Brothers Read online

  I finally stumbled forward, still taking it all in. My brother is a biker?

  He stepped forward as well and we met in the middle of the room. Cars on Pennsylvania Avenue lit up our faces with faint white flashes as they passed the window. “Jesus,” I said, my voice thick with emotion. “Carrick?!”

  He gazed into my eyes and I saw the pain there, the momentary hesitation. What’s he scared of? And then he spread his arms wide and we pulled each other into an embrace, my arms locking around warm leather. Under my palm, I swore I could feel the shamrock tattoo on his back throbbing, just as the one on my own back was. I felt him relax: whatever his fear had been, it was gone, burned away by the hug.

  I let him go, but kept my hands on his shoulders. Saw him glance away into the corner of the room for a second and blink a couple of times. I didn’t want to admit it, but I was the same.

  I was still trying to take in what was happening. Ever since Sean had come to DC to find me, I’d been trying to find Carrick and Aedan but with no luck. I’d been so focused on looking for them, I’d never considered that one of them might come looking for me. Now I realized how stupid I’d been. Since the coup, my face was all over the news. And I lived at the best-known residence on the planet.

  I fumbled with the nearest light until I found the switch. Now I could see him properly and it was almost like looking in a mirror. We had the same jet-black hair and the same jaw...but his was covered in dark stubble, the way mine used to be. I could see the butterfly tattoo better, now. The name on it was Annabelle.

  “How are...are you okay?” I just blurted it out. That was what I had to know before anything else. I’d been living with the possibility, all these years, that I’d find out he was dead. Now that he was before me, out of the blue, I had this sudden, crazy fear that he was going to say he was dying of cancer or something—

  He nodded. “I’m fine.” Like me, he’d kept his accent, although his was blended with a good helping of Californian gold. He glanced down at his leather cut. “Found myself a family. Thought it was all I needed, for a while. Then someone made me see sense.” My hands were still on his shoulders. He reached up and put one of his on top of mine. “It’s time we got our family back together.”

  I stared at him. He was the eldest but not by much, then there was a bigger gap between us and the younger two: Aedan and finally Sean. It had always been a battle for leadership, between Carrick and me. Him the risk taker, getting us into trouble. Me the responsible one, getting us out of it.

  “I know where Sean is,” I said.

  I saw his chest fill. “You do? I couldn’t find him.”

  “Yeah, they’re...trying to stay off the radar.”

  “They?”

  “He got himself a girl. Louise. He came out here a few weeks ago. They live in LA.”

  Carrick’s voice rose in disbelief. “Sean’s in Cali?” He shook his head. “I live in Cali. Jesus, all this time and he was a few hours’ ride away. He okay?”

  “He and his girl had a rough summer. Had to get involved in some bad shit, but they got out clean. They’re all okay. And the kid.”

  “He has a kid?!”

  “No. The kid’s Louise’s. And it’s her sister, but she’s like...fourteen. Anyway, they’re fine.” My chest tightened. “What about Aedan? You any idea where he is?” We were three for three so far. Please don’t let him be dead.

  “Chicago. He was boxing in New York for a while, then he and his girl had to bail. They’re okay.”

  I let out a long breath. Four for four. A slow warmth started to fill me. I hadn’t realized how much I’d been dreading bad news. All sorts of plans started to swim in my head: I could fly out to Chicago in a few weeks and meet up with Aedan, then maybe take a trip to Cali and—

  I stopped. There was something in Carrick’s eyes.

  “This isn’t just about getting back in touch,” he said.

  And suddenly I knew why he hadn’t just called. I’d been wrong. We were four for four. But there were five of us.

  “We don’t even know if he’s alive,” I said.

  “Then it’s time we found out.”

  “You think I haven’t tried?” I’d tried to find out what happened to Bradan many times over the years, even hired private detectives a couple of times. No one had gotten anywhere.

  “So have I,” said Carrick. “But we haven’t tried together. All of us.”

