Without my brothers, I'd be dead or in jail. Hayden and Luke took time away from their careers and families to come see me every few weeks, talking me down from murdering Jeremiah Corbin.

I must have planned his demise a thousand times, each more mad and painful than the last. But none of my best laid plans ever involved me getting away alive thanks to the security he's surrounded himself with, much less without chains around my hands and feet.

“Don't go there, brother. It's hell. It'll ruin your life.” Luke's stint in prison lasted a few months after Robbi's psycho mom nailed him to the wall. But he's talking from first hand experience, reminding me he only survived unscathed thanks to Hayden's old friends in that motorcycle gang, the Grizzlies. “You go down that road, you put a bullet in his brain like you want, you'll damned sure never get her back.”

Never.

I didn't know the meaning of the word, the grim finality, before I went thirty days without seeing her. Then I went sixty more without hearing a fucking word, every single message I sent to her phone utterly ignored.

I don't know what Corbin told her. Mack told me about the threats when we made peace at Sanford's. The bartender cried, hissed his anguished confession through his fingers, his hands clenched over his face. He told me how they made him hand over the tapes, how he had to let them comb through old security footage, or lose his dead Rita's ashes to the Atlantic.

“Stop beating yourself up,” I told him. Meant it, too.

He'd have never screwed me over in a trillion years if there weren't someone twisting his arm in the worst way. I know it weighs heavy on him every night I drag myself into his bar before closing like a phantom. The drinks are always on the house.

I still don't understand what Corbin found. Sure, I landed pussy here. Did things on tape that would probably turn my stomach now if I saw them.

All pre-Bekah. Every last dirty pick up on those cameras happened before her.

Whatever he did, it worked. He's scared her off. He found something damning, or distorted it to make it happen, and then made her hate me enough to bring her back into his arms, into his lies.

I try not to dwell on it. These questions don't do me a damned bit of good. They don't help bring her back, or slow the relentless march of time.

Three months turn into six more. I spend most days in Chandlersport now, too disgusted to crawl home to New York. The entire city feels like stolen property since my fuck of a fake partner thieved everything. Even if he hadn't put the day-to-day operations of my company under his people, I wouldn't have been able to share a space with his parasites long enough to manage a thing.

So, I stay here in Maine, signing the petty orders that come every few weeks when someone at Neolithic wants to see if I'm still alive. I let Corbin think I've given up, accepted my kick in the balls, just like a good, reasonable boy should.

Oh, but there's nothing reasonable about my solemn promise to wrap my hands around his throat, and squeeze with my whole soul. He'll never lie to anyone again when I'm finished.

There's nothing reasonable about the millions I drop down rabbit holes going nowhere, hiring private detectives and sending bribes to insiders who never turn up the missing link I need to fix this epic clusterfuck.

Definitely nothing reasonable about how I hound my brothers, torching my goodwill and sympathy with them. I beg Hayden to come close to breaking the law when I ask him to pick at dad's old mafia ties in real estate, probing deep into black, illegal places no sane man ought to ever go. I call up Luke in a half-drunk, furious rage some nights, threatening to drive down to New York with the magnum and the ammo I've picked up recently at the local range.

Forces my little brother to come to me, leaving behind his movie and his wife and kid, tying my hands for one weekend so I don't do anything stupid.

Disgraceful is what it is. But that's become my whole life since the minute they got to her, threw me to the floor in my own office, and fed her whatever poison lies are keeping her in daddy's death grip.

No, I haven't forgotten Monsieur Fuckface either. Fabius is the key to this. Everything I do digs deep into his company's military networks, prying at the arms trade in places ravaged by years of the worst fighting on Earth. I also keep my private investigators circling his evil ass like sharks whenever they're able, making sure he stays put in the Big Apple, or in Paris, without an angel who has chestnut hair and otherworldly jade eyes at his side.

