Murphy’s Law: Murphy’s Law Book One Read online

  Murphy’s Law

  Murphy’s Law Book One

  Michelle St. James

  Blackthorn Press

  Contents

  Murphy’s Law

  Copyright

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Links

  Also by Michelle St. James

  Murphy’s Law

  Murphy’s Law Book One

  * * *

  Michelle St. James

  This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  * * *

  Copyright 2019 by Michelle St. James aka Michelle Zink

  * * *

  All rights reserved.

  * * *

  Cover design by Isabel Robalo

  1

  Ronan Murphy ran, picking up his pace when he reached the waterfront. He glanced down at Chief out of habit, wanting to make sure the dog was keeping pace, but he didn’t need to. She was a warrior, albeit a scarred one like him, her wound hidden under the thick fur on her right side.

  They’d been retired at the same time, both injured during a firefight in Afghanistan. It should never have happened, but Ronan hadn’t been entirely surprised. It had been a shit show, so many countries and military units involved that no one knew who was coming or going. It seemed like someone got shot or blown up every other day, and while his unit’s missions had always been covert, they weren’t immune to injury or death.

  He’d been shipped to Germany for treatment against his will, his demands that he be treated in one of the field hospitals so he could go back to work falling on deaf ears when the doctors realized one of the bullets had wedged itself into Ronan’s breastbone, dangerously close to his heart.

  After that, his fate had been sealed: four-hour surgery in which they’d discovered the bullet couldn’t be removed without extraordinary risk to his life, honorable discharge, a flight back to Boston where he’d stepped off the plane, blinking in the stark light shining off the February snow. Chief had been returned to him two months later.

  He looked at his watch, his breath coming fast and shallow, and realized he’d been running for almost two hours.

  “Come on, Chief.” He picked up speed, sprinting alongside the last hundred yards of railing at the water’s edge. Chief kept up, then slowed to a walk when he did, both of them catching their breath.

  When his breathing had returned to normal, he dropped to a squat and scratched the dog’s neck. “Good girl.” She licked his face. “Good girl.”

  Strangers almost always mistook her for a German Shepherd, but she was actually a Belgian Malinois, slightly smaller than a shepherd, her fur shorter. Other than his brothers, Chief had been his best friend since the day they’d led her out into the yard during a visit to the Navy’s canine training facility in Texas.

  Ronan hadn’t been interested in becoming a handler at the time. He wouldn’t have gone at all if David Chen, one of his Navy brothers, hadn’t urged Ronan to come along, promising him control of the music and a six-pack when they got back to base.

  But the minute the handlers trotted Chief into the yard, Ronan had felt an unfamiliar tug of affection in his stomach. The dog showed him no preferential treatment during the demonstration — she was trained to focus on the task at hand when working — but as soon as she’d been released from work duty by her handler, she’d bounded not for Chen, but for Ronan.

  He’d requested canine training — and Chief — the next day, and after months of training, they’d been deployed together. Her name had been given to her by someone at the training facility, but Ronan had never argued its appropriateness. When he and Chief worked, she was the boss, and like all military dogs, always one rank above him.

  “Let’s go home, girl,” he said, rising to his feet.

  The city was just waking up around them and Ronan needed to hit the shower and get ready for a new client meeting at the office. The house would be waking up, his brothers probably engaged in their usual banter, something that alternated rapidly between fun and games and the rivalrous bite that was part and parcel of working with family.

  He looked dispassionately at the neighborhood’s brownstones, lined up like toy soldiers, all of them selling for well over a million dollars. Other than his six years in the Navy, he’d lived in Boston his whole life, but it had never felt like more than a place to sleep, to train, to build the business.

  Nick, two years his junior, would say the problem wasn’t Boston, it was Ronan. As far as Nick was concerned, there was no better place in the world, and Ronan wouldn’t have been surprised to find the briny water of the bay seep from Nick’s veins when he bled.

  Ronan’s arguments to the contrary had always been half-hearted. Deep down he knew Nick was right. As the oldest son of one of Boston PD’s finest, Ronan had spent his childhood and adolescence focused on making his father proud. He excelled in school, was quarterback of the football team. He went to college and looked after his younger brothers and sisters right up until their youngest sister, Erin, died of a drug overdose, proving him wrong.

  He hadn’t been looking after her at all.

  He’d gotten leave for the funeral and had gone straight back to Afghanistan, grateful for the distraction, for Chief and her simple affection and loyalty, for the ability to leave Boston and Erin and his increasingly broken family behind.

  He’d felt no more attachment to the city when he’d come home than he’d felt for any of the towns in the desert they’d holed up in, than any of the rural villages they’d jumped out of planes to reach under cover of night.

