“So, you shot the Mexican?” Robbie asked Connor as he slid a bottle of Connemara across the desk to him, followed by a glass.

Connor glanced at Cian. “Yes, sir,” he answered, pouring himself a healthy amount of whiskey.

“You approve that?” Robbie asked Cian.

Cian stood behind Connor’s chair, his hands on the back, white knuckling the damn thing. Liam leaned against the door, quiet, but Cian knew his brother had his back like he always did.

“No, but that’s on me. I didn’t get a chance to tell Connor what we were doing. He heard I was with Vasquez and assumed the worst, came in to protect me.”

Robbie looked hard at Connor. “That true?”

“Vasquez was a snake,” Connor said, evading the question. “I wouldn’t trust him with my dog, much less my brother.”

Robbie nodded, taking a sip of his own whiskey.

“So, your first time.” He lifted his glass. “Sláinte,” he toasted.

Connor lifted his own glass and Cian noticed his brother’s hand shook when he did. “Drink that all up now,” he said quietly, giving Connor’s shoulder a squeeze. Connor nodded and drank.

“So we got a war on our hands.” Robbie’s tone was neutral, which always worried Cian. He preferred when it was obvious what his father was going to do. Cruel or charming, as long as he could predict which Robbie he’d get, Cian could manage him. But the unknown Robbie was always a danger.

“Headed that way,” Cian answered.

“You ready for that?” Robbie asked Liam.

Liam nodded thoughtfully. “I already have the guys preparing,” he answered. “We’ve moved any product that was being stored close to Vasquez territory. We’re doubling up protection at all the family businesses.”

“Defensive, that’s all defensive,” Robbie said, his jaw set. That told Cian what he needed to know, so he jumped in to preempt the old man and hopefully prevent someone getting hurt.

“Not so defensive since we just killed the head of their organization,” Cian said calmly. “The next move really is theirs.”

“Bullshit!” Robbie’s fist came down on the desk. “You declared war, you make war.”

Connor took another long drink of his whiskey, and Cian heard Liam shift behind him.

“Maybe I should have said ‘we still have the hostage and we killed their boss.’ We have the upper hand here, Pop. I don’t want to take a bunch of our guys into Vasquez territory and risk lives if we don’t have to. If we wait to see how they’re going to react, then we can make some better choices about what’s next.”

Robbie stood, his face red as he stepped out from behind the desk. He moved fast for a man who was nearly seventy and had a heart condition, grabbing Cian by the front of the shirt.

“You listen to me,” he snarled. “No son of mine is going to wait around for someone else to make the decisions. You’re in a war, you act like a damn general instead of a scared little pussy.”

Cian put his hands up, letting his father rage. One punch and he could flatten the old man, but he’d never done it, and he knew it would only make things worse. His hatred of Robbie had passed the red-hot variety years ago. It was cold as ice now, and that meant it waited patiently for the right opportunity. Someday, Cian would finish Robbie, but until then, he played his part.

“All right,” he said. “What would you like us to do? Send some guys down there and do a drive-by? Maybe go after one of their storage facilities, set a fire? You tell me. We’ll do it.” His words were submissive, but his tone was like the ice that wrapped his heart whenever he thought of his father.

Robbie shoved Cian away like so much garbage he couldn’t stand to touch. “You hit ’em fast and you hit ’em hard. Finish the hostage, dump him somewhere they’ll see him. And knock off some of their other men when you do it. In a war, you never make a move that doesn’t include taking some of their soldiers out. The fewer men they have, the less firepower.”

Cian’s stomach turned at the idea of losing more lives. “You want this done tonight?” he asked.

Robbie snorted in disgust, but Cian could see his outburst had cost him. His skin had paled, and he was breathing heavily. “Yes, I want it done tonight. I want it done two hours ago.”

Cian subtly adjusted his shirt collar. “Okay, we’ll get right on it.”

