“You’re insane.” She shook her head as her pink lips quivered.
“Olivia. Sweet, Olivia,” I said as I placed my hand on her cheek. “You haven’t seen anything yet.”
Moving away from her, I stepped onto the porch. Ethan giggled and reached for me the second he saw me. I him from Evelyn’s arms and spun him around.
“Ethan!” I laughed. And we both giggled as I pulled him to my chest. I kissed his face as he smacked my own.
“I vaguely remember a woman once telling me she doesn’t know how to be a mother,” Evelyn snickered as she studied me.
I looked to Ethan, who happily sucked on his pacifier while watching my face. “I have no idea what she’s talking about,” I told him.
“Of course not,” Evelyn said for him, as her eyes softened at the sight of us. “You remind me of myself when I first had Neal.”
“Is that a good thing?” Knowing Neal, that could have been taken both ways.
“Yes, it is. Are you going out?”
I nodded, not wanting to release Ethan.
“This will be over soon and I’ll be back to tuck you in,” I whispered into his ear. Liam came out as I spoke, dressed semi-casually with better shoes. He came over to us and Ethan rolled in my arms, trying to grab his daddy.
“Well, I can see who your favorite is,” I said as I frowned and handed him over to Liam. Not a second later, Ethan was pulling on Liam’s hair.
“Nice to see you too.” Liam winced, as he reached up to separate Ethan’s little hands from his hair.
“Are you both heading out with Neal and Olivia?” Sedric asked as he came out to join us.
“I wasn’t aware that they were leaving,” I said, as I looked towards Liam who nodded, as Ethan smacked his lips.
“Apparently they’re having a date night,” Liam informed me.
“A date night?”
“Can’t be blood and gore all the time. The moment this is all over, Sedric and I will be going back to Ireland for a while,” Evelyn said with a grin while Sedric kissed her cheek.
“A long while,” he added.
“Before we take any victory laps, let’s win the war,” Liam responded, as he placed Ethan into their arms. He reached for us again and I kissed his little hands goodbye.
“Be safe,” Evelyn said.
Nodding, we both left them and walked towards the garage where Liam had an old Ford 1963 Mustang waiting for us. It looked so misplaced parked behind the mansion.
“This is new,” I said, as I ran my hands over the dark blue paint.
“It is,” he replied, taking the driver’s seat. He drove off the second I got in without even giving me the chance to buckle myself in.
“What’s wrong?” I asked, leaning back.
He pulled out his phone. “Play it.”
Taking it, I listened.
“Hello, Neal?”
“Coraline…”
“Neal, what’s wrong?”
“Everything, Coraline.”
I wasn’t sure if I want to laugh or throw the phone out the damn window after I’d finished listening to their whole conversation. Looking to Liam, his jaw was tense and he gripped the steering wheel so tightly his knuckles whitened.
“Is é mo dheartháir amadán.” (My brother is a fool.) He snapped in a rage.
“He’s chosen to be loyal,” I said and he snorted.
“What good is loyalty when he’s weak, thoughtless, and a motherfucking pain in my ass? I’ve been trying to wrap my head around why he thought it was a good idea to use our anniversary as a test for Olivia. His stupidity once again almost cost us our fucking lives. And Coraline, who gave her the right to keep this from us? Since when did they have to right to even fucking think for themselves? They wait for our directions and then acted on our accord, not their own. It’s as if they were children!”
He stopped at the light and pinched the bridge of his nose before he took a deep breath.
“Are you pissed that they acted on their own, or pissed because they ruined our anniversary?” I asked.
He looked to me and frowned. “Do you know how long it took me to plan everything?”
“So it’s the anniversary.”
“Why aren’t you more pissed about this?”
“Because if you’d stop barking at me for a moment, you’d see that this works in our favor. Neal, stupid as he may be, still chose this family over Olivia. We know now for a fact that Olivia is against us, though it was hard to deny it before. If we allow Neal to give us more, we now have the ability to fuck with Avian.”
“Do you really think he can accomplish that?” he muttered. “Olivia has been holding his balls for years.”
“Only time will tell, but right now we have our proof. As for Coraline, she’s shocked me.”
He snickered, as he shook his head at me. “Someone’s managed to shock Bloody Mel?”
Rolling my eyes, I placed my feet on the dashboard. “Yes, I might have a plan for her later.”
“Care to share?”
“No. Now, do you know where we’re going?” I asked him as I looked out the window. It was as though he was just driving around for the sake of driving.
He a glared at me and I waited a moment before I pulled out my phone and opened the GPS.
LIAM
Three hours passed and I’d only been able to calm down a little bit. We were now in view of Avian’s penthouse. But I couldn’t stop thinking about Neal. I wanted to take him by the neck and knock his motherfucking face in. I was eighteen when my father told me that I, not Neal, was going to take over for him. When I asked him why, he said that one day I would understand. I’d always thought it was because I was his favorite, but I now understood. Neal was literally incompetent. I could already see myself spending the rest of my life cleaning up after his utter stupidity. Part of me almost wished he had betrayed me so that I could just kill him and be done with it…only a small part of me did though.
But he chose family. He’s loyal.
That made up for a lot. Almost everything.
“I’m counting six agents,” Mel whispered, as she looked through the scope of her sniper rifle.
Looking through the binoculars, Avian’s penthouse apartment was in perfect view from the skyscraper we’d broken into. We could see right into his Italian styled home. The entire penthouse was surrounded by large, open windows. It was as though he was daring us to try.
“The glass is a quarter inch thick, and I have no doubt in my mind that it’s bulletproof.” she added, as she remained hunched over. As far as I knew, we weren’t going to kill anyone tonight, but she insisted on wasting our time by doing this.
When I didn’t speak, she looked to me, eyeing me carefully. “You think this is a waste of time,” she stated.
“If we aren’t going to kill him, I see no point in watching him solve crossword puzzles all night.” That was all the man did; he sat in his silk robe and finished crosswords in old newspapers. Every few hours he walked to the window to smoke a cigar, and then he moved on to the next fucking crossword. If he was trying to drive me insane, it was fucking working.
She released the rifle, and it looked as though she was trying to think of nice way to bitch at me.