“Kieran’s that powerful now, huh?” Griff, my second, shoves his hands into his pockets.
“On the Irish side, yes,” I respond. “We got word on the street that the Byrnes, the Nolans, and the Donnellys have all lined up behind him.
“They heard about Stasia?” Connor gets up and starts pacing.
“Everyone’s heard.” I push a hand through my hair.
My brothers and I do all the security for the O’Rourkes. Through that one lens, that makes us working class and expendable. But we have something Kieran needs: my father’s vote on the city council. I’m preparing to run for his seat when he steps down. In between my security work, most of which Griff and Connor manage, I’ve been my father’s council deputy for more than a year since his health started to fail him.
Turning to my father’s bookcase, I thumb the leather spines of journals containing family records going back to the eighteen-hundreds. “We need to find Kieran a wife. A Quinlan. Shit is going to get ugly around here, and if he wants our cooperation on the council, he’ll marry one of us.”
“Da’s Quinlan brothers are back in Ireland,” Connor says on a yawn.
“What better way to keep up the tradition of Irish lineage?”
“Don’t you remember being there five years ago?” Griff huffs. “Girls in those villages aren’t exactlymodern.”
What I remembered was fucking a virgin, who looked anything but small town, with short, bleach-blonde hair and a cute cat tattoo on her wrist.
Getting that wild bird out of my head, I say to Griff, who was in Waterford with me back then, “All the better. A young, pretty girl who has no options? She’ll run for that white dress and altar.” I pull down the scrapbook journal my da made with letters and photos his brothers sent him over the years.
“There must be something about Irish sperm,” I mutter, thumbing through page after page. “Everyone’s got sons. Uncle Patrick, two sons. Uncle Finn, four sons.”
“How old are they?” Connor asks, peeking over my shoulder. “Do they have daughters?”
I roll my eyes. “They’d be wee ones.”
“Does Kieran want a wife in the traditional sense?” Griff asks me.
“We’re not bringing back a five-year-old, you sick fuck.” I shake my head.
A brown envelope sticks out from the back of the journal with a Christmas stamp dated over twenty years ago. The name says Quinlan in the return address, but there’s no first name. Inside, I see it’s a Christmas letter from… Rian.
My throat tightens, and my brain feels like cobwebs have suddenly grown all over the place. I’ve not thought about Rian in… In forever.
Three or four folded-up parchment sheets with a holly border sits inside the envelope. After I unfold the yellowed pages, a photo drops out.
It’s a 3x5 faded picture of a couple with a little boy smiling in front of a Christmas tree.
I recognize Rian because he looks a lot like Da. He should; he’s my father’s son. My half-brother. A notation on the back of the photo reads:
Merry Christmas! With love, from the Quinlans
“What’s got you so tense?” Griffin approaches me cautiously. “Oh. Is that?”
“Aye…”
Our father having an illegitimate son back in Ireland is something we almost never talk about. I only found out about Rian through my own investigative work doing opposition research on Da when he first ran for the city council seat. That wasn’t a fun conversation to have with my father. In front of my mother.
Da was brief with the details. He got a girl pregnant in high school, and her parents kept them apart. He never even met Rian.
“At one point, Rian and Da started writing to each other,” I say with a tight jaw. My whole life, I’ve been hailed as the Quinlan Crown Prince. Da’s oldest son. But it was a lie.
“Rian should be forty-five now.” Griffin did a full workup on him when we uncovered Da’s secret.
“Aye. Andhe’sgot a son, too.” I slap the photo, an idea hitting me in the head. “Hang on.”
I thumb through the Christmas letter, and the words snag my eye: