Page 1 of Lorcan

Prologue

Lorcan

Ten Years Earlier

Therainfellhard,as if the world was grieving, just like I was. It didn’t feel real. She was free. She got away from the danger of my world, and yet, she died anyway.

You could have saved her, the bad thoughts continued to plague me as I thought about her sweet life.

Stolen.

My sweet Clem.

I saw his black cloak before I recognised his face. The mixture of tears and rain made it hard to see on this dreadful day.

“Father Murphy,” I greeted the man who had been a good friend to my father. He’d seen me grow up, and now he was a confidant for the world I took over from my father when he passed.

“It’s a sad day, my son,” he said, putting his hand on my shoulder and squeezing it hard. It was comforting. More comfort than I had gotten in a long time. “You should remember her as she was, not as she became.”

“She ran from me to escape danger, and she ran right into it,” I said, pushing back a sob that was lingering in my chest. “I could have protected her.”

“You cannot think like that, Lorcan,” he said. “She ran because she didn’t want to be a part of this life and she knew you could not get away from it.”

“Why?” I asked him. “Why couldn’t I run with her?”

Murphy pulled me into his arms, away from the other mourners and toward the tree so we could have privacy. “You have a duty to your family and to this town, it is a fine duty at that. Your father would be so proud of the man you have become.”

My father was a brute and he knew it. They were old school friends, but they fought on the matter of the crime in this town, and the neighboring towns.

“I loved her,” I said as I felt myself break. I fell to my knees, the pain in my chest was expanding and I didn’t know how to go on. “I fucking loved her so much.”

“I know, Lorcan,” he said, putting his hand back on my shoulder, comforting me in the only way he knew how. “But you’ll love again. Clem would have wanted you to be happy.”

That was bullshit. If she had wanted me to be happy, she would have stayed. She would have stuck it out with me.

Somehow, I found the will to pull myself up, supported by the tree. I wiped the combination of rain and tears from my face and I did what my father did when our mother had died.

I pulled my shit together.

“I’ll never love again.”

Father Murphy looked at me with both sadness and compassion as I brushed off his hand and pulled on my big boy pants. I was the goddamn head of the O’Farrell dynasty now. I had a town and an empire to watch over.

Grief was fleeting.

Mine had to be anyway. I had two younger brothers who needed me, two younger brothers I was going to raise up to help me with this empire. That was the one thing I never understood about my father, wanting the full empire to run on his own was a dumb move.

We were stronger together.

I looked back over to where they were lowering her into the ground. I moved past Father Murphy and up the hill to where everyone had departed. Not even her parents had stayed this far.

I picked up a loose rose from the ground and I threw it over the top of her coffin as the dirt started to be thrown over it.

Goodbye, my love.

Goodbye, my heart.

I wasn’t being a hardass when I told Murphy I’d never love again. I never intended to let a woman close enough to get into my solid stone heart.

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