Robbie’s attention turned to Connor. “I’m proud of you for defending your family,” he said, cuffing Connor upside the head. “Your brother wasn’t half the man at your age.” He stared defiantly at Cian, baiting him, looking like he’d welcome nothing more than a chance to take on his oldest son.

Connor nodded awkwardly, and Liam let out a sound of disgust with a muttered “Come on, Pop.”

Cian simply strode to the door and opened it, his mind already on his next move. The constant chess match that was his life had no room for bitter old men and their approval—or lack thereof.

“Let’s go, Connor,” Cian said. “We’ve got places to be.”

Connor stood and walked to the door.

“You’ll tell me after it’s done,” Robbie instructed. Cian nodded, but then his mother appeared in the hall.

“Robert Patrick MacFarlane,” she said. “I could hear you shouting in the kitchen. How many times do I have to tell you to calm down or you’ll give yourself a full-blown heart attack?”

Cian let his mother slip past him, looking down when she paused to give him a sad smile and a pat on the cheek before she bustled in to fuss at his father more.

Liam and Connor followed him out to the kitchen, where they found Finn waiting.

“Were you able to do it?” he asked Finn.

“Yeah, nobody else showed. It was quick and smooth.”

A sigh of relief washed through Cian then. The Vasquez people would know they’d killed Alejandro, but at least the feds and the cops wouldn’t have a murder to investigate.

“What happens now?” Finn asked, his voice low as all four men clustered together near their mother’s kitchen table.

“Pop wants us to hit ’em tonight,” Liam answered, his brow furrowed.

“Is that what you want?” Finn asked. Cian shook his head. “Good,” Finn said, “because I have a better idea.”

* * *

Cian took a deep breath before stepping out of the car under the street light. “You want me to come in?” Danny asked as he held the car door open.

“No, just wait here.” He looked at his man on the stoop guarding Lila’s door. “Why don’t you take a break?” he said. “Danny will be here. Come back in about thirty minutes.”

The guy nodded. “Thanks, Mr. MacFarlane. Can I grab you anything at the Starbucks down the street?”

Cian declined and then walked up the steps to knock on the door of Lila’s simple brownstone.

The door swung open, and there she stood in a tight T-shirt, yoga pants, floppy bun, and bare feet. He’d never seen her without shoes. She was even smaller than he’d realized.

“Sorry for the late visit,” he said, nudging past her and into the tiny foyer.

“Uh, did you need something?” she asked, still holding the door open.

“Yeah,” he answered, moving into the living room. “Why don’t you come have a seat?”

She stared at him for a moment, probably something to do with the fact he’d just invited her into her own house, but then she sighed, waved weakly at Danny, and shut the front door before she sat stiffly on the sofa across from the chair he’d taken.

He felt a slight sweat break out on the back of his neck beneath the dress shirt he wore. He’d tried to figure out a way to avoid this discussion, but his choices seemed to be diminishing with each day. He had to either strike the Vasquezes before sunrise or get them to agree to a deal. Finn had provided that proposed deal, not realizing the danger he put Cian in with the idea. Now Cian had about six hours to figure it out, and he needed information that only someone like Lila could get him.

He’d debated going to a stranger, someone who didn’t have a vested interest in what he did and with whom, but that was one more loose thread out there he’d need to keep track of. Lila was a fish in his tank already. It would be easier to ensure she kept her mouth shut than it would be some mercenary hacker he’d hire on the dark web.

He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, and gave her his most earnest appeal. Because he was earnest; everything he was telling her was true, and he needed her to see that.

“I need help,” he began. “I’ve been trying to negotiate something with the rivals who attacked you and my brother’s girlfriend the other night.”

“The Vasquez family,” she said.

He should have known she’d be up to speed on it. She was smart and had access to vast quantities of information.

“Things between our families have been tense for a long time. And tonight, they snowballed. I’m down to two options—one is to go to war, which will cost lives and money and draw unwanted attention to the business.”

She nodded in understanding, pulling her feet up underneath her and relaxing back into the sofa, seemingly lulled by his frankness.

“The other option is to try to trade some information for a peace agreement.”

