Nate closes the files down one by one, his fingers working as efficiently as they always do. I gaze at him working, thumb rubbing my scar at the thought of modernising the business, and then look up through the windows towards the main house. No more reliance on old rules or traditions. No more need to bow to the will of other families. There are only three major players left from the old world now that Joe’s dead. In the states at least. Other countries have their own generations to deal with. Here, we are now moving forward in a new vision. Marco, like me, is aligned in our vision. He’s allowed me to do what needs doing, no comeback on our family for my actions in his presence. Whether it was because of my inward need for revenge or not isn’t relevant, only that it’s now done.

There are only the other families to pull on board going forward, all three of whom will succumb to their business needs when they see the Canes and Mortonis aligning tighter.

Threatening them with power.

“How’s Marco handling the death?” Nate asks, standing and walking over to the bar.

I stare at my view of the main house, unconcerned about Marco and wondering when the time will come for my father to be taken the same way. He deserves as much as Joe got, more so given the past and his inability to protect his own family. No one ever touched a Mortoni woman, only the girlfriend I had on the flip of the deck, and she wasn’t a real wife.

“Funeral’s next week. We’re both invited to go and grieve the old man’s departure,” I eventually reply. He smirks and holds up a glass to me, toasting the air between us.

“Should be interesting. He’s obviously grief stricken.” Hardly, he just needs us there to make our world believe he killed his father himself as we’ve agreed.

I gaze at the house still, trying to pull together thoughts that have been with me for three days. A new generation of Cane business. New strategy. New protocols. A new direction. Perhaps a life like Emily leads is simpler. Less threat to life. Less countering and manoeuvring. Less looking over our shoulders, worried where the next menace will come from.

“How legal are we overall?” I ask, tipping my eyes to him. He chuckles and closes the laptop, gulping back a shot and offering me one. I shake my head.

“You just killed Joe Mortoni, Quinn. I’d say we’re not legal at all.”

I wave him off, standing with a small smile and pocketing my hands as I walk closer to the window. My dice rattle in my pocket, making me grip them and remember her telling me she wanted to go back home. I pull them out and grind them round to a four and a three. Seven. That’s the number she blurted out. Fate fell well for her, offered her a chance at freedom again. Freedom from me and this world I’ve been born into.

“What could we do to run smarter, Nate?”

“We do run smart.”

“Cleaner then.” He frowns at me, gripping his drink softly and looking at me across the kitchen space, eyes full of interest. I snort at him, amused by his need to become a decent human being. Not that he’s ever been far from that anyway.

“You know that as well as I do. We close down. Run the money ‘til it dries, siphoning it through offshore accounts, then clean it back up through whatever we can buy legitimately.”

He rounds the island unit, coming to the window to stand beside me.

“How long would it take?” I ask, trying to translate the multiple accounts in my head as I keep staring at the view.

“A year, two maybe. I’ve got an exit strategy already mapped out. Did it a year or so ago.”

I turn to him, admiring his acumen and nodding at the thought. Two years to clean up and back out.

“You could lose what needs losing to make us untouchable?” I ask. He laughs and pulls at his cufflinks to roll his sleeves up. “I’m serious, Nate. All out.”

“We’re already untouchable, but I could make us more viable to the tax system. Make our reality as clean as a British whistle alongside our appearance, if that’s what you’re asking for.” That’s exactly what I’m asking for. I nod at him again and turn back for the view, dice beginning to roll comfortably round my palm. “Although, you’ll be bored, Quinn. We’ll be nothing but a money-making machine with less ability to coerce profit.” He wanders away, making me swing around with him and follow him through to the main lounge. “You were born for what you do. It’s in your eyes all the time. Has been since you came home that night.”

I sigh and sit in one of the chairs, remembering that night and wondering what would have happened if I hadn’t killed for the first time. He smiles and runs his hands through his hair, probably as uncomfortable with the thought now as he was when he cleaned my scar up all those years ago.

“You enjoy it, Quinn. Always have as far as I can tell. You’re a cold bastard. You get your fucking kicks out of this life.”

Enjoy. Interesting word for the life I’ve lived so far.

I don’t enjoy a damn thing.

“No, Nate, I just needed the world to think I did. You, too.”

He scowls at me, a confused expression settling and expectancy written all over his face, then walks straight back out of the room. I sit, staring at the doorway and listening to glasses clinking as he comes back in.

