Page 6 of Home Free

Giving most of the money to Anichka for Petro’s care had been the perfect solution. It enabled Anichka, who had two children of her own, to send them with Petro to the private school in town. It had made it possible for Anichka and her husband to add a bedroom and bathroom to their small house and to buy enough good food for the whole family, ensuring that caring for Petro wasn’t an added stress.

What Finn didn’t send to Anichka, he set aside for Petro’s future, thanks to Nick who had counseled him regarding the best long-term investments. If all went according to plan, Petro would have a tidy sum by the time he became an adult.

Finn signed off with Anichka and sat back in the chair, staring at the screens in the control room of the mountain house. When Clay came up, the screens were all lit up at once, Clay working his hacker magic to try and run down leads on Eudorus’ boss, the man named Achilles who had called the shots that got Fedir and Iryna killed.

Now the screens were blank, Petro’s image gone. Finn tried to call him once a week, but it was clear he was becoming a distant memory to the little boy who had trailed him like a puppy while Finn had lived in his house in Ukraine, working on Fedir and Iryna’s farm in exchange for room and board.

Finn wouldn’t have minded if Petro still had his parents, but he had lost everything, and now Finn was nothing but a vaguely familiar face on a screen. Anichka and her husband were undoubtedly taking good care of Petro. Finn had known them while he’d been in Ukraine and was confident they were good people.

But none of that came close to easing Petro’s pain and the loss he would carry for the rest of his life.

It was a loss Finn knew well. First his mother from cancer, then Erin from an overdose when she’d been barely out of high school.

Not the same as being gunned down in their home, but losses that still sometimes felt like a black hole of misery in Finn’s chest. Unlike his brothers, Finn had never fooled himself into believing he was over it, had never used violence to ease his suffering.

Until now.

He’d spent eight years traveling the world, proving to himself that it wasn’t shit, that there was still beauty everywhere if he looked for it. Believing it — seeing it — hadn’t made the pain disappear, but he’d thought it made it easier to bear.

He’d been wrong. The torment had just been sleeping inside him, pushed aside by the people he’d met and the places he’d seen, waiting for a chance to catch him unaware.

Seeing Petro’s face onscreen, Finn couldn’t help imagining the little boy twenty years from now. He would carry the same trauma Finn carried (his mother, pale and thin, struggling to breathe… his sister, alone in her death with a needle in her arm in some shitty apartment downtown), except it would be worse, because Petro had been there in the woods outside the house, had heard the gunshots that ended the lives of his parents.

And Finn would always be part of that memory, an unwilling participant in the worst moment of Petro’s life. How long would it be before Petro started asking himself why Finn hadn’t done anything to stop it? Why Finn had stayed with him instead of running into the house?

Would he believe that Finn had stayed to protect him? Did Finn believe it himself?

They were questions without answers, and Finn got to his feet and paced the darkened control room. He thought of the safe hidden in the walls of the closet, holding the amber sample that had been excavated in Ukraine. Finn didn’t yet understand the connection between the amber and the murders, but he knew it was there, and that knowledge filled him with something heavy and toxic.

He hadn’t recognized the feeling building inside him in the early days with Eudorus at the mountain house. It had caught him by surprise, had caused him to go running through the trails in the woods around the house when he wanted to crawl out of his own skin.

But he recognized it now. Welcomed it. The need to hurt someone the way he’d been hurt, the way Petro had been hurt.

He thought of Eudorus in the garage, filthy and bloody, his body battered and broken, his face likely damaged forever, not that there would be a forever for Eudorus. Ronan had made that clear. They weren’t in the business of teaching men like Eudorus a lesson. Their business was death, protection for the rest of society, sleeping soundly in their beds, trusting that the justice system was fair and honest, that it would do the job of holding accountable people like Eudorus, like the man who had hooked Erin on heroin when she was still in high school.

Finn’s brothers knew better. Eudorus would have to die. He’d been part of Fedir and Iryna’s murder, had brought a team of mercenaries into the mountain house in an attempt to steal the amber sample Fedir and Iryna had died for.

Six months ago, Eudorus’ inevitable execution would have been a hard reality for Finn to swallow. Now he could only hope he was there at the end. In the meantime he would make Eudorus talk, would make him confess who had hired him, who had been behind the order to kill Fedir and Iryna.

Then Finn would finally know why.

He flexed his fingers, closing them into fists and opening them, primed to go back to work in the garage.

At the front of the house, the door closed and a voice called out.

“Ronan? Finn? You guys here?”

It was Julia arriving with Elise for the weekend.

Finn heard footsteps on the stairs and listened as they continued down the hall. Then she was walking through the doorway and into his arms.

Elise.

“Hey you,” she said, sinking against him.

He buried his face in her hair and breathed her in. She smelled like coconut and vanilla, like fresh air and home. “Hey.”

He unclenched his fists and held her tight.

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