Her eyes widened in understanding. “And you need help getting the information?”

“I do.”

They looked at one another for a beat longer, then he broke the gaze, standing and rubbing the back of his sweaty neck as he paced her small living room floor.

“Word has it there’s an FBI informant deep in the Vasquez organization.” He heard her small intake of breath. “I need to know who that person is so I can trade his name for peace.”

He turned and looked at her.

“You want me to hack the FBI?”

He nodded. “Can you?”

She snorted softly. “Of course I can.” Then she paused. “But I’d basically be signing the guy’s death warrant, wouldn’t I?”

He shrugged lightly. He wasn’t going to tell her that death would be the easy part of what the guy got. The torture that preceded it would make him grateful for the execution.

She folded her arms across her chest, and he tried not to smile at the frown that appeared between her delicate brows.

“So you need the name of a confidential FBI informant?”

“Yes.”

She sighed. “I can probably do that.” She moved toward a desktop on the far side of the room.

“There’s something else,” he added, clearing his throat as she paused midway to the desk. “You might see something—on that list. You might see another name, and if you do, you could do some serious damage to my family.” He breathed deeply, leaning back against the wall as he pinned her with his gaze. “You could cost other lives—my life.”

Her eyes widened as she swallowed so hard, he could see her throat work from across the room. He knew when she got it. Watched as her face went through the full array of responses—shock, disbelief, fear, confusion. Then, as if she’d put on a mask, she nodded once, sharply.

“Okay. I’m going to get to the file you need, and I’m going to step away from the computer, and you’re going to look at that file and you’re going to get whatever information you need from it. I won’t know what’s on it—who’s on it. I don’t want to know.”

“This is the part where I’m supposed to threaten you.”

“Yeah, I know,” she answered, sarcasm tingeing her words.

“I don’t give a damn about myself,” he said truthfully. “But I care a hell of a lot about my brothers. Everything I do is for them. If anything were to happen to them because of this, I would do what I had to.”

She stared at him, and she looked so sad, he almost took it back, almost told her he’d only ever killed one man, and that had been under duress. He couldn’t even begin to imagine killing a beautiful, sharp, tough little woman who hacked computers. He was a damned liar.

But admitting he had a weakness wasn’t how he played the game, and he’d been playing it a lifetime.

* * *

Lila tried to control her shaking hands as she sat at her desktop computer. She’d built it herself, piece by piece, insuring it had every single component exactly as she wanted it to be. It was her pride and joy, but now it seemed more like a device to insure her eventual demise.

He’d threatened her. After saying he didn’t hurt civilians. But of course, hacking the FBI so he could give information to a rival gangster probably took her out of the civilian category. She wasn’t Lila from Rogue working on setting up secure sales systems. No, now she was Lila the expert hacker in the middle of a potential gang war.

Yeah, he’d threatened her, and while part of her was warning her not to ignore it, because he wasn’t the head of a ruling crime family for no reason, another part of her simply couldn’t believe it. The man she’d come to know was so…decent, she struggled to believe he’d kill her simply because she knew something he didn’t want her to.

As she set up the cyber walls she’d need to surround her as she entered the FBI’s servers, she took a deep breath, letting it out slowly, willing her heart to settle into a normal rhythm.

Dammit, Lila, she warned herself. Just because he was sexy as hell didn’t mean he wasn’t dangerous. And truth be told, men like him were master manipulators, letting you see only what they wanted you to. And if anyone should know that, she should. How many times had her father seemed like the caring, attentive parent, only to end up missing her science fair or class play because he was at the track? How many times had he offered to take her for ice cream only to end up dragging her to the track so she could look at stats and odds to tell him which horse to bet on?

If anyone should know how deceptive men like Cian MacFarlane could be, it was Lila.

And yet, there was still a little voice in her head that said he wouldn’t actually do it. The way he talked about his brothers, the look on his face when he watched her while she explained technical things to him, the questions he asked when they met for coffee. He’d seemed genuinely interested, not asking the standard questions, but deeper things—like what it was like to grow up biracial, if she was religious, what she liked to do in her spare time. And the way he’d texted her late at night after she’d been attacked.

