Page 7 of Audacity

‘As in Sullivan Construction. He’s recently taken over from his old man.’

Oh.Now I understand. Sullivan owns half of the London docklands. They’re an enormous Irish construction company going back several generations. They went public a few years back, making the family billionaires several times over.

‘Does the son run the public company?’

‘No. He runs Rath Mor, the family’s investment vehicle. They’ve got assets of over eight billion. They kept a lot of the land. His brother runs the construction side.’

‘So it’s a private wealth fund, basically?’ I’m familiar with this concept: families so wealthy that they don’t go to a Swiss private bank like most normal rich people but manage their assets in-house like a proper investment firm.

‘Exactly. Do me a favour. Look Gabe up.’

‘Okay. Give me a sec.’ I reach across and pull my MacBook onto my lap, typingGabriel Sullivaninto the search engine.

Holy fucking shit.

‘He’s not Steve Goodall,’ Anton quips.

‘He most certainly is not,’ I murmur.

A guy stares back at me from the array of corporate and Getty images the search throws up.

Black hair.

Blue eyes.

Unsmiling.

Cheekbones that could cut glass and ramrod-straight posture.

In most of them, he’s wearing some variation of a suit and tie, or suit and unbuttoned shirt.

But as I scroll, one photo catches my eye.

I click into it and Google serves me up the following headline in the financial section ofThe Telegraph,dated last year.

Gabriel Sullivan is to leave the priesthood and take up the helm of Rath Mor Asset Management. His father, Ronan Sullivan, is due to retire this September.

It’s a formal shot, but boy does it hit differently from the others. Gabriel is standing in the nave of a beautiful old church, arms folded and smile absent —so far, so on-brand—in basic priest’s garb. He has on a black shirt and trousers and a simple white dog collar. Around him, the space dances with fragments of colour, courtesy of the sunlight streaming through the church’s stained-glass windows.

I lean in to study the image. He’s arresting and grave, this man of the cloth, and he is hotas fuck. So hot, in fact, that the little frisson of pleasure I’ve felt at speaking to Anton is instantly forgotten.

How does a man go fromthat—a sense of vocation so strong that he’s willing to subjugate his most primal desires in favour of a life of service—to paying up for sex on tap?

And what type of enigma does that make him? Do his former sacrificesexplainhis interest in the kind of solution only Seraph can provide, or do they render it whollyinexplicable?

Presumably, he once believed in the sanctity of the vows he took. In their ability to hold him and cleanse him and behallow him.

Presumably, that covenant promised him a celestial array of eternal, exalted rewards in exchange for renouncing any earthly worship of money and sex.

Yet he now wants to use his unlimited supply of the former to pay for an unlimited supply of the latter.

There’s lapsing.

There’s pivoting, even, in one’s belief system. One’s moral code.

But this guy’s one-eighty must be giving him whiplash.

‘You’ve gone awfully quiet,’ Anton drawls. ‘Like what you see?’

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