Only Zac could call Eva angel. Mainly because he was the only one who could get away with it. He’d been the one to discover her when she’d tried to hack into his company’s client database, and he’d been the one to hire her to make sure no one could ever hack into it again.
Eva rolled her eyes. “Okay, whatever.”
Gabriel nodded to Zac from his chair but made no effort to move.
“I heard about Corrine,” Zac said to him as he shrugged off his overcoat and slung it over a nearby chair. “My condolences.”
“Thank you.” It didn’t surprise Gabriel that Zac already knew. The guy knew lots of things, especially things he wasn’t supposed to know.
“How did you find out?” Alex asked from the sofa. He sounded annoyed.
“I read the obituaries. Like anyone else.”
Alex sighed. “I don’t read the obituaries.”
Zac came over to the fire, reached for a tumbler, then looked around for the decanter. “Maybe you should.” He frowned in Gabriel’s direction. “Have you finished all that bloody scotch, Woolf?”
Gabriel shrugged, unrepentant. “My mother is dead. I think I deserve it, don’t you?”
“Guys, please,” Eva interrupted, looking impatient. “Could we forget about the booze for a second? We can get some more in a minute. I want to talk about the opportunity I e-mailed you about.”
The last shot of whisky had settled comfortably in Gabriel’s stomach, making his limbs feel loose. But the anger inside him still boiled away like a saucepan of water on an open fire. Wasn’t confessing one’s sins supposed to help? At least that’s what his mother had always said. But not today it hadn’t. If anything, confessing had only made his anger burn hotter.
“‘Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord,’” his mother had always told him. “Not ours, Gabriel. Ours is to forgive.”
Maybe his mother had forgiven the man who raped her. But Gabriel couldn’t and never would.
What had the Reverend said to him once? “Keep it cold, Church. Don’t let emotion get in the way of what you have to do.” The Reverend had been the old president of the Angels and had known what he was talking about. Emotion clouded your judgment. Made you weak. And he couldn’t afford to be weak.
This anger had to be cold. Clean. So he could deliver justice for his mother with a steady hand.
“Honor St. James,” Eva was saying. “That’s who.”
Gabriel blinked as the name permeated suddenly through the whisky haze.
Alex was still sprawled on the sofa but his posture was now not so much lazy cat as a lion about to pounce. “Honor?” His voice was soft and deadly.
Eva, standing with her back to the fire, smiled. “Yeah, Alex. Honor. Your sister.”
Everything inside Gabriel paused.
He and Alex had been sixteen, both of them laborers on the same building site. Alex had just left home—or rather deserted it—yet Gabriel still remembered the woman who’d turned up at the site one day looking for her son, a beautiful woman with black hair and Alex’s blue eyes. She’d had a serious-looking eight-year-old girl in tow. A girl who’d stared at Gabriel and Alex as they were summoned by the site foreman. Saying nothing. Just staring. Accusing.
Honor.
Alex never spoke of her, just like he never spoke about any of his family.
“What about her?” Gabriel demanded, instinct suddenly gripping him tight. He could feel Zac staring at him from across the room, golden eyes unnervingly direct.
Understandable really, since two days ago Gabriel had asked him to do some digging into a man called Guy Tremain. The name of the man on his mother’s check.
Zac’s contacts had turned up all kinds of interesting facts.
Such as Guy Tremain’s marriage to Alex’s mother nineteen years earlier. His role as doting father figure to Alex’s sister, Honor. His successful hotel chain. His reputation as a veritable pillar of the community.
All the while no one knew the most important fact of all: that he was a rapist.
Eva gave Gabriel another one of her narrow, suspicious looks. She didn’t trust easily and hated men who took advantage of women. “Why are you so interested?”
“Don’t be stupid, Eva,” Gabriel said shortly. “You know me better than that. I’m not going to screw with her in that way.”
“Then what way? You’ve been zoning out for the past ten minutes and at the mention of her name you’re suddenly all ears?”
Alex was shaking his head. “No,” he said. “No and no. Keep out of it, Eva.”