It's a mercy he doesn't. I'm grateful no lies in the universe will ever send Bekah to him. It's good for him, too, because both my brothers holding me at once wouldn't stop the urge to slaughter any man who goes after what's mine.

I'm surprised I've made it this long. I wouldn't have survived without their support all these months. Certainly wouldn't have kept my sanity, watching lead after lead go up in smoke, if the day hadn't come.

As I'm sitting on the leather sofa in front of the fireplace, the same one that warmed us before I carried her to bed for the very first time, a full glass of moscato in my hand and Jack at my side, I'm smiling.

Smiling for the first fucking time in months.

It's finally happening.

Hayds called me this morning and let me know he's found a guy who knows a guy who knows a certain arms dealer on the other side of the world. That dealer made a princely sum off under-the-table deals for Fabius, and he's just fallen into the hands of an elite team we hired to track him down.

We've found our smoking gun. Both my brothers are on their way here tonight to see it with their own eyes, to scheme, and to set this right.

It's not a happy smile staring back at me in the wine glass reflection. It's scary, crazy, and nothing but a ghost if we can't get the truth out of the dealer. I've learned by now not to get my hopes up, but damn it, I'm going to tonight.

I can see the key to tasting my Bekah again, real and sweet as the revenge on its way, too. Just have to grab it, pick it up, and give it the proper twist.

Why does this key look so much like a dagger?

* * *

Hours later, we're huddled in my basement, watching the man with the black eye and the bloodied goatee, begging for his life in a thick Russian accent over our satellite link on the TV.

For Corbin, his pleas are the beginning of the end. It's a slow moving doomsday and redemption foretold in red scratches, begging, and black and blue bruises.

“English, motherfucker,” the big man with the gun to his head growls on the screen. “You know it, Mayakovi, and my clients want to hear it.”

Mayakovi the arms dealer looks at us with disjointed eyes. Gunfire chatters in the distance. I swallow, trying to steel my nerves, knowing anything can happen out there while they're next to the battlefield where they found him.

“Let's see the goodies in his bag. Then I want to hear the magic words from the man himself,” I say, sitting stiff as a board next to Hayden.

It takes a second or two for our hired gun on the other end to hear my words, and move accordingly. Satellite delay. He pans his camera around to a beat up table, where Mayakovi's side arm lays next to his backpack, empty and disassembled. There's also a stack of documents with the Fabius logo, purple and gold, a neat French script circling it. I want it faxed over ASAP so I can send it to my lawyers. Everything.

“You recording?” Hayds whispers to Luke, standing in the corner. Fly Right nods. He's fiddling with another small video camera on his shoulder, documenting every move on the screen as one last backup in case the video on the device fails.

“Yeah, yeah,” Luke rumbles. “This cloak and dagger shit isn't really my style, bro, but I know how to work a camera.”

Hayden gives a satisfied nod. “I think it's question time. You up for doing the honors, brother?”

He slaps me on the shoulder. I give his hand a squeeze that says fuck, yes. I've been ready for months. It's been such a hard, endless fight, I can't believe the end of this nightmare might be staring me in the eyes.

“Let's talk face-to-face again, Lewis,” I say, waiting for our guy to face the beaten man again. “How long have you been on Fabius' payroll, Mayakovi? Years?”

There's a long delay. At first, I think the prick is going to play hardball, but his head rolls in a messy nod once, and then a few more times. “Two...two years. The French love me.”

My fingers tense in a fist. “There must be a contract. Is that what the papers are? The documents they pulled off you?”

The Russian laughs, his busted lip showing new scars. “Inventory, fool. You think your business contracts and lawyers mean anything here?”

Lewis presses the gun into the back of his head until his smile is gone. I fold my hands neatly in front of me, staring into the screen, remembering why I've had to resort to this gritty, hateful violence. It doesn't faze me in the slightest that we're torturing this man. He was dirty, I remember, long before he became our business.

“How did they pay you, then? Cash?”

