Page 74 of Haunted Nights & Savage Sins
He holds my gaze and tries on bravery. It sits wrong on his face. I take the mallet to the other leg. The sound is uglier this time. Something in his knee did not like it. He gasps and tips his head back and for a second he is just a man who made a bad bargain and knows it.
“Talk,” I say.
“Because you’re getting in the way,” he pants. “You moved the dock crews. You cut off two pilots. You changed the dates, the routes, the contacts. You locked out old channels. You did it fast. You did it without asking. It made people nervous.”
“People,” I say. “Which people.”
He swallows. “Families that have kept the balance for a long time.”
“The balance,” Brenna repeats. “You mean the agreement to keep the pie cut the same while everyone pretends not to be starving.”
He looks at her again, then at me, then at the black fireplace like maybe there is a god there. “They think you and her together are a problem,” he says. “Not because of love. Because of math.”
My grip tightens. “Explain.”
“You put two empires together and you do not just get bigger. You get heavier. You pull other pieces toward you. People who have been allies look at that and they do the math. They say if they let you keep pulling you will swallow them. So they talk about stopping the pull before it turns into a tide.”
The room feels colder. Brenna steps closer to my side, heat against my forearm. “How many talk,” she asks.
Owen takes a shaking breath. “Enough that if one fails the next will try. Not all at once. Quiet, steady. Ships delayed that never make it. Crews that get sick. Accidents. Then a night like this where a man like me draws the short straw and comes to make a house quiet.”
I want to hit him again just to bleed off the need, but information matters more than rhythm.
“Who is organizing,” I ask. “There is always one hand tying the threads.”
He stares at the floor. Sweat runs. “I do not know who holds them all.”
He is not just a blunt instrument then. He has watched the board. In my head pieces start to move. Routes. Warehouses.Shell companies. Silent partners who are not so silent. Questions stack beside the ghosts on the mantle.
I crouch until my eyes are level with his. “Does my father know.”
The candle by the window hisses. Maxim shifts his weight. Brenna goes very still.
Owen tries to smile and fails. “Your father knows nothing and that’s how it needs to stay.”
“Liar,” I say, quiet and certain.
He flinches. My father knows what he is paid to know. He is not in this country. There are distances even money cannot shrink in a day.
Brenna steps half a pace forward. “Does my father know,” she asks.
Owen looks at her like she is a trick. “Your father is even more oblivious than his. Your father actually thinks this marriage is going to help him in the long run, the second you pop out any kids with the last name O’Sullivan your father is all but dead. You’re the last of his fucking line and he gave you away to get more of the now and nothing of the future.” he says.
Heat scorches the back of my throat. Brenna does not move. Her eyes shine like wet coal and her mouth presses into a line that is not soft at all.
I straighten, set the mallet on the desk, and pull open another drawer. There is a roll of cloth there, tools in stitched pockets. Pliers, a punch, a little torch with a hissing mouth. I do not plan to use the torch in a room with memories soaked into the walls, but I let him see it. Men talk faster when they can imagine the next ten minutes.
“Times,” I say. “Dates. Routes we are not supposed to look at. Warehouse numbers. Call signs. Give me enough to pull a thread and see where it runs.”
He closes his eyes and starts to talk. Numbers. Wednesdays that became Fridays. A plane that files for Tulsa and lands in Amarillo, waits, then goes dark and takes off without a plan. A container supposed to hold ceramic tile that weighed too much and was rushed past inspection because a man at the gate had a new truck two weeks later. He talks and I watch his throat work and try to see the shape of the thing behind his words.
Maxim cuts in once, low, because he is hearing what I hear. “That warehouse,” he says. “The old tram hub. It sits between two buildings we don’t own.”
Owen nods fast. He is eager now that he can feel the end of the rope and wants the last minute to mean something. “Yes. They use the dead angle. There is a back alley they call the spine, you can get a truck in, no prying eyes. The city still thinks the easement is closed.”
I file it away. “Names,” I say. I want to know who.”
He swallows. Gives me one. Another. Two more. Some I know, some I do not, some I have only heard next to numbers in the corner of a ledger. The board gets clearer. The rage settles into something colder and sharper. It feels like the first breath after a long dive, like coming up through fire and finding air.