“Get a grip, Alex,” she said. “She’s got one of the best investment firms in the city and I’m not going to ignore her just because she’s your damn sister. If you’ve got a problem with her then perhaps you need to work it out? Have you ever thought of that?”
Alex went even more still, if that was possible, and the temperature in the room plunged.
“Eva, that was insensitive,” Zac said mildly enough, though the reprimand was unmistakable. “And also Alex’s business.”
There was never any pressure to speak of the things they didn’t want to talk about. “Don’t ask, don’t tell” was one of their first rules. Every single one of them had wounds that remained hidden. Eva especially, from what he’d heard.
She didn’t look at Zac but her intense gray gaze flickered. “When I need a father, Zac, I’ll ask for it, okay?”
Zac opened his mouth to say something but Alex held up his hand. “It’s fine. I accept your apology, Eva,” he said, even though Eva hadn’t offered him one, “but for future reference, can we keep my family out of any of these ‘great investment’ deals?”
“Tell me about the deal,” Gabriel said, ignoring the flare of blue as Alex turned to look at him.
Eva lifted her chin. “You didn’t answer my question. What’s with the sudden interest in Honor?”
He wasn’t quite sure yet. All he knew was that she was connected to Guy Tremain. And perhaps that did make her a potentially useful tool. Especially since it concerned claiming justice for his mother.
But he wasn’t going to tell everyone else that. Even after all these years it was too personal to tell anyone. That he was the walking, talking reminder of his mother’s rape. That he’d spent the last nineteen years of his life knowing that whenever his mother looked at him, she didn’t see her son but the face of the man who’d raped her.
Oh, she’d told Gabriel it wasn’t true. That she couldn’t remember who the man had been but Gabriel knew she’d lied. He’d heard her confessions, after all, whispered so that no one else would hear. Confessions of guilt and shame. And fear. Fear when she looked at her own son.
No. They didn’t need to know about that.
Gabriel met Eva’s gaze. “You said investment opportunity. So? I want to fucking invest.”
Eva stared at him for a long moment. Then she looked down at her hands, examining the chipped polish on her nails. “Honor contacted me personally about a large hotel chain she’s needing investors for. Apparently the company’s been trying to turn some of the hotels into luxury eco-resorts but ran into serious debt. She still thinks the idea has merit and thought I might want to sink some cash into it because they want to use some of Void Angel’s smart tech.”
Luxury eco-resorts … that was familiar somehow but he couldn’t quite place it. A Woolf Construction job maybe? His company did quite a bit of hotel building and certainly one of his own personal areas of interest was in green construction—that was where the smart money was these days.
“How interesting,” Zac murmured, his voice soft.
Gabriel flicked a glance at the other man and met amber eyes that were staring calmly back. Must have something to do with the information he’d asked Zac to get for him …
Ah, yes. That was it. Zac’s contact had pulled up a whole lot of financial info about Tremain Hotels, the hotel chain Guy Tremain owned. About how in debt the company was after an attempt to turn a select few of the hotels into a series of luxury eco-resorts.
Looked like Honor was trying to help her stepfather. Which could mean all sorts of opportunities, if so.
“Yes,” Gabriel agreed, folding his arms. “Very interesting.”
Alex abruptly pushed himself off the sofa in an impatient movement and went over to a phone that sat on one of the side tables. “Could we get more of the Macallan thirty-nine in here please, James,” he said shortly into the receiver, then hung up and turned back to the rest of them. “Sorry, Eva. You’re going to have to count me out on this one.”
“Because it’s your sister?”
“Yeah, because it’s my sister.”
“Why? Afraid she’s going to call you out on the last nineteen years of no contact?”
“Eva,” Zac said quietly. “Respect the group.”
There was a flush in Eva’s pale, fine-boned face, the glitter of something like pain in her eyes. Most of the time she was guarded, sarcasm her armor, but there were some things she felt deeply enough about to let that armor drop. Loyalty was one, the importance of family another. Gabriel could understand it. He’d first been fiercely loyal to the only blood relative he had—his mother. And then, when she turned away from him, the Angels, the motorcycle club that had embraced him and their president, the Reverend, the man who’d been a father figure to him.