“Da. Big pallets. Just like the scraps your friends will make off with after they roll me in a ditch,” Mayokovi says, a wry smile on his lips when he mentions his own death. “Cash proves nothing out here.”

I hate how he still has his senses to taunt me. He's absolutely right, of course.

I need to think. The documents are damning enough, but I need a hard confession if this evidence becomes iron clad, instead of circumstantial.

“Wait, Lewis, go back to the table,” I say, hoping he'll focus on something small and metallic I saw from the corner of my eye. “What's that at the edge? The rings?”

It takes him a minute to hold them up. “Looks like...jewelry, sir. Stolen from civilians, if I had to guess. Lot of that goes on out here, especially after the airstrikes roll through. Grave robbing's like going to the supermarket.”

“Ask him,” Hayden butts in. “Let's hear it from the bastard himself.”

Lewis pans back to Mayakovi, says a few words in Russian, and I see something I never expect on the arms dealer's face. Remorse. His eyes go big and glassy as his smirk falls.

“Tell them where you found the jewelry, you fuck. Tell them now!”

“Oh, God. Bozhemoi. Not the gutter crew, as you call them...I can not...”

“Buddy, I'm not fuckin' around here.” His finger goes to the trigger. The barrel of his gun must be leaving an impression in Mayakovi's head, digging in hard. “Tell them what you did. Tell them where this shit came from. Did you steal it from corpses, or what?”

There's hesitation before he cracks, swearing in his native language. “Yes. Yes, damn you! I took everything. Sometimes cheap. Sometimes priceless heirlooms. I had orders to send them back to the U.S., but of course I kept a few for myself. I hid them, spirits in my pockets where no one would know, held on as they haunted me!”

“Wait, damn it...did he just say the States? Not France?” I look at Hayds, who shares my suspicion, and then repeat the question to the screen.

“I told you – America! Fabius' request. Christ, do I wish I'd said no,” Mayakovi barks, tips his head to the side, and coughs.

I ask him a few more follow-ups, but I don't get anywhere. It doesn't matter. I've just picked up my key and polished it.

I remember seeing the jeweler listed in the merger documents when I went over Corbin's domestic investments. Except this one was unusually large for a jewelry chain.

If he's been selling war loot, relics, hard physical proof of his ties to this bloody, illegal arrangement...

“Bro, you have to get your guys over to that shop in Queens.” Luke looks so intense he lowers the camera, catches himself, and swears.

“Hayden.” I'm about to tell my brother to make the call, but he's already standing, digging in his pocket for his phone.

“On it. You just worry about finishing this.” He steps away, heading somewhere quiet he can talk, calling my guys in the city. With any luck, I'll have my mercenaries beating down the doors of those jewelers in Queens within hours, picking through every glass case and crate in the back before the NYPD pounces with a warrant.

“Any more questions before I feed this rat his cheese?” Lewis asks, stooping down so he looks at us through the screen, his dark eyes showing through the holes in his camo mask.

I take a few seconds to tick off the boxes in my mind. I've got everything I need, more than enough dirt to nail Corbin's dick to the wall with the Fabius papers, plus the high odds of the police finding a speck of dirt that's been in Syria.

“None,” I say, pronouncing it like a judge reading out the sentence to a man who's up for death row. “We're finished.”

Mayakovi's justice doesn't interest me. He's a monster, like any other arms trader in a war zone, and our beef isn't personal.

I have Luke shut off his camera a second before Lewis grins. The screen turns black and the sound cuts off, but not before we hear a lone gunshot ring out.

* * *

Four hours and a manic flight through the darkness later in Luke's plane, we're on the tarmac in LaGuardia. We hit New York running, racing to the conference room I've rented out in a hotel downtown, where we're supposed to meet my legal man, Crowley, and Nina for moral support.

“Mr. Shaw!” My old secretary looks at me like she's seen a ghost when we bust through the door, interrupting the nervous coffee chat my people were having. She hasn't seen me in months. Ditto for my chief lawyer, who gives me the same haggard stare.

