcus Murphy himself. It’s fresh and raw, not the pent-up shit I’ve been stewing on for years.
When he stepped aside and let me stake a claim on his daughter at the fake funeral, I always thought it was because he had a plan. His revenge would come, but he’d serve it ice cold. That’s what Murphy always did.
But he didn’t. He let that precious, rare China Doll slip through his fingers and into my fists without so much of a protest.
A snarl rumbles behind my rib cage. Just when I thought I couldn’t hate that bastard anymore.
There are voices somewhere down the hall, hushed but serious. Footsteps grow louder, faster. A smile pulls at the corners of my mouth. This must be Poppy coming back because she can’t find a housekeeper to let her into the Museum.
I set down my drink and straighten my back, turning to the doorway expectantly.
I don’t even bother to hide my annoyance when Eileen, my secretary, appears. As always, her face is hardened with frustration and crinkled from years of being a miserable old bitch. “Do you ever answer your cell?” she barks, clutching at her chest.
I raise an eyebrow. “I know you’re not talking to me like that, Eileen,” I snap.
A few deep breaths and she just about manages to control herself. “My apologies, Mr. Quinn,” she says in a tone that is anything but sorry. “But it’s an emergency. Your presence is needed at the office, now. Everyone is there.”
The hairs on my neck stand to attention. “Everyone?”
“Antoin and all of your other cousins. The car is waiting for you out front.”
Twenty minutes later, I’m stepping out of the elevator and into my penthouse office of the Quinn Ventures sky-rise building in downtown Boston.
A sea of suits around my boardroom table. All my first cousins. They all turn to me at the sound of the elevator ding, amber eyes burning. Antoin leaps to his feet. “Where the fuck have you been?” he growls, slamming a hand against my oak table. “We’ve been calling you for an hour.”
“Chill out, man,” Donnacha growls next to him.
Whatever the emergency, I need to stamp this shit out right away. He isn’t going to talk to me like that, especially not in front of my cousins. Three strides and I’m in his face. “Don’t ever talk to me like that again,” I hiss, matching his furious expression.
Like two lions standing off in the Serengeti. He’s the first to back down. Obviously.
He sinks back down to his seat and straightens his tie. “We have a problem.”
“No shit,” I snarl, “I wouldn’t be here if there wasn’t. What’s going on?”
I don’t notice the brown envelope in the middle of the table until Donnacha slides it in my direction. I rip open the flap and tug out the single Polaroid photo.
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.