Page 7 of Shadow Of Sin

He throws the ball at me, hard, which is how I know the score is pissing him off. We always play to eleven on Tuesdays and Thursdays. He’s won maybe six times total in the three years we’ve been doing it. But he keeps showing up, and that’s one of my favorite things about my older brother. He doesn’t need to win to think something’s worth his time. Most people aren’t like that. Most people quit when the math stops working in their favor.

He drives hard down the court, and I let him edge past me because I already know how this ends. He pulls up, shoots, and misses left. I’m already standing where the ball lands because he misses left about seventy percent of the time, something I figured out a long time ago.

“Stop doing that,” he snaps.

“I’ll stop when you stop making it so easy.”

“You fucking suck, Wolfe.” He wipes his face with his shirt, grinning because he’s annoyed about the fact that I pummel his ass into the ground more often than not when we play.

Cillian always grins when he’s annoyed and grimaces when he’s happy. It took me years to crack that backward-assed code. But knowing him as well as I do makes it easy to understand what’s happening beneath the surface. With most other people, even my brothers, it’s hard for me to get what they really mean when they say or do things a certain way.

It’s cold out here. March doesn’t care about your outdoor plans, but I like it. My head works better when the rest of me is uncomfortable. I’ve never really understood why, and I’ve stopped trying to.

I sink my ninth shot and Cillian catches the ball before it bounces on the court.

“Ronan wants us inside in ten. The ghost stuff,” he says, reading something on his phone.

“Yeah, I know.”

He lifts an eyebrow. “You know about the meeting, or you know about the ghost stuff?”

I shrug. “Both.”

He gives me the look. The one that says I’m being a pain in the ass on purpose, which is half true. I’m not trying to be a pain in the ass.

“Just try to be helpful in there. Give him what he wants,” he says, and what he really means is don’t piss Ronan off.

“I’m always helpful.”

“You’re helpful when you feel like it, which isn’t the same thing, and you know it.”

I sink my tenth shot instead of answering.

“Fuck,” he mutters, shaking his head as he stalks toward the house. I follow with the ball tucked under my arm. I always carry it in since he always forgets to grab it. It’s one of those patterns that I find comfortable instead of annoying.

There aren’t many of those in my life, so I’ll take this one as a win too.

A couple of years ago, our family was completely fractured, and our father was the main cause of it. But you’d never know it by walking into this room right now. We actually look like a functional unit. Kind of.

Ronan was Dad’s loyal soldier for a long time, and even though he doesn’t want anything to do with his toxic legacy, he stepped into the role as boss when Dad disappeared without a trace. Nobody fought him on it, not because we agreed that it should be him, but because fighting Ronan is like standing in front of a wall and asking it to move. You can do it, but the wall doesn’t care what you think.

I thought he’d thaw out a little bit after Dad took off. He patched things up with Lochlan and started to show up more for the rest of us. But you could still freeze ice on his ass. He sits at the head of the table, grunts greetings, doesn’t make small talk. He can be a real prick, and that’s his MO on a good day.

“The intrusions,” he says with a pointed look at me. “We know someone’s poking around our and the DiMichelis’ systems. Adriana’s security team flagged another hit last week. And we’ve been tracking the ones to ours.” Ronan’s jaw twitches from clenching it so hard. “So, the ghost. Where are we, Wolfe?”

Everyone calls them the ghost now. That started as my word and I didn’t give anyone permission to use it, but that battle’s long lost.

Gavin spins a pen between his fingers the way he always does during these meetings when his ass isn’t the one on the chopping block. Lochlan’s on speakerphone from his office because Adriana has a meeting at her consulting company this morning and he doesn’t like being too far from her, just in case. That’s a math problem I’ve tried and failed to understand since twenty minutes versus forty makes no difference in an actual emergency.

“I’m closer than I was last week,” I say.

Ronan’s brows knit together. “I need more than that.”

“I’ve got a location. Looks like this person is trying to stay off the grid, based on what I can tell. Whoever it is, they’re freelancing. And I don’t think they’re doing it by choice.”

Gavin’s pen stops spinning and he sits straight up in his chair. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

I turn to look at him. “It means someone’s pulling the strings in the background. The ghost is only the one taking the orders. I’m still working out who might be behind the whole operation and why they’re trying to access our data.”