Page 79 of Steel Rain

“I wasn’t going back to the barracks,” I admitted.

I had already assumed I’d be back in his bed this evening, even if people talked. I didn’t care if they gossiped about us. Hell, let them spread the word far and wide that I was Ajax’s woman. His mistress. Whatever they might call it. Let them say it to my face, if they dared. Or worse, say it tohisface.

I stood on my toes and kissed him again, his warm lips grazing mine.

I could get used to this. To affection. Tobeingwith someone. I never thought that was a possibility until now.

Ajax pulled the shovel I had forgotten I was holding, and lightly pushed me towards Eoghan, sending me on my way. “I’ll see you soon, She-Wolf.”

It was a promise and a prayer.

He turned away and started shoveling, covering up the third shallow grave. The other two, they said, were Grimes and O’Rourke. Though they were dead when they were buried.

Dairo looked at me, then at Eoghan. His face was somber, his nostrils flared. It was as if he was repressing words, before Eoghan slapped me on the back and pulled me down a narrow path through the woods, towards the house that I grew up in.

“The path has been a bit overgrown since you left.” Eoghan sounded jolly. Almost playful. A little more like the boy I had known. “Your father drove to the big house, never walked. He was a bit of a lazy arse, if I’m truly honest.”

“You’re not wrong.”

“You, me, Dairo and Sibby were the only ones who wore down these little trails.”

The sound of his footsteps on the ground echoed between the barren trees. Leaves crunched, and a soft layer of frost glittered under the moonlight.

“That was a long time ago,” I mentioned, wondering what he was getting at. Eoghan wasn’t one for just idle conversation.

“Was it that long ago?” He stopped in his steps, looking at me. I stopped, and looked back.

“I was a different person back then.” The girl I was before my engagement party, and the woman I was now might as well have been from different flesh.

“I don’t know if that’s true, Shiny.” He stepped towards me. I refused to step back. “You see, I still see my little sister when I look at you. The one that my mother took under her wing andforcedme to be nice to.”

He stepped away and started walking down the path again, through the familiar woods, where the packed dirt still looked well-trodden. Hadhebeen walking to our house from his mansion? If so, why?

“You might have cut and colored your hair,” he said over his shoulder, as I trailed behind him. Even that felt familiar. The way I followed him, as I had when I was a kid. “You might have toughened your knuckles, and stopped wearing dresses, but …”

He paused for a moment, as we kept on walking. Ifeltus coming upon my old home more than I saw it. It was dark, the midnight blue sky barely shedding enough light for me to see the path under my feet. But still, there was something in the shape of the shadows, the smell of the earth, and the way the wind howled a particular way through the woods that told me I was home.

“There was more to you than just your shine,” he finally said, as the house came into view.

Our family had not been modest, by any means. As a favored guard of Old Mr. Green, my father had enjoyed certain luxuries. This house wasn’t a mansion, but it was grand. Large by any measure, with a walled in back yard. It was a red brick, rectangular home with white Grecian columns. Ivy climbed up the sides to white window sills and black shutters.

I looked up over the awning, to where my room had been. I could almost see the ghost of my former self, combing my hair at the window, waiting for my playmates, Eoghan and Dairo, to come bring me to the big house so I could spend time with Mrs. Isla Green.

How I had hummed, fancying myself to be something like Sleeping Beauty, waiting at a cottage to go to the castle.

“Are you and Coach LeBlanc serious?” Eoghan’s words pierced through my memories, jolting me back to the present. He was at the black front door, the light over his head dim. Dimmer than it had been in my memories. I always used to think our lights were so bright. Or maybe it was disrepair and dirt that was making the entryway seem haunted.

Or maybe it was just my own thoughts?

“What do you mean?” I was being purposely obtuse. I knew exactly what he was asking.

Eoghan fished out a key from his pocket, and jiggled it loudly into the door. He twisted it, and the old mechanisms clanged as it unlocked, the door slowly squeaking open.

A table that had been in our foyer was missing. In its spot was just a slightly whitened circle on the rug it had been perched on.

“Your father knocked over the table as we dragged him out of here,” Eoghan’s voice was almost amused. “Before we delivered him to the bratva.”

“Right,” I said on a slight exhale. “Your stepmother, Aoibheann, married the pakhan, didn’t she?”

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