  “All of us?”

  Carrick lifted his chin and looked me right in the eye. It was just like when we were kids: he was the oldest so he was giving the orders. “We’re going to Chicago right now to get Aedan. You can call Sean, get him to meet us there. And then we’re going to find our brother.”

  I opened my mouth. I was about to ask what the urgency was: why now? But the words never made it out because I looked into his eyes and I understood.

  The urgency was that it had been far too long already. We all felt it: Sean had come looking for me, I’d been looking for the others, Carrick had found Aedan...after years apart, we were all finally doing what we should have done long ago. In my case, it was Emily who’d finally made me see it. Maybe it was the same for the others.

  And looking into Carrick’s eyes, there was something else. I was mad at the cult for taking Bradan, mad at my dad for killing our mom. But Carrick was mad at himself. I felt guilty about not trying to reunite us sooner but Carrick looked as if he was tearing himself apart inside. It made my chest ache to see him in so much pain.

  “...okay,” I said at last. “I’ll pack a bag. But it’ll be a while, I have to let people know I’m going. Let me take you somewhere you can wait—”

  “I’ll meet you down the street,” he told me, and named a bar. “I think I make your security guys nervous.”

  I nodded reluctantly.

  “You, though,” he said. “You fit in just fine here.”

  I looked down at myself. I’d completely forgotten I was in a tuxedo. Fancy clothes felt almost comfortable, now. “Yeah,” I muttered. “Well.”

  “You did good, you know. President’s daughter. Saving the country.”

  I gave him a look. “It wasn’t like that. I just did my job. A lot of other people deserve credit. Emily, for one.”

  “Well,” said Carrick as he opened the door. “I’m proud of you.”

  It’s funny. After the coup, the papers had been backpedalling so furiously from supporting Kerrigan that they tried to turn me into some sort of hero. They’d come up with all sorts of bullshit praise, but none of it had really meant anything to me. This did. “Mmm,” I muttered, looking away. I felt my neck going hot. “Thanks.”

  Carrick smirked and nodded at my tuxedo. “Even if you do think you’re James Bond.”

  And suddenly it was just like old times. We could have been kids back in Ireland, again. “Oh feck off,” I muttered, grinning. “I’ll see you in a few hours.”

  Miller was waiting for me down the hallway. “That’s your brother?” he asked, watching Carrick walk away.

  “One of them.”

  “And I thought you were a reprobate. Still on for poker?”

  The weekly poker games with him and a few of the Secret Service agents had become a thing, since the coup. I enjoyed it, especially because it felt like I had a lot more in common with those guys than with the bigwigs I met at cocktail parties. “Maybe not this week,” I told Miller. “I’m going to have to go away for a while.”

  “Everything okay?”

  I knew I couldn’t get him involved: however much I loved Sean and Carrick, one was an ex-drug grower with links to the Mexican cartel and apparently the other was an outlaw biker. If some story appeared in the press about how the President’s daughter’s boyfriend came from a family of criminals, I wanted the White House to have deniability. “Just family stuff. I can handle it.” Then, thinking out loud, “I’m going to need to rent a car.”

  “I can do that for you. What do you need?”

  I added it up in my head. M
e, Carrick, Sean, Aedan...and it sounded like the others had girlfriends, too. “Something big,” I said.

  “I’ll take care of it.”

  I slapped him in on the shoulder in thanks. Funny how we’d wound up friends, after being at each other’s throats for so long.

  I went back to our room but Emily wasn’t there. Probably off with her mom somewhere and I really didn’t want to have to have this conversation in front of the First Lady, so I stayed put and started throwing shirts in a bag. I had no idea how long I’d be gone for. But now that I’d made the decision, my whole body was buzzing with excitement. Carrick! And Sean! And Aedan! All of us back together again. And maybe, just maybe, Bradan, too.