“Talk,” he says, the tone he normally reserves for Josh in his voice. “’Cause that just confused the shit out of the last ten years of my fucking life, Quinn.” He fills me a glass and lands it roughly on the glass table in front of me next to my dice, the frown as deep as it gets. I chuckle, enjoying his snarl of irritation. He looks all Cane. Exactly what I’ve made him become whether he liked it or not.

“You think I had a choice?” I reach for the glass and lean back to look at him again, brow raised for an answer he can’t damn well give me. I didn’t have any fucking choice. “It was me or you. Me that did as I was told, or you that would have had to do all those things I’ve done. The same ones you sneer down your fucking nose at me for.” He stares for a second or two longer and then drops his eyes. He’s fucking right to. He wouldn’t have lasted doing what I’ve done. Never could have handled it. The blood. The fights. The fucking death and threats. He would have lost his grip on all this, weakened us. “I chose me, Nate.”

Quiet descends as he thinks about that. Typical Nate, thinking his way through a problem and trying to document his way out of it. Count the numbers, find a solution. Only this time there isn’t one. There never was. Big brother stepped up to the plate to keep him safe. Keep both of them safe. Just like my mother asked me to.

I’m damn tired of it.

“You’ve never said.”

“Why should I? The business needed to run. It’s been running. Fucking improving.”

That’s all there is to say. What the fuck talking is going to achieve I don’t know. He knows me better than anyone, and that’s barely enough for him to understand half of what goes on in this head of mine. It’s a place he doesn’t want to be. Shouldn’t be either. Hell, it’s a place I haven’t wanted to be sometimes.

I drink some more, sipping at the dry scotch, and stare back through the lounge in the direction of the main house. Fucking loyalty.

“This is Emily, isn’t it?”

“What?”

“All this.” He waves a hand at me, a slight smile forming as he moves to a chair. “This emotion. It’s not you. You fell for her.”

The thought makes me imagine her naked, four feet from where he’s currently standing, my dick in her ass and her whimpers calling my name. I smile at the image, still able to feel her skin in my grasp.

“How much did she owe you?”

“Nothing.”

She owed me nothing. And yet she gave me everything.

The sound of that song comes into my mind, eyes blankly locking onto the spot I’m thinking about. It’s been with me since she left, along with the feeling that something has been lost by her going. I sip my drink again, trying to work through the sensations she’s left me with. I feel empty, as if her presence in this house made it more alive, made me more alive. The corners of my mouth tip again, a memory of her coming down the stairs more enamouring than I gave it credit for at the time. It makes me twist over my shoulder, following her ghostly form down them, for once not tripping over her feet. She was so much bolder by the end of our time, even daring to try running from me. She spat and kicked like the best of them.

My dirty girl.

“Then why was she here?” he asks.

“I stole something I wanted. Nothing more than that.”

It’s something I still want.

I reach for my dice again, scooping them from the table and leisurely rolling them around. Perhaps fate should tell me what to do about her. She’s in here with me. In this room. In this house. Hell, she was even there when I pulled the trigger on Joe, her sweet melody coming from the flames I stared into. No woman has ever stayed with me like that. That’s what Mother talked about. Love.

“There wasn’t a debt to be paid?” he asks, surprise in his voice.

“Not by her.” He shakes his head and turns away, dismissing me and heading out of the room, disgust evident in his stride.

“That’s fucked up, brother, even for you,” he calls back, his frame disappearing out of my view.

The main door slams, signally his irritation. I sigh and digest the words. Even for me. It’s true. She never owed me that money. Never should have been taken away from her life, but I took her anyway. I behaved like my father would have, no care for morality or civility. I just took, and then I carried on taking just like Cane always does.

A frown creases my brow, disgusted with myself about the whole fucking thing, irrespective of my enjoyment of it. It pulls visions forward of my mother and her life, the madness in her mind borne of people like me taking what we want. The thought causes concern to creep in, making me snort at the sensation. I should find out if she’s alright, if she’s managing her way out of the fucked-up hell I put her in. I haven’t even asked Rody if she got home safely. I didn’t need to. He nodded when I saw him, telling me he’d done his job. That was enough for me at the time.

It’s not now.

I swipe out my phone, searching for her number, then remember I haven’t got it. What a fucked-up world this is. I steal her, play with her, treat her like dirt and then don’t even have the fucking foresight to have her number in my phone? I growl at myself and stand up, glaring at the door to the basement as I pass it by and remember locking her up down there. I’m a fucking animal. I’ve been moulded by a generation that inflicts cruelty to negotiate terms. Nate’s right. It’s all fucked up. I’ve behaved just like my father to someone who deserved nothing but respect.

Not anymore.

