Page 5

The Potential

Tadhg

“Heya, Tadhg. Heya.” The second I stepped off the elevator on the top floor of the Dublin KaCh€ng App offices, my assistant, Eileen, all but pounced on me.

My COO alarm instantly went off.

She looked rattled—more rattled than the one time we had to reschedule payroll due to a company-wide software glitch.

Bloody PR nightmare that was for a fintech app.

“What’s wrong?” I doubled my speed toward my office suite at the end of the long hallway.

“If there’s a fire to put out, we’ll want to turn an extinguisher on it immediately.”

“Not a fire, exactly. There’s…” Eileen huffed as she struggled to keep up with me, letting me know she hadn’t been taking better advantage of the treadmills in our company gym as she’d sworn she would toward the beginning of the year.

“There’s someone in your office! I walked in ten minutes ago to find him just sitting there behind your desk, looking as if Edward Scissorhands and Professor Severus Snape decided to have a right grim and completely silent child. Who’s grown up now and holding a whiteboard that says ‘ Cian Mahoney here to meet with Tadhg Ryan .’”

I stopped walking.

“The Shadow Kin—” I caught and corrected myself before I could call him by his official, but largely unknown, title.

“Cian Mahoney, our CTO, is here? Waiting for me in my office?”

“Well, that’s who he claims to be. According to the log, he let himself into the C-suite using a working badge with the highest level of security clearance. But he’s so pale. I’m not even sure he’s corporeal.” She leaned in, voice pitched low.

“Should I call security, just to be safe? Or maybe those Ghostbuster fellas? I mean, he’s just... sitting behind your desk. Like a wraith who thinks he owns the place.”

“Well, technically, he does,” I pointed out, glancing toward my office.

“A one-third majority stock holding, anyway.”

“So, that’s really him, then?” Eileen whispered.

She had no idea our kind could hear even a whisper from behind a closed door.

“I never would have guessed from looking at him that he used to be on the rugby team with you and Declan.”

That was because Cian hadn’t actually played—just consulted with our coaches.

Same way I hadn’t technically been married to a plus-sized supermodel.

Well, I was. But only for the couple of weeks it took to get it annulled after the drugs and alcohol from my IPO funding celebration week in Koh Samui wore off and we both came to our senses.

As for Cian, he’d only “joined the team” to test an algorithm that might have earned him millions in the sports analytics market —if he hadn’t pivoted to creating a global financial product to compete with PayPal, Venmo, and Wise instead.

But now wasn’t the time for a correction to the bio he hadn’t bothered to update since we founded KaCh€ng from our shared Trinity University housing.

I waved her off. “It’s alright. I’ll handle it from here.”

“Should I bring you anything, then?” Eileen asked with another fretful glance toward the door.

“Tea? The blood of a virgin, perhaps? I hear wraiths like that.”

“Nothing for us. Thank you, Eileen,” I answered, pushing into the office before she had a chance to ask me anything else about our company’s reclusive third co-founder.

The glass wall of my corner office tinted as soon as I stepped inside, and sure enough, there he was.

Cian Mahoney—KaCh€ng’s CTO and our secret kingdom’s very own Shadow King.

He rose to his feet like a gothic raven behind my desk with the window remote in his hand.

I could understand why my lapsed Catholic human assistant covertly crossed herself before I closed the door behind me.

The tallest of we three kings, he was pale as milk, with eyes the color of bright-blue sea glass.

But those were the only two light qualities to his appearance.

The rest of him read dark as the dead of night.

He had a mess of jet-black hair that somehow managed to look tousled and spiky at the same time and wore head-to-toe black, with a heavy cable-knit fisherman’s sweater and leather pants some long-ago ancestor of his had most likely skinned and dyed his family line’s signature color with squid ink.

“I see you’re still dressing like the Irish answer to the Sandman comics,” I observed, coming to stand on the other side of the desk.

“To what do I and my now incredibly spooked first assistant owe the pleasure of this visit, Shadow King?”

Cian, of course, did not answer—at least not out loud.

Only used his long-fingered hand, nails painted black, to push a stapled sheath of papers across the desk toward me.

The first page turned out to be a printout of an email from an ex-employee.

According to the origin string, it had been forwarded several times, starting with an employee in our Scottish offices.

Hiya,

I’m not sure who to talk to about this, but I really need to reach Declan McMahon or Tadhg Ryan, quick.

I’m from a wee village up in the Scottish Highlands.

Just now, we’ve a group of visitors from Canada come over for a sort of mail order bride scheme.

But one of them isn’t like the others.

She’s different. Different like Mr. McMahon.

...