  Chief stayed next to him as they approached the house he shared with his brothers, but he felt her coiled energy as if it were his own, knew she was eager to get inside for a drink and a pet from Nick, who would be up and dressed for the office.

  Ronan looked up at the house’s brick facade as they stepped through the arch that led to the courtyard at the center of the compound. It was a rarity in Back Bay where brownstones ruled: a single-family house large enough to be split into four wings.

  Purchasing the house with the first of their big-contract earnings had been strictly a business decision. Given the discreet nature of their organization, it made sense for all of them to be under the same roof. As co-owners in Murphy Intelligence and Security, they often had to discuss confidential matters — and illegal ones. The house was routinely swept for surveillance devices, allowing them to speak as freely there as they did at the office.

  The place had been a mess when they’d bought it, a warren of tiny rooms that had been rented as apartments since the 1950s. Ronan had gutted the whole thing, hiring the best engineers and designers he could find to turn the house into a modern marvel of tasteful decor and high-end finishes split into four equal suites surrounding the central living area and kitchen.

  He and Chief crossed the courtyard, damp with April rain, and
headed for the glass doors leading to the kitchen. If the glass hadn’t been bulletproof, Ronan would have considered the doors a security risk, but theirs was a business that guaranteed enemies, and all the glass in the house was engineered to stop several rounds from a semiautomatic weapon, one of many security enhancements Ronan had insisted on when they’d redesigned the place.

  Nick was standing at the custom granite counter, a cup of coffee in front of him, when Ronan stepped into the kitchen. He looked up, his dark hair still damp from the shower.

  “Hey,” Nick said. His eyes were the same shade as Erin’s — green instead of blue like the rest of the Murphy men. Sometimes Ronan still had to resist the urge to flinch when Nick looked at him, their dead sister shining from his eyes like a lingering impression.

  It should have helped that Nora, their other sister, had green eyes too, that she was alive and well and living in California with a man who ran an organization not dissimilar to Murphy Intelligence and Security.

  But it was Erin he thought of when he looked into Nick’s eyes. Erin and their mother, also dead, although their mother had been taken by illness, not addiction.

  Chief trotted over to Nick, her tongue hanging out, and Nick bent to scratch behind her ears.

  “Hey,” Ronan said, walking to the alcove where Chief’s bowls were kept. He filled one with water and the other with a scoop of food. “You headed in?”

  “Thought I’d get there early, go over the background on John Taylor again,” Nick said.

  “Not much there,” Ronan said. John Taylor was squeaky clean.

  Nick downed his coffee and set the cup in the sink for the housekeeper. “Doesn’t hurt to be thorough.”

  Ronan ignored the dig as he filled Chief’s bowls with food and water. Nick knew damn well that no one was more thorough than Ronan. He just couldn't help himself.

  They all had areas of expertise, although Ronan’s overlapped in a lot of areas thanks to his Masters in Economics and his time in the military. But he and Nick had been engaged in battle since they were kids, Nick trying to assert his importance over Ronan as a matter of principle while Ronan held him off with the ease of someone who knew nothing would ever change the fact that he’d been born first.

  Ronan saw no point engaging in competition with his brother and ally, but Nick took pride in trying to best Ronan in every area. Ronan hardly noticed it most of the time. He didn’t care that Nick left the house early, showing up at the office first like it was a badge of honor. He didn’t care when Nick nitpicked the financials or when he double-checked Ronan’s work like it might be the one time he would catch Ronan in a mistake. He only cared when Nick tried to second-guess his strategic decisions, an area in which Ronan was undisputedly the expert.

  Then they would lock horns, Ronan reminding Nick about his experience in the military, Nick accusing him of being patronizing, of downplaying Nick’s four years with Boston PD. They would have it out, things would be tense in the house and the office until something reminded them they were on the same side, and all would be forgotten until the next time.

  “Declan up?” Ronan asked as Chief slurped up her water.

  Nick snorted. “Your guess is as good as mine.”

  Ronan nodded and downed a glass of water. Sandwiched between Erin and Nick in the family lineup, Declan had made the most of his invisibility since they were kids, slacking off in school and putting in minimal effort in pretty much every endeavor, a characteristic that hadn’t prevented him from being good at everything he tried and charming the pants off every woman in Boston between the ages of 19 and 60.

  “I’ll check on him on my way to the shower,” Ronan said. “He should be at the meeting.”

  The decision to take on a new client was not one Ronan took lightly. In their business, every client represented exposure, a future crime committed by the firm and everyone involved, potential prison time, asset forfeiture. It was a business built on illegality, the very reason for its existence to exact justice outside the confines of the law.