  My hands tightened on the bag’s handles. The last image I had of Bradan was of him in the back of our mom’s car, hands banging on the glass so hard I thought he was going to break it, begging her not to take him to the cult. My chest closed up. The bastards.

  Alive or dead, we were going to find him. And we were going to make them pay for taking him.

  I’d just changed into a suit when Emily opened the door...and stopped in the doorway as she saw my bag sitting on the bed. “What’s going on?” she asked immediately.

  I sat her down and told her. Before I’d finished, she was on her feet: closing her laptop and grabbing the power cord, plucking dresses off hangers to throw into a suitcase. Then she caught the look I was giving her and her expression darkened. “I’m coming with you,” she said in a voice she’d inherited from her father.

  “No.”

  “Don’t ‘no’ me, I’m coming with you! That’s not up for debate!”

  I stood up and gently put my hands on her waist. “Emily—”

  “No!” She shook her head, long hair flying. “Uh-uh. Not even a question.”

  I stroked my hands gently up and down her sides. I could smell her scent and it made me crazy: it made me think of warm Texas sun and wide open spaces. I was raging inside at the unfairness of it: I’d finally found the woman I wanted to spend the rest of my life with and now I had to tear us apart? I wanted to take her with me but— “I can’t,” I said at last.

  “You can! If you’re looking for Bradan, you need me. I’m good at tracking things down.”

  “It might be dangerous.”

  “Then you definitely need me. Have you forgotten who saved your ass in the hotel ballroom?”

  I sighed. She had me there. But: “You can’t come. Emily, you know what Sean and Louise were involved in.”

  “They got away with it!”

  “But they still did business with the cartel. The press watches everything you do. If I meet up with Sean, hopefully no one will care. But if you’re there, it’s a story. Someone in the press will dig up Sean’s history, or find out about Kayley’s medical treatment and how they paid for it, and suddenly it’s a scandal. President’s daughter linked to drug farmers! It could ruin you. And your dad.”

  She took a deep breath but bit back whatever she was going to say. Instead, she stared off into the corner.

  “Emily.”

  She wouldn’t look at me. She knew I was right but that didn’t make it any easier. We’d barely been apart since we got together. She’d always had my hand on her back. She needed that and I needed to protect her...but this time, protecting her meant keeping her away.

  “Emily,” I said softly.

  Even in her heels, she was smaller than me. When she finally met my gaze, she had to look up at me to do it. The defiance on her face made my heart melt.

  “We have to do it this way,” I told her. “For everyone’s sake.”

  Her shoulders sank as she relented. She took another deep breath and this time I heard the tremor in it: she was just barely keeping from crying. “You’ll call me every day,” she told me.

  I bent down and kissed her lips. “Yes ma’am.”

  I backed out of our room, bag slung over my shoulder, and nearly walked right into the President. “Sir!” I straightened up fast.

  “Walk with me,” he said and led the way.

  I fell in beside him. He was still in his tuxedo but his bow tie was hanging unfastened around his neck. I’m a big guy—physically, I’m bigger than him. But he still towered over me, his presence filling the hallway, members of the Secret Service coming to attention long before he came into sight. He was the President.

  I swallowed when I realized we were heading for the Oval Office. We swept in and the President nodded for me to close the door behind me. He poured himself a whiskey and then walked around to stand behind his desk.

  I slowly put my bag down on the floor, more than a little freaked out. I had no idea what he wanted: we’d talked plenty of times but this felt different. I nodded to my bag. “Sir, I’ve got to...ah...go away for a little while.”

  “I know,” he said. “I heard about your brother visiting.”

  I nodded. So that was it. I thought about lying to him, telling him that it was just a happy family visit. But the thought went out of my head as soon as I looked at him again. You don’t lie to the President. “Sir,” I said at last, “there’s some stuff that maybe I should have told you. About my family. One of my brothers, Bradan—”

  “I know,” he said, cutting me off.

  I blinked, dumbstruck.