How is your throat? he’d asked.

Better. But I think I might have a bruise that shows. Scarves for me for a couple of days.

Then there had been a pause, and she’d thought he might have moved on, the obligatory check-in done.

I wish more than anything I could promise you’ll never be harmed because of me again, he’d finally added.

It’s okay, she’d texted in response. I’m a grownup, I knew what I was getting into when I decided to enter the dark end of the business.

You’re not even thirty years old yet, and you’ve been a professional hacker since you were twenty, he’d responded. There’s no way you could have predicted this—my family’s business.

She hadn’t known how to answer that, so she never responded. But she’d looked at that message in the dark of her bedroom for hours afterward. Because deep down, as much as she liked to tell herself otherwise, she knew he was right. She’d been twenty, angry, and lost. She’d already broken countless laws on her father’s behalf. Erasing his debts with bookies, switching his bets in the records when his horse lost, and scamming online gambling systems on his behalf. And then one day, she’d stood in front of the entire information systems faculty and student body at the prestigious Chicago Institute of Technology and accepted the award for student of the year and her father hadn’t been there to see her get it. That was when she’d finally known—he didn’t love her. He only loved what she could do for him.

Her anger over that had been so consuming, she’d dropped out of school, started hacking for personal gain, and never looked back.

Yes, Cian MacFarlane had pegged her in a way no one before ever had. He’d seen she’d never had a choice about what she did. She’d been set on her path just as surely as he’d been set on his. Childhoods and fathers who gave them no alternatives. Men who cared more about their own obsessions than they did their own children.

It was because of the way he’d seen so deep inside her that she was having trouble believing he’d actually hurt her. But wasn’t that what manipulators did? Looked inside you, found what made you tick, used it against you. It was what her father had done. He’d known all she wanted was him—his love, his approval—and he’d used it to control her.

Was Cian different? Or more of the same? She gave herself a little shake as a timer told her she needed to get past the current barrier in the system in the next twenty seconds or she’d be booted out and need to start all over again. She focused as the timer ticked down, her heart racing in that familiar way it did whenever she faced a challenge from a system. Ten…nine…Dammit! She reversed the code she’d typed and hammered out another string instead. Five…four… Her screen went dark, then relit almost instantly with the FBI logo. She exhaled a shaky breath. She was into the basic employee system. Now she had to find the file Cian needed. No telling what security clearance level it would require, but at least the first hurdle had been cleared.

She glanced at Cian sitting on her sofa, thumbs flying over his phone screen. Then she shook it all off, focused on the blinking cursor in front of her, and got down to business. Whether he’d kill her or not, he expected her to succeed at this, and the one sure thing Lila had in her life was her hacking. She was one of the best in the world, and she wasn’t about to let the FBI or a sexy mobster change that.

* * *

For the next two hours, Cian sat in Lila’s living room as she clacked away on her keyboard, muttering to herself intermittently. He made some calls, scrolled through emails, even went in her kitchen and made them both coffee with the old French press she directed him to.

Finally, somewhere south of three thirty in the morning, she stood. “Okay, I’m in. At least I’m in to one file with the sort of information you want. I can’t promise it’s the right one, so I may need to look more.”

Cian set his nearly empty coffee cup down on the end table and made his way to the computer.

“You’ll just double-click on that folder,” she indicated, pointing to the screen. “And you should go quickly. They do a security scan at six a.m. Eastern, and it might pick me up digging around in there.”

Cian nodded and sat in her desk chair. It was still warm from her body, and something inside him couldn’t help but notice that.

She turned away and walked to the kitchen. He heard the refrigerator door open, then a pan being put on the stove. After he double-clicked on the icon, the screen brightened with a list of names, along with series of letters and numbers—some sort of codes.

He scanned the list. What an idiot he’d been. He’d had visions of the list being like a roster—name of informant, organization they were informing on, email address, phone number…something other than first names that were probably pseudonyms and damn secret codes of some sort.