The dice roll, the throw of them at my kitchen counter coming without any real thought from me.

“Nine,” I mumble, watching them spin and bounce the surface. One lands on five, the topple of the second unsure whether it should land on four or not. I’ve scooped them up before it gets a chance to land fully. It’s close enough for me.

I snatch the keys off the table and straighten my tie, some pretence of the decency she deserves making me concerned for how I appear. It’s strange, making me chuckle at myself and remember her fingers tracing my scar. There was such a softness in them as she frowned and gazed, her mind asking questions she shouldn’t have had to hear the answers to.

I head out of the house towards my car, part holding myself off doing so, and yet unable to stop my feet driving towards an airport I shouldn’t head for. Women like her don’t belong here with us. They should be exactly where she was before me. Forging her way forward in life. Appreciated in her community for qualities that this world I’m in bypasses as inconsequential.

“Where are you going?”

Nate’s voice makes me spin back to face the house. He’s sitting in the formal garden area, drink still in his hand as he glares at the main house and then tips his head to me.

“Out.”

“Where?”

“I need to…”

I need to what? I don’t know myself, but I do know I need to do something. I need to talk to her, or see her. I need to know I haven’t fucked her over like Joe Mortoni and his family did my mother. My chest aches for something I don’t know what to do with.

Nate sips his drink and waits for an answer, no help on the matter as a smile starts to spread.

“You’re in love, brother.”

I scowl and turn for my car again, not interested in discussing whether I am or not. This isn’t about love. This is about apologising for something that should never have happened. Making sure my fucked-up sensibilities didn’t just screw over someone’s life and destroy it. It’s about modernizing and changing our future, something I started with the bullet in Joe’s dead body. Something she started when she breathed my damned name and it finally meant something to me other than business.

“Don’t bring her back, Quinn. She’s not meant for this.”

The car door slams and I spin the wheel to get me away from his words, foot flat to the floor as I power out of the drive. Not fucking meant for this? He’s damn right she’s not, but that’s not stopping me wanting her in my grip again.

I phone for the plane as I travel towards Chicago, ordering it ready in the next thirty minutes. It won’t be. There’s no fucking way they’ll be able to turn it around in that time. I’ll have to pace the hanger, hungry for something I can’t get to quick enough. I don’t even know why it’s so fucking important to me, but it is. It’s like a nagging I can’t get out of my skull. A lingering imprint of a past I want rid of somehow.

By the time I arrive an hour later, traffic hindering my route, the plane’s already waiting for me and ready to go. I chuckle and grab at my dice as I climb the steps, releasing and catching them, amused by fate stopping my need to pace. These damn cubes I hold have guided so much of my life. All the decisions I couldn’t make. All the times I faltered. They’ve served me well, showing the world a monster who couldn’t care less for the decisions they made.

“Good Evening, Sir,” the stewardess says.

I nod and carry on through to my seat, indifferent to her conversation. I’m not here for servants or small talk. I’m not here for things that answer me with what I want to hear, their sycophantic voices belying their truths. I’m here because I am, for once in my life, in need of someone who counters me. Someone who offers the possibility of this new future I’m creating, breathes life into it with me. It’s consuming enough to make me reach for my phone and turn it off, needing time to process my own emotions without interference from others. Cane can be damned for a while.

The thought resonates as I stare out onto the runway, engines already powering up to get me to her. The sound of them inches my gut closer to the realisation that Nate was right, irrespective of my dismissal. I am in love, but with no right to be. I have fallen for someone so far from my world I don’t know how to pull her into it, or even if I should. What do I have to offer an emotion like love? Lies, deceit. Manipulation and avoidance. A world still steeped in death and destruction? Nothing will change for a few years. Maybe a tilt of the axis for a while, but we are still Cane until we become legitimate. We still have a business to run, deals to complete, most of which will still have repercussions should the deal go bad. This gun will be lodged in my jacket for some time yet.

My fingers rub at my chin, feeling the hard ridge of the scar and imagining her under a blade like that. She’d never even held a gun before I forced one into her hands. But with me, as part of Cane? She will need to know how it feels to have life threatened, be ready for it. She will need to understand that every day of her life because no matter the changes I make, and no matter the life I try to forge, there will always be someone waiting in the background for us. It’ll keep coming forever regardless of how well Nate or I count the numbers down.

The wheels take off, and the ground of Chicago disappears into the distance beneath my feet. I just keep staring and think about what the fuck I’m doing up here, still confused about the correct angle to use when I get to her. Maybe I’ll make these cubes spin again when I see her, let fate make that last decision.