“Different...” A flicker of unease struck a match inside my chest. In “the world above” as our kind called it, “different” could mean anything from high on the ASD spectrum to deeply in trouble if you got caught out on a full-moon night.

Which was why I, unlike Declan and the reclusive Shadow King, always wore a scent-masking cologne.

“Are you thinking the writer’s a shifter then?”

Cian raised his sharp black eyebrows in a way that clearly conveyed “ keep reading .” Even this unprecedented in-the-flesh visit wasn’t enough to make him abandon his eerie vow of silence.

With a sigh, I flipped the page to a printout of a conversation from our highly encrypted message system that took place between Cian and someone with the AU tag assigned to all Anonymous Users who were only given temporary accounts.

CM: Hello, this is Cian Mahoney, speaking to you on an encrypted line.

Are you a wolf? If so, state your business.

AU: Yes, I’m a Scottish wolf.

Born and raised in the kingdom of Faoiltiarn.

Are you like Declan?

CM: Yes.

The uneasy feeling flared brighter as I read over the conversation, which revealed that the male Scottish Wolves were currently participating in some sort of Bridal Exchange with a group of Canadian she-wolves who hailed from a fundamentalist community that called themselves the Wolfennites.

AU: However, one of them is most definitely not a wolf.

CM: Are you saying that all these brides, including the one who is not a wolf, have come from across the sea?

AU: Well, they’re from Canada.

So yes, they had to fly across the Atlantic Ocean to get to us here in Scotland.

The words across the sea snagged my eyes—and my memory—and made me realize out loud why the Shadow King had made the unprecedented decision to visit me here in our Dublin offices.

In person.

An ancient hand fisted around my heart.

“You think this is the prophecy? The sign that we’ve entered the time of the Second Reaping?”

Cian nodded once.

His face would have made a gravestone label him much too serious, and his sea glass eyes glittered with a true believer’s conviction beneath all that black hair covering his forehead.

“No.” I took a step back and dropped the printed-out conversation back down on the desk like it was a hot coal that had seared my hands.

“No, lad. No way. You’re not actually entertaining the thought of telling the Irish wolves about this to commence a Second Reaping? The first one nearly prevented us from being able to open an office in Glasgow. Over five hundred years later. ”

He lifted the whiteboard to reveal words already written on it as if he’d predicted this would be my response: TELL & FUND & GET OUR QUEEN.

Queen was underlined.

Three times.

“Are you cracked?” I asked him with absolutely null levity.

Only to answer my own question.

“Most obviously, you’re cracked. You’ve gone full Mad Hatter locked up in that black basement you call a castle. But guess what?”

I pointed angrily at the printout, as if I were a prosecutor and it was a felon trying to plead not guilty in court.

“Declan won’t go for this. He doesn’t believe in anything that can’t be run through an ROI calculator. And have you forgotten? We’ve jobs to do in the real world. Board meetings to attend.”

The Shadow King wiped off his whiteboard.

“And before you say we can work remotely. One—” I turned my accusatory finger on him.

“You are a walking advertisement against working from home, lad. Look at the state of you. You could step in for another unnecessary remake of The Crow. ”

Cian looked down at his black-on-black leather outfit and conceded my point with a shrug.

But he kept writing.

So I kept going. “And maybe you’re used to living behind a keyboard in your secret kingdom abode, but Declan and I are meant to be interviewed by the Irish Times at Davos this fall, aren’t we? How’re we supposed to be the face of this company if we’re hiding from the Scottish Wolves? What’s this then?”

I paused, squinting at the board Cian flipped over to show me: If you look in the folder, I’ll go and not bother you further.

With that promise, he slid a folder across the desk.

I’d made the list of Nicest Billionaires on the Planet for my philanthropy and easygoing personality, but I swore, permanent frown lines were being etched into my face as I snatched up the folder.

“What do you possibly think could change my mind on?—”

Both my words and the world stopped the moment my eyes landed on the folder’s contents.

A single photo, blown up to 8 x 10, with a small tab note labeled: The Potential.

And then everything changed.

There she was.

The Potential.

The girl from the email.

The prophesied queen from across the sea.

It felt like stepping off a cliff and crashing into the Three Gods Lake.

I was being pulled under, my life divided into two parts.

Before I laid eyes on this female.

And after.

No, Declan wasn’t going to like this.

But I looked at Cian, my chest still tight with the sensation of drowning in the knowledge of this female’s existence.

And then five words fell from my mouth, as if they’d been etched into me thousands of years ago by the serpent gods who supposedly created our kind.

“Call in the Irish Wolves,” I told The Shadow King.

He nodded and exited my office without another word, leaving me with the life-changing picture—and a new future to set in motion.