“Jesus,” he muttered. “Dumbass.”

“You having problems?” she asked as she walked back into the room, the scent of bacon following her.

“Uh, my own stupidity, I guess.” He looked at her over his shoulder. “I didn’t really consider this stuff might be coded.” He scanned down the list. There was no Cian there, and thank God, because he had a damned unusual name. “Can you take a look?”

She tentatively stepped closer, standing behind his chair to look at the screen. The back of his neck prickled, and he felt something he knew he couldn’t afford to right then.

“Ah,” she said quietly. “Not going to be easy to find your guy in all that, is it?”

“No.”

“So the trick to these is the patterns…” She leaned over next to him and hit a couple of keys that split the screen, then she began typing rows of letters and numbers that looked like the ones on the FBI’s page.

“Your bacon will burn,” he said, noticing his voice sounded a little rough as he looked at the strip of skin between her cropped T-shirt and yoga pants. “I’ll deal with it. You do what you do.” He moved off the chair, striding quickly to the kitchen. Once there, he rolled up his shirtsleeves and flipped the strips of meat, pulling plates out of the cabinet and popping a few pieces of bread in the toaster as well. He’d always liked cooking, and he really needed the distraction.

“God,” he heard her call from the other room. “They’re so predictable. It’s a Caesar cipher. I just need to find the shift value. It’ll only take a couple of minutes.”

The toast popped, and he slathered on some butter, divided the bacon between the two plates, and added half a grapefruit to each as well. After searching for utensils, he found an entire drawer full of plasticware from takeout packages.

He walked out of the kitchen carrying the food and set her plate on the desk next to her. “You have no silverware,” he remarked, one eyebrow raised because he thought it was funny.

She glanced at the plate, then at him and sighed. “I don’t cook very much.”

He pulled a footstool over and sat on it, balancing his plate on his thigh as he ate.

“What the hell is a Caesar cipher?” he asked around a bite of toast.

Lila absentmindedly plucked a piece of bacon off her plate as she continued to tap out rows of numbers and letters with her other hand.

“It’s a fairly simple way of encrypting something. Just imagine if you have two rows of the alphabet and you shift the bottom one four spaces to the right, then take the four leftover letters from one end of the bottom row, move them to the other end, and then substitute letters in the bottom row for letters in the top row.”

She grabbed a piece of paper and pen from the drawer and quickly showed him.

“So that’s what they’ve used?” he asked, fascinated at the things she knew.

“Yes, but I don’t know how many spaces they shifted, and they’ve included numbers and special characters, so it’ll just take me a sec…” She paused, hit enter, and the screen went wild for a few seconds, spitting out strings of numbers and letters in a frenzy. Then it stopped, two rows highlighted.

“Here we go,” she said.

“Did the computer just figure it out?”

“I figured it out,” she corrected. “I just set up a quick program to have it run the combinations so it would go faster.”

Cian set his plate down on the desk and leaned forward. Her hair smelled like honey, and he couldn’t stop himself from taking a deep breath before he focused on the screen where she was now typing madly again.

“Now what are you doing?” he asked.

“Decoding the list for you,” she said. “Oh. Except maybe I shouldn’t see the list. I can give you the cipher, and you can decode it. We can print it out or—”

“Just do it,” he told her. He had neither the time nor the mental energy to solve encrypted FBI informant lists right then, and he’d already admitted to her his name might be there. What difference did it really make?

She swallowed. “Okay.”

“Lila from Rogue?” he said quietly, keeping his eyes on the computer screen though he really wanted to look at her.

“Yeah?”

“I’m not actually going to kill you.” He couldn’t help the small smile that lifted one corner of his mouth as she turned, her face mere inches from his, and stared at him.

“Okay,” she said again, her voice thready.

“I have a very complicated life,” he continued. “I make hard decisions every day, and my priority is always protecting my brothers. Sometimes to do that, I make unorthodox choices. You can understand that, right?”

