Page 5 of Wretched Soul
“I’ve found another distillery I want you to research,” Ash tells me.
Whiskey-making has been Ash’s passion for years, and we already have a shit load of distilleries in our portfolio, but not enough apparently.
My brother has a natural talent for taking any industrial process and enhancing it. He takes after our dad in that respect, but Dad was never business-oriented. Other people made more money from his ideas than he ever did. Ash takes a different approach, and with three additional Griffins bringing their own unique skills to the table, we’ve managed to build a billion-dollar empire.
My particular talent is information gathering, and I specialize in accessing records I’m not supposed to see. The Griffin way is to take a failing business and turn it around. Our work benefits local communities as much as it adds to our wealth, and we use that wealth to invest in new projects. It’s what we did with the paper mill that Maddie’s family owned.
“When are you going back to Brimstage?” I ask her.
Maddie meets my hard stare with a smile. “The paper mill is performing better than ever. Our ops director is training up new management, so our work there is done for the moment. We don’t have any plans to go back for a while. I’m all yours.”
Hunter clears his throat to remind his wife that she’s not mine, she’s his. Fine by me.
Maddie pretends not to notice, and winks at me. “I promise to give you all the attention I have left once I’ve satisfied my husband’s demands.”
“So, none then,” Hunter says.
There’s an edge to his voice even though he knows as well as I that Maddie’s only flirting to get a reaction from me. And she does like teasing me. She thinks I’m easier to crack than Ash, who’s a closed book to everyone, including his brothers. Reid, by contrast, wears his heart on his sleeve, but my half-brother does have better genes than the rest of us.
Ash, Hunter and I are the products of my dad’s first marriage, and I was only a few months old when my mom walked out. Dad remarried and Reid came along when I was four. His mom, Lisa was like a ray of sunshine breaking through dark clouds, and Reid takes after her. But the problem with so much light is that it deepens the shadows. And the shadows are where I’ve always felt most comfortable.
And now Hunter’s brought another ray of fucking sunshine into our lives by marrying Maddie. Instinct tells me to retreat, hence the new apartment, but shunning the light is provingharder than I expected. When Hunter isn’t being the surly and stubborn prick I love, I catch a glint in his eyes that wasn’t there before. I want some of that. Just not from Maddie.
My fingers drum on the solid oak table as I fight the urge to pick up my phone again. I don’t know much about Lily Kendrick except how she tastes, and the way an invisible fist wrapped around my heart when she called me an asshole. But if I was looking for some of what Hunter has – and it’s a big if – Lily wouldn’t be a bad place to start.
“Aren’t you eating?” Reid asks.
I blink. Everyone else’s plates are loaded and mouths are full. When did that happen? “Sure,” I say, ladling stew onto my plate. The sooner we eat, the sooner we can leave.
“Do we need to talk about Barrett now we’re all together?” Reid asks, looking around the table.
I may not show my own emotions easily, but I am observant, and I notice Maddie tense. Hunter’s hand slips beneath the table to rest on her leg. We’d first met Maddie on what was meant to be her wedding day, disrupting her family’s plan to marry her off to Barrett Emerson. We have plenty of enemies, but our fight with Barrett is personal. He’s the product of our mother’s second marriage, but since we’ve never considered Alice Emerson as our mom, Barrett certainly doesn’t deserve the label of brother.
Maddie dodged a bullet as far as Barrett is concerned. The heir to the Emerson empire inherited all his wealth, and his specialty is asset-stripping failing businesses and decimating small towns in the process. It’s what would have happened at Brimstage if we hadn’t intervened.
Maddie’s better off with us, and she knows it, but her route to happiness wasn’t easy. A couple of months ago, Barrett had sent one of his men to try to steal her back. I can’t wait until we come face to face with him again. And he can’t avoid us forever.
“Sorry, Maddie. I didn’t think,” Reid adds quickly. “We can leave that conversation until we’re back in the office tomorrow.”
“No, I’d be interested to hear what he’s been up to,” she says.
“There’s not much to tell,” replies Ash softly. It’s not a tone I’m used to hearing, but Ash has been known to fall victim to the Maddie-effect too. “It looks like he’s busy putting out some fires of his own making. Literally and metaphorically.”
“What do you mean?” she asks him.
“He’s splitting his time between New York and Poulton Springs in southern Illinois. He’s been cleaning up a site where a food processing factory burned down quite recently. It wasn’t so much a takeover as it was an erasure.”
“From the plans his architects are drawing up,” I add, “it looks like he’s using the land to build a new base. The designs rival any of the other Emerson mansions.”
Maddie’s brow furrows. “He wants to live here, in Illinois?”
“I doubt it was his initial plan,” says Ash. “When he bought the factory, he didn’t know one of the warehouses was being used as a distribution hub for the McConkeys.”
She still looks worried. “YourMcConkeys?”
John McConkey runs the Irish mafia out of Las Vegas. Although calling them ‘ours’ is a stretch, they are our allies. We mainly deal with Killian, John’s son, and we keep our work strictly legitimate, barring the occasional lapse. We learned early on that there are times when we have to defend ourselves, and with the exception of Reid, we all have blood on our hands. But never innocent blood. It’s a line none of us would cross.
“Do I want to know what goods go through the distribution hub?” Maddie asks.
