Page 1 of Home Free

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The blows reverberated through Finn’s body, traveling through his fist and up his arm, echoing through his torso and legs. The man on the chair in front of him was bloody and bruised, his head hanging onto his chest, but other than a soft grunt, he barely responded to the impact.

It had been that way more and more lately. The first week, the man had been defiant, holding his head high as Finn and his brothers beat him, demanding answers to the questions that would solve the murder that had haunted Finn for the past six months.

After that, the man had retreated to a place inside himself, a place where the daily beatings didn’t seem to touch him.

His apathy prompted a surprising reaction in Finn.

A surprising rage.

Rage was his brothers’ department. While they’d built a business killing those who’d escaped justice, Finn had been traveling the world, taking work on village farms and in schools, taking pride in growing things, in seeing the light of knowledge in the eyes of children in Mexico and Africa and Eastern Europe.

And he’d learned too. The people he’d met in his eight years on the road had made him feel small in the best of ways, unimportant in a way that had diminished his personal pain.

Finn wasn’t a violent man.

That’s what he’d told himself anyway. But since they’d taken Eudorus prisoner, the person he’d been had started to feel further and further away, a distant memory that was starting to seem more like a dream.

Like he’d never been that person at all. Like maybe he’d only told himself he was that person to put distance between himself and his brothers, who made no excuses for the violence that was their business.

He looked down at his bruised and bloodied hands. Like the man in front of him, Finn had stopped feeling the pain a long time ago.

No, that wasn’t exactly true. He’d started to relish it, proof of his commitment to find the people behind the murder of his friends, Fedir and Iryna Kolisnyk, a murder that had left their young son, Petro, an orphan.

The door to the house opened behind him, and he turned toward the light. He didn’t know if it was day or night, if the column of light came from the kitchen or the sun.

His oldest brother, Ronan, appeared in the doorway. “I’ll relieve you.”

“I’m good,” Finn said, flexing his battered hand. “I’m going to get this fucker to talk.”

Sometimes Finn forgot that was why they were keeping the man, code-named Eudorus, prisoner.

“Nope,” Ronan said, stepping into the garage. “Time’s up.”

Finn glared at him, the urge to hurt someone transferred to his brother. One look at Ronan’s face told him there was no point fighting it. Aside from being the oldest of the six Murphy kids, Ronan was also a former Navy SEAL. He was used to being in command, and even now, both of them adults, Finn wasn’t eager to go toe-to-toe with his big brother.

Finn seethed as he headed for the stairs leading to the house.

“Anything new?” Ronan asked, stepping onto the concrete floor.

“Not a fucking thing.” Finn slammed the door to the garage. He plugged the kitchen sink and turned on the cold water, then removed the ice maker from the freezer and dumped the ice into the water.

He set a clean dish towel on the counter. When the sink was half full, he turned off the faucet and stuck his hands in the icy water.

He rested his elbows on the sink, wondering what it would take to get Eudorus to talk. He and Ronan, plus their brother Declan, had been taking turns beating the guy to a pulp for the past three weeks, but he’d barely said a word.

The trail to the person who’d hired Eudorus — the person behind Fedir and Iryna’s murder — was growing colder by the day. By now, he must know Eudorus had been captured during the invasion on the mountain house in Massachusetts, which meant he’d had three weeks to tie up any loose ends leading back to him.

That person had been operating a mining operation in Ukraine, near the village where Finn had been working for Petro’s parents. It was clear from the sample they’d stolen during a shootout in New York that an important paleontological discovery had been made there, but it was hard for Finn to imagine some prehistoric artifact being worth the lives of living breathing people, good people like Fedir and Iryna.

When Finn had first come back to Boston to ask his brothers for help finding answers, he’d expected to spend a few weeks at home while they used their business — Murphy Security and Intelligence, a facade for the assassination-for-hire enterprise that had made them rich — to dig around.

But weeks had turned into months, and somehow Finn had slid down the slippery slope of finding answers to killing a man during a shootout in New York and beating Eudorus to within an inch of his life.

Getting answers had become a singular pursuit, one whose end justified any means, eclipsing everything else in his life.

Well, almost everything. Elise Berenger’s face flashed in his mind. She was beautiful, with long flaxen hair and deep brown eyes that made him think of all of the world’s best hidden places, but that hadn’t been the thing that had drawn him to her like a sailor to a siren.

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