It must be the lightning in my eyes. It's well past midnight, and I don't think I'd sleep with an elephant tranquilizer jammed up my spine.

“Hold the pleasantries. Everybody take a seat,” I say, claiming my spot at the head of the table. “I've brought my brothers, Hayden and Luke, who are both helping me with this matter. Any news from our boys with the police, Crowley?”

“Nothing yet, boss. Don't know if this kind of hold up is normal, but it's the middle of the night. Might not hear anything until morning.”

My fist comes down hard on the table, rattling the paper coffee cups in front of everyone. “Too slow. I want you to get your ass on the line, and shake it at whoever you need to in the NYPD.”

“Right,” he says, a muscle twitching in his high cheeks. He heads off my next question with what he says next. “I've got my international people working on those documents you faxed over as fast as they can. High level look says they raise some serious questions about what Fabius has been doing in Syria, and doing with Corbin and our company in turn, but it might not be the silver bullet you're hoping for.”

“What about the video?” Hayden cuts in, his hands folded calmly in front of him. Always the voice of reason, something I'm lacking in droves right now.

“Compelling and very interesting, but probably not our ace in any court of law. The arms dealer, Miyakovi, was under duress when he answered questions. Any halfway decent defender will see the gun to his head, and tell the judge to take what he said with a huge grain of salt. Strong chance it'll also get bumped off to the nearest war crime's tribunal.”

“Fuck.” I don't like where this is going. “So, we just wasted the last minutes of an asshole's life forcing out a confession for nothing?”

Crowley looks down, frowning, saying nothing. I'm about to explode.

“Not for nothing, bro.” Luke leans back in his chair, smoothing his leather jacket, looking way too much like the bad boys he plays in Hollywood. “We pulled the truth out of him. He told you point-blank he's on their payroll. That means something to you, to us, even if there isn't a judge in this state who'll open their ears to hear it. It's vindicating.”

“Vindication? You think I have time to go chasing my tail to nowhere?”

He doesn't understand. He went five years without his woman before fate intervened, and gave them a second chance. I'm coming up on a year in just a few more months, and I'll lose my fucking mind if the calendar flips over without her.

“Grant...” Hayds slaps a hand on my shoulder, giving me that look with the cold blue eyes we share. Patience. Don't blow yourself up when we're this close.

I feel like I'm locked in a pressure cooker. Having the only people I can trust in here with me isn't helping.

“Need some air. Anybody hears from the cops, anything about finding a smoking gun, you call me.” I stand up and start pacing, walking into the hotel's lonely corridors as the meeting breaks up.

Nina sits on the concrete wall outside the service door. She turns in my direction when she sees me coming her way. “Just a little while longer, Mr. Shaw. We'll make it. We have to.”

I don't need to ask how Corbin's reign has been. The woman looks miserable, her bright face more sunk and red than I remember.

It's not just Bekah on the line. Nina wants what's best for us because she's a friend, yes. But she's also gone through hell, worried about losing her job several times over, ever since I bowed out on my day-to-day duties after the coup.

I force a smile as I walk past. My old right hand gal isn't stupid. She knows how dangerous, how scary, how desperate this situation is by the ice clouding my eyes.

My gut wrenches when I think long and hard about abandoning my people to those wolves.

I didn't have a choice. Not if I wanted to give us all a fighting one later, staging a strategic retreat so I wouldn't lose everything by ripping heads off the first time one of Corbin's underlings decided to flex his dick in my office.

We're not too far from Wall Street, or the old office. I deliberately avoid the street with our high rise, but I walk through the financial district, staring into the corners where I once had the best and worst of times.

The New York Exchange will be open in a few hours. It's Tuesday morning.