She nodded, still staring at his profile. She’d stopped typing, so there was nothing to see on the screen, but he continued to look at it anyway.

“I’ve trusted you with something because I had to right now. If you choose to tell someone—anyone—it will cost my life, and that in turn will probably cost my brothers their lives, or at least their freedom.”

Then he looked at her, and it took every ounce of the self-discipline he was known for to keep from leaning those last few inches and pressing his lips to hers. Her eyes were luminous—dark and shiny. Her skin was flawless, porcelain laid over steel, and her lips were two perfect pillows calling for him to come rest there, release his burdens, lay down his weary soul.

But he was Cian MacFarlane, and he hadn’t survived thirty plus years in his world by losing control.

“So, you can tell someone what you learned here today, and you can put me and my brothers at risk. Or you can keep it to yourself. Your choice. Either way, I’m not going to kill you. I don’t kill beautiful women who are doing me a favor.”

“I don’t want you to die,” she said, blinking at him for a moment before she broke the spell by turning away and resuming her typing. Something inside him sizzled and sparked at that. The idea that anyone other than his brothers didn’t want him to die was refreshing, maybe even inspiring.

“And I haven’t learned anything here today,” she continued, “except you cook damned good bacon, and the FBI is lazy with their encryption. A five-year-old could have broken that cipher.”

Then she grinned and pointed at the screen. “Voilà!”

He looked where she pointed, and there, the third name she’d decoded on the list was Juan, and following it was the name Vasquez. His gaze traveled to the other two rows she’d decoded, and he noted neither included “Cian” or “MacFarlane.” He breathed a sigh of relief.

“Now,” she said, “it’s already five a.m. Eastern. I’m shutting this down before they sweep the system.”

“Great,” he answered, standing and picking up his plate. “That’s what we needed.”

He loaded her dishwasher while she backed out of the FBI system, and ten minutes later, they both stood in her foyer, Cian armed with the information he hoped would stop a war, Lila looking tired as hell.

“Thank you,” he said as he stood gazing at her, knowing he needed to leave, but not wanting to give up the sanctuary of her quiet home just yet. “I’ll have something sent over for your time,” he added. “A bonus if you will.”

“It’s really not—”

“Yeah,” he corrected, “it is.”

She nodded. “Thank you.”

They stared at one another awkwardly for a moment, then he took charge, because that’s what Cian did.

“If the circumstances were different,” he told her, reaching out and cupping her soft cheek in his big palm, “you’d be my reward for a life done well, Lila from Rogue.” Then he leaned down and kissed her chastely on the lips before he turned and left.

* * *

The sun was rising as Lila fell into bed. She lay in her underwear and nothing else, the sheets cool against her heated skin. She gently ran her fingertips across her lips, the feel of his breath still warm on her skin.

He’d kissed her, admittedly only a whisper, a flutter of feathered wings that was gone before she’d hardly had time to register it. But her heart had raced, her pulse had jumped, and an hour later, her breath still came faster than normal.

“You’d be my reward.” Lila had never been special to anyone for anything except her hacking skills. But somehow, she knew that wasn’t what he’d meant. No, he’d been talking about her as a woman.

She sighed, unable to stop the small smile that slid across her lips. God, a man like Cian viewing her as a woman—a woman he wanted, no less. It was so far out of her normal worldview, she wasn’t sure what to think of it.

Or at least her head didn’t know what to think of it. The rest of her seemed perfectly able to think about it—fantasize about it, sigh over it like a schoolgirl with a crush on the sexy older guy in Algebra.

She knew it wouldn’t ever happen again, and even if it did, it wouldn’t result in anything. But for that one brief moment, as the sun lit up the cold Chicago sky, Lila allowed herself to imagine what it would be like to have Cian’s hands on her, his lips skating across her skin, his fingers touching her most achy and tender places, his breath coming heavy as he thrust into her. For just a few brief moments, Lila allowed herself to dream about what it would feel like to be wanted by a man like Cian MacFarlane.

And it was spectacular.