Page 81 of How to Kill Your Rival

‘For now, we keep it between us. Dad is too fragile to be trying to go after them. And there’s no point worrying him when we might well have him back by tomorrow.’

Maggie looks at me and sighs. ‘Now’s the time to tell him the other thing.’

My chest seizes. I don’t want to tell James the secret I know she’s hinting at.

‘No,’ I say.

‘He needs to know why we need to focus on both families. Why they’d team up.’

James is looking from Maggie to me, and my heart stutters in my chest.

‘I can’t.’

Reaching over, James threads his fingers through mine. ‘Whatever it is, we can deal with it.’

Nausea roils in my stomach, and I screw my eyes shut.

‘The man who once broke my heart was Patrick Kavanagh.’

I daren’t look at James’ face. My pulse thunders as I count to twenty after my admission, trying to steady my breath.

‘Weren’t you eighteen or so?’ James asks, his voice dropping low.

‘I was.’

‘And he was your dad’s friend,’ he says.

I nod.

‘Well, we’re killing that fucker regardless of how he’s involved with the rest of this.’

Opening my eyes, I smile. ‘It was kind of him to give me another excuse. You don’t think I’m disgusting? Or stupid?’

‘Eliza, we’re all stupid at eighteen. Even you. It doesn’t give him the right to take advantage.’

‘Okay,’ I breathe. ‘But first, we get Fraser back.’

* * *

‘Tell me everything you know about the Stewart operation,’ James says. ‘Glasgow holdings, contacts, logistics, who runs what. All of it.’ He has a sea of technology set out in front of him, his phone already buzzing from the messages he’s sent out for information.

‘James,’ I say.

‘Anything you know. No matter how small,’ he says.

‘I should have told you about Eddie. Months ago. You should have had the full picture and I⁠—’

‘Yes, but there’s nothing we can do to change that. So focus on getting Fraser home. Tell me what you know. We can deal with the rest later. Fraser has seven days.’

I swallow hard. Fraser, despite all his broodiness and tattoos, is still my baby brother. Still the little boy we read stories to and chased around the forest pretending to be gruesome monsters. It could be argued that Eddie was also someone’s brother. Someone’s son. But he brought his demise upon himself. All he had to do was leave Maggie alone. In my mother’s absence, despite being the middle child, I’ve taken on the mantle of the mother bear. And anyone threatening my family is doomed.

‘They run their operations primarily out of Glasgow. They have a lot of warehouses in the East End, a couple of offices that work as fronts for what they do, and some residential properties.’ I pull my laptop towards me. ‘My father’s always kept a fairly close eye on the Stewarts because they are as untrustworthy as they come.’

‘Send whatever you have to me, and we’ll whittle it down to the most likely places they could be keeping him. They’ll need somewhere where they can’t be overheard.’ He swallows down whatever he was going to say next. He doesn’t need to say it. They won’t want to be overheard if they are torturing Fraser. If they try to extract what happened to Eddie while they hold them.

The thought of my brother going through that makes me sick to my stomach. Some might say that we deserve it as much as the men and women we hunt down and dispatch. In their eyes, we likely are. The Hamiltons have only ever taken contracts that remove terrible people, though. We never take the ones where a man wants his wife dead so he doesn’t have to lose half of his house in a divorce when he wants to run off with a younger woman. Nor the familial inheritance squabbles, where one fewer sibling can be highly lucrative.

We have morals.