Page 76 of Ruthless Claim

I hiss.

Damn it.

I’m in love with her.

That’s what this is. That’s what it’s been. I just beat a man half to death without a single care because he dared to say my wife’s name. I’m in love with her.

I take a deep breath and shove the thoughts away into my mental box, locking them back. Connor is waiting and I need to be someone else for the next hour.

I drive to midtown. The lobby is quiet and it hits me that it has never once felt welcoming.

Tonight is no different.

The elevator opens onto the executive floor and I can hear Connor before I see him.

His voice comes through the closed office door, hard and clipped, the tone that means someone on the other end of that call is being made to understand something they’d rather not understand. I wait in the hall.

His assistant, also always at Connor’s beck and call even this late, stares at his desk.

My knuckles drip onto the marble floor. I watch the small red drops appear and don’t do anything about them.

The call ends and there’s a beat of silence. “Send him in,” Connor says, and his voice is very quiet, which is worse than loud.

The office is dim except for the desk lamp. Connor is standing, not sitting. He’s facing the window already, which means he skipped the pen-capping and the calibration entirely.

I inwardly sigh.

This means he’s been waiting for me specifically, which means someone called ahead. Doyle, probably. Or Ryan.

I don’t blame them.

He turns when I come in.

When I see his face, I know immediately that whatever version of this conversation I was preparing for on the drive over isn’t this one.

Connor Brennan has two modes of anger: the cold, contained version he uses on people he wants to manage, and the other one, the one I’ve seen maybe a handful of times in twenty years, the one that means the container has cracked.

His face is tight across the jaw and his eyes have gone to that flat, colorless pale that signifies danger.

“Sit down,” he says coldly.

I sit.

He doesn’t.

He stays at the window with his hands clasped behind his back and he looks at me the way he looks at problems he’s deciding how to eliminate.

I’ve been on the other side of that look before, but directed at other people.

I keep my face neutral.

My hands are on my knees and the knuckles are still bleeding sluggishly.

I’m fairly certain he can see it and that he doesn’t care.

“Doyle tells me,” he starts, “that you conducted yourself like a man with no training, no discipline, and no understanding of what I sent you there to do.” The way his head tilts is almost serpentine. “Tell me that’s not accurate.”

“The job is done,” I respond, careful to stick to the facts. “The names⁠—”