Page 18 of Irish Daddies
“You already took my family from me once,” she gasps from under my forearm, but she goes still.
I finally, mercifully, get her down on the ground and handcuffed to a leg of the bed. Unless she can lift a bed by herself, she’s stuck here. My legs are around her, and she watches me with wary eyes as she scoots into a position where she’s sitting up, her shoulder lopsided. She tries to move her arm into a more comfortable position and eventually gives up, going slack against the bed.
I tell her, “This isn’t how it has to go. You can be good.” Our faces are close, and her hazel eyes are brighter than I remembered. She’s changed. Hardened. The girl from the club, trembling andshy, afraid of what it meant to want, is gone. Replaced with a bitter animal.
As I admire her, she spits in my eye, and I stumble backward, my rage simmering. No woman has ever fought back so hard. She’s a fighter, a survivor.
Not for long, but not in vain either. Someone saw her. I saw her. And even though she will die, she will die seen.
I wipe the spit from my eye and turn to face the fear in her eyes, but there’s none there, only resentment. Her anger is a mirror to mine. “That’s good,” I tell her. “Keep fighting. I like a challenge.”
“I’m not afraid of you.”
We scan each other, two people collecting data on the opponent, and I can see that it’s true. I nod silently, turning to Rian.
“You’re SICK!” Caroline screams at my back. I don’t know why, but I turn to face her. Her face is twisted and contorted, and her hands are red against the cuffs as she strains.
But I also see how hard her nipples are, how flushed her chest is, how wet the spot on the floor beneath her is. Smirking, I tell her, “So are you.”
And maybe it’s just anger or fear or heat from the fight billowing to her cheeks, but when I say it, she blushes, and I like it.
And I decide that it means something else.
11
CAROLINE
What was that?The question echoes in my head as the tall man with the sharp features, the one whose mouth I remember around my nipple, turns away from me.
My body betrays me, and I feel heat building between my legs. It’s not just the tension stuck there, lust on the edge of a cliff. It’s also being in the same room as all three of them again. It’s something I prayed would never happen again, and now that it has, all this damned body can remember is the feeling of their hands and mouths working in tandem.
The spot underneath me is growing uncomfortable as my naked skin sticks to the wood floor beneath me, and I squirm a little, wriggling my thighs out of the wetness.
“What the fuck was that, Rian?” the angular one asks, seething, unable to hide his disdain for his brother. I had come to know Rian as Paul. I had imagined a life with Paul, the insurance guy with the biting sarcasm. I saw some love in his eyes when he looked at me. I saw strength in his arms. I let myselfhope.Now I see what happens to hope around me. My first thought, pathetically, is,Told you, Alaina.
Alaina. She’s with my kids, and she has no idea what’s happened to me. How long will she wait with them before she calls the police? Before she decides I’ve abandoned them? Will she tell the police about Paul? Will she come looking for me?
My heart races as I imagine Alaina coming to look for me only to find her mixed up in this bloody game.
“I had second thoughts about killing her,” Rian mutters to his brother.How romantic.I tug at the handcuff and wince at the way the metal pinches the peach fuzz on my arms. I wince at the phrasing.Second thoughts. He thought about killing me, while I was thinking about him fixing my gutters. I’ve never been so wrong about someone as I was about him—and I’ve done it twice.
I watch the two of them talk like I’m not even here, like I’m a piece of furniture. I might as well be—they know how this will end. I guess I do too. The angular man’s pointed nose scrunches with disgust, and he leans close to Rian to murmur, “Maybe we should just kill you.”
Rian swallows, and I see his Adam’s apple bob. “Declan, even if you don’t agree with my choices, I’m still your brother. I’ve never steered you wrong.”
Declan.It seems fitting. Sharp like him. He looks infuriated to be reminded they’re brothers. He has the same look he wore when he took his mask off—vulnerable, incensed. “It is possible for you to steer me straight into the ocean the first time you do, however. I’m starting to feel that I’m looking straight into the water, and you’re telling me it’s land.”
Rian looks at him the careful precision that he looked at me with when I almost walked away, the way he looks straight intoyour soul. My lungs are emptied, breathless, still against my ribs, watching the interaction that determines my fate. “I’m sorry that you feel that way. But it isn’t true.”
“Da told us what we needed to do.”Who’s Da?
“Dadoesn’t run this show,” Rian answers, looking at me. My breath stills. Up until this moment, I felt like a fixture in the room—something they might bump their toes into in the dark.
Suddenly, I realize:Are they talking about their fucking dad? They want to kill me for theirdad?A sickness spreads through my stomach, and I start slamming the handcuffs against the leg of the bed, whimpering like a wild animal.
“You know that he does,” Declan says curtly, walking over to me and grabbing my face with one hand. “Stop,” he hisses through bared teeth at me, and the gray of his eyes chills me to the bone. He lets go, pats my cheek, and walks back to Rian.
“I know that it’s our legacy too. He has to learn to trust our judgment,” Rian says, flickering his gaze between me and him.