  The President tilted his head to one side. “You really think I didn’t do a full background check on you before I let you guard my daughter...much less date my daughter? I know about Bradan. I know about your mother.” He sighed. “That’s why I have to ask you not to go.”

  “Because you’re scared of the fallout, if the press find out?”

  He shook his head. “Because the cult is more dangerous than you can possibly imagine.”

  3

  Kian

  The President sat and nodded me to a chair. “What I'm about to tell you doesn't leave this room,” he said. “It's known to me, a couple of intelligence staff I trust and that’s it. Even the joint chiefs aren't aware of it.”

  I slowly sat down. What the hell is going on?

  “When I took power, my predecessor warned me about three things,” said the President. “A military project that was threatening to damn near bankrupt us; some guys at State who he suspected were on the take—they were—”—he drew in a deep breath—”and the cult.”

  I shook my head. “I know they’re bastards—”—I caught myself—”sorry, Sir. I mean: I know they’re evil but I didn’t think they’d be on your radar. Or on anyone’s radar. When they took Bradan, no one even believed us or took us seriously.”

  “That probably saved your life,” the President said.

  “What?!”

  “They’d already pinned your mother’s murder on your dad. They knew no one would listen to a bunch of kids so they let you go. If you’d been adults, if you’d pressed a little harder...we wouldn’t be having this conversation.” He picked up his glass, staring at the amber liquid inside. “These people,” he said, “are merciless. They are relentless. They will do absolutely whatever it takes to protect themselves. They didn’t let you live out of any sort of mercy for children. They did a goddamn calculation and figured killing you wasn’t worth it.” He looked at me over the rim of his glass. “How many people do you think are in the cult?”

  I shrugged. Surely not that many...they weren’t known: I mean, you never heard about them on TV or saw advertising for them. I didn’t even know their official name. “I don’t know...thirty, forty people around Chicago?”

  The President took a sip of his drink, then marched the glass around and around between his fingers. “The best estimate I could get,” he said, “was five or six thousand.”

  “Thousand?!”

  “And it’s not how many there are, it’s who they are. These people are woven right into the goddamn government, Kian. CIA, FBI, DEA. I suspect they’re in the NSA which means they’re into our computers, into our emails. Maybe even my emails. Judges. Senators. At least one justice in the Supreme Court. You
don’t need millions of people to make a difference. A few thousand will do it, in the right places.”

  The room was spinning. I’d thought I’d known what we were dealing with: when I thought cult, I thought of a group of fanatics in white robes, worshipping some conman. I’d had no idea.

  “Every time I tried to probe them,” said the President, “Every time, however delicately I did it, there was a warning. They didn’t dare take me on personally but they got to the people I sent. I made the mistake of talking to a DA about it and he started making enquiries. A week later, he was dead: drove his car into a tree...on a clear, dry stretch of road. A woman at State started an investigation: she died in a boating accident. ” He leaned across the desk to me. “Now you know me. You know I never walked away from a fight in my goddamn life. But I wasn’t going to send more good people to die. I dropped it, even though it killed me to think of the cult out there, uncontested.” He shook his head. “I don’t know who’s leading these people. I don’t know what they want. But I know that if you try to go after them, they’ll kill you.”

  We sat for a few seconds, his words hanging in the air between us. He drank a little more of his whiskey, the rattle of the ice cubes loud in the silent room.

  “When Emily first hired you and I checked you out and found the connection to the cult, I nearly vetoed the whole thing,” he said. “I thought maybe it was all a setup, maybe they were trying to sneak someone into the White House. But when I looked closer, saw how they'd split your family apart...I knew we were on the same side. When you and Emily started seeing each other—and I knew about that long before you think I did, I'm not a goddamn idiot—I hoped this day would never come. Because I like you, Kian. And I know what these people will do to you and your brothers if you try to take them down.”

  I sat there reeling, my eyes unfocused. Now I knew what we were up against...what chance do we have? If the President’s best people couldn’t even penetrate the cult, what hope did four Irish brothers have?