  They could fill Declan in on the specifics of the John Taylor job later, but Ronan always preferred for all the partners to hear the details firsthand before they weighed in, except for Finn, who was always god-knew-where.

  “Sounds good.” Nick grabbed his suit jacket off the back of one of the stools lined up at the kitchen island. “See you at the office.”

  Chief settled into her bed in the kitchen, one of many scattered throughout the house, and Ronan bent to scratch her head. “Good girl.”

  He crossed the adjoining living room, a massive room with vaulted ceilings and oversized furniture, and followed the long front hall past the central living area to the back of the square-shaped house positioned around the courtyard.

  Weariness flooded his body as he approached the door to Declan’s area of the house. He might have been replaying any morning of the past five years: the run with Chief, the loaded conversations with Nick, the babysitting of Declan, the client meetings.

  He knew he was fortunate. He’d made it back from war alive. His work was meaningful, illegal though it was, and while theirs wasn’t a family without tragedy, they still had their father. They still had each other.

  But he couldn’t help feeling like there must be more. His father would say he needed a wife, but Ronan knew better than to buy into such an antiquated idea of purpose. Look what had happened to his dad: he’d met the love of his life when he was nineteen and had lost her not even twenty-five years later.

  No, love wasn’t what Ronan needed, although a solid fuck might do him some good.

  The possibility buoyed his spirits. He was already paging through the women in his phone when he opened the door to Declan’s suite.

  2

  Julia Berenger stood outside the house on Beacon Hill, her eyes glued to the alcove that sheltered the stairs leading to the house’s front door. The sun had risen an hour earlier, a fact that she’d registered with disappointment. Beacon Hill wasn’t the kind of place where people loitered on the street. It was too risky to lurk outside the house in the daylight, but she couldn’t help engaging in the familiar struggle of emotion versus reason.

  She’d been casing the place for nearly a week, arriving with a large coffee and a bag of donuts just after the sun went down, making herself comfortable in the recessed doorway of the boutique — which closed at 6 p.m. — two doors down, her face and figure sheltered by the navy awning that hung over its entrance.

  She’d started with high hopes, but so far the owner of the house, Seth Campbell, had done nothing more than arrive home between eight and ten every night. She watched the door religiously, her eyes burning, expecting him to leave in the middle of the night, to lead her to her missing sister.

  He hadn’t.

  There was one night when she’d taken a chance and left her post to follow Greg Novak, Campbell’s lap dog, hoping he might lead her to Elise, but Novak had gone to his own apartment and hadn’t left again until the next morning, when he’d reported for duty at Seth’s house.

  Other than that, she’d been outside Seth Campbell’s house every single night and it hadn’t gotten her a damn thing.

  She thought of Elise, the image of her little sister washing over her in a wave of despair. She knew Seth had Elise, knew he either had her or knew what had happened to her.

  Elise had been close mouthed about the rich man she’d been seeing in the weeks leading up to her disappearance, but Julia had learned long ago that snooping in her sister’s business was sometimes a matter of Elise’s safety.

  She’d just never expected it to be a matter of survival.

  They were similar enough in appearance — same dirty blond hair, same heart-shaped face — that no one had ever doubted they were sisters, but there were differences. Elise was two inches taller than Julia, with the slender body of a model, whereas Julia had always sported curves that made it hard to find jeans that fit. Anyone who looked closely would realize that Elise’s eyes were a deeper
brown than Julia’s, whose eyes had a hint of amber in certain light.

  But their biggest differences weren’t physical. Whether a product of nature or nurture, Julia was strong and disciplined, focused and cynical enough to keep her distance from anyone outside of her sister and gramps. The prospect of love was something she considered with both derision and suspicion. Her mom was exhibit A of the case against romantic entanglement, proof that even smart people could turn stupid if they let their guard down.

  No way was Julia going to make the same mistakes.

  Elise had none of her cynicism, a minor miracle given their mom’s repeated failures in the love department. She’d been looking for love since the fifth grade when she’d given “special” valentines to all the boys in her class, hedging her bets against the possibility that none of them would return her affection.

  It had only gotten worse as they got older, Elise propping up her low self-esteem by hooking up with loser after loser. The men had been at turns unemployed and abusive, apathetic and passive-aggressive, uninterested in Elise beyond the bedroom and happy to let her pay for everything out of her tiny wage from the string of high-end retail outlets she’d worked since she dropped out of college.

  Julia had tried telling her sister she deserved better, but it hadn’t mattered. Elise had never seen herself the way the rest of the world did, and every promise to be more selective, or better yet, swear off men altogether for awhile to focus on herself, ended the minute another guy came along to shower her with affection.