Page 124 of The Unlikely Spare

“And the Prince is secure? With you now?”

“Yes, sir. I’ve got him.”

There’s a pause, just long enough to make the hair on my neck stand up. Something in Pierce’s breathing pattern shifts, almost imperceptible through the satellite connection, but I catch it immediately.

“Well done, Officer O’Connell. You have gone above and beyond what we expected, and you have made everything so much easier.”

My forehead crumples. “Easier?”

“People like you, people with principles, have the easiest behavior to predict. Your moral code forces you down predictable paths.”

My mind swirls. It feels like we’re having a parallel conversation.

“Sir?” I say.

“Your brother Malachy will be able to explain things further. He asked me to remind you of your father’s favorite saying—something about family standing together? Whatever it was, I found it poignant.”

The ground tilts beneath my feet, reality splintering like ice cracking on a frozen lake. My brother’s name in Pierce’s mouth feels like a blade between my ribs.

“You’ve got Malachy?” I manage to say.

Nicholas must sense something is off from my body language. Because he’s staring at me, suddenly alert, all traces of his earlier sardonic humor vanished. He takes a half-step closer.

But I can’t think about Nicholas now.

Pierce has arranged for someone to kidnap Malachy? Everything goes sideways in my head. I see it with horrific clarity—Malachy’s flat door splintering open, his wheelchair catching on the threshold as he tries to escape, his strong arms pushing frantically at the wheels. The basketball trophies on his shelf crashing to the floor as he’s surrounded. His face, so like mine but sharper, contorting with the same rage that got him into countless schoolyard scraps before the accident. Fighting until they overpower him.

My free hand clenches so hard the knuckles crack audibly. My mouth fills with the taste of blood. I’ve bitten the inside of my cheek without realizing it.

The world narrows to a pinprick of fury so intense it feels like my skull might fracture from the pressure.

“Oh no, Eoin, you seem to be under the illusion that we are the bad guys. Malachy is one of us. He is the one who suggested you for this job.”

My head spins.

“That’s not possible,” I rasp, but even as the denial leaves my lips, threads I never connected weave into a horrifying tapestry.

My selection for this assignment, when others had more experience in aristocratic circles. The way I’d been positioned as the outsider on the team, isolated and suspicious of everyone.

And even further back, Pierce recruiting me from Belfast, mentoring me through the ranks, knowing every detail of my background, my motivations, my pressure points.

And Malachy—my brother with the revolutionary streak, always angrier than me about the tenement collapse, about the English aristocratic landlord who walked away without consequences while he lost the use of his legs.

The brother who pushed me to leave Ireland and join Scotland Yard.

I glance at Nicholas, who’s watching me with growing alarm, and the last piece slots home like a bullet in a chamber.

I was never hunting a traitor. I was being maneuvered, step by calculated step, into becoming one.

The satellite phone slips from my hand as the truth hits me like a sledgehammer.

I was the sleeper agent planted in Nicholas’s protection team to act when needed.

And I did my job.

Because I have just kidnapped Prince Nicholas.

Chapter Thirty-One