I remember how I came here with high hopes, adrenaline, and some seed money, desperate to get as far from my old man's Chicago real estate as I could. I lived the highs and lows. Watched men older and wiser scream when they hit jackpots on multimillion dollar trades. Saw institutions with a century behind them and household name recognition go kaput when the mortgage crisis struck. I'll never forget the sad faces shuffling out of their offices with a small box in their hands holding their belongings, a grim faced security escort at their sides.

The look on those faces would pummel any sane person's heart.

And it's nothing – fucking nothing – compared to how I feel every time I think our efforts are turning up another goose egg. Whenever I think about Bekah drifting away from me for one more day, living God knows where, cursing my very name.

I've never let the ring I meant to give her the night she disappeared leave my side once. It's tucked in the pocket inside my suit jacket now, my private hell set in gold, cold and unfulfilled as the space inside its loop is without her finger.

Who knew a man could be taunted in such small, sinister ways?

The ring may be tiny, sure, but it's big enough to reach up and choke me like a noose around my neck when I let it get to me. It's tight enough, strong enough, ruthless enough to bring me to the edge of tears.

I've never let myself cry once over this shit. I don't have the time.

I walk on, into the cool New York spring morning for hours, circling the financial district again and again, hoping my phone will vibrate in my pocket every time I come near the hotel.

It's after five o'clock, and the first light is on the horizon when it finally happens. My hand dives in, brings it to my ear, and I brace for whatever's on the other end like a man about to walk death row.

“Shaw.”

“It's Crowley. Just heard from Mathers, the lead detective we hired a couple months ago.”

“And?”

“They've found something, boss. Several somethings. Plenty to bring the owner in for questioning.” Crowley stops talking as I lean against a tree, trying to catch my breath, before the knot releasing in my stomach all at once kills me. “Mr. Shaw?”

“I'm here. Tell them to feed the police everything we know about Corbin's investments in these jewelers, and what he's been doing in Syria. They'll hook us up with the FBI and SEC in no time.”

“You really want to involve the Feds, sir?” Crowley's voice cracks, his nerves getting the best of him.

He's right to be worried. Ever since our companies merged, Corbin's problems are ours. Technically, the government can do whatever it damned well pleases when it sees Neolithic muddied with my partner's dirt.

“It's inevitable. Plus it's the only way we'll ever cut out the cancer screwing us over, giving us a chance to survive.”

“If they go hard...we're talking millions in fines. Hundreds of millions. We've been attached at the hip for more than six months, boss. Too long to get off the hook with plausible deniability.”

“Quit worrying You'll get your golden parachute if it goes tits up,” I growl into the receiver. “Everybody who's helped me at my lowest will. Don't care if the company is gone, and I have to write the checks from my own trust. Nobody's being left behind.”

“Oh, of course, sir. I know you'll do right. Not even a question.” His voice says he's not entirely convinced.

“We'll meet up at the hotel in the next hour and hash out how we'll approach this with the Feds. I want my brothers and the full legal team ready to pay a visit to Corbin's house later today. Keep it together a little while longer, man. Help me do justice one more time, and I'll do yours.”

“I will, boss. I will. You've been good to me.” The call ends.

It's the best I can offer, and I'm sincere. Truth be told, this merger is my fault. All of it.

I let myself be star struck by Jeremiah Corbin and his firm, set the wheels in motion on nothing more than his word and a standard review from all my departments. I thought he was like me, older and wiser, getting rich in the trenches doing honest, cutthroat investing.

I didn't know how dirty old money could get.

Didn't know he'd chew through everything I ever worked for like a parasite.

Didn't know I'd fall like a fool for his daughter, and she'd make me put everything and then some on the line.

I don't care if I'm a billion dollars in the hole by the time I get her back.

Money can't buy me another kiss with Bekah. It sure as hell can't patch the gaping chasm in my soul, threatening to rip me apart, ever since she stormed out on his lies.

Hold on just a little while longer, moscato. I'll taste you again.

I'll have you every day like ambrosia, or I'll have nothing.