Chapter 30
Chapter Thirty
KIERAN
I wake up to find the room gently rocking. My head pounds as if someone is hammering nails into every inch of my skull, and my mouth tastes stale and is painfully dry.
For a second, I don’t know which couch I’m contorted on. The room is pitch dark and smells too much like flowers for it to be the penthouse…
I blink once, twice, bidding my eyes to focus as I try to remember what the hell happened last night, but the memories come in shards.
Hitting The Blackthorn, Ronan giving me a hard time.
To be honest, those memories could have been plucked from last night or last year.
“Christ.” I groan as I force myself to sit upright.
But as I move, the rustle of paper snaps my attention, and I’m hit with the memory of being in the kitchen with Ronan and him handing me an envelope.
Riley’s letter.
I must have fallen asleep clutching it to my chest, as the envelope is warm against my palm.
I slide my fingers under the flap and find the paper inside is crumpled from where my thumb has been pressing into it.
That’s when the rest of last night starts flooding my mind.
Reading the letter, wanting to talk to Riley, but not in my drunken state.
I came into the lounge to sleep off the booze. It was only meant to be for an hour or so.
From how groggy I feel, I must have been out longer.
Is she still waiting for me outside on the patio?
My chest tightens with guilt.
I should have just gone to her the moment I finished reading the letter, not curled up on the couch and passed out like the drunken idiot I am.
I need to find her before she decides to take back her words in the letter and call it quits.
I go to stand, but my legs feel like lead, and my head swims to the point of having to grab onto the back of the couch to stop myself from falling flat on my face.
Maybe it’s a good thing if Riley has gone to bed. She shouldn’t see me like this.
Despite what has happened between us, I am still about to be a father, and I’m not exactly painting myself in a responsible light.
I tuck Riley’s letter into my pocket and move toward the kitchen to get some water. I find my phone on the kitchen table next to a discarded plate of crumbs.
Fuck. The screen is cracked. I must have dropped it at some point. But of course, I don’t remember.
As I tap the screen, it floods with light.
It’s almost two in the morning.
It’s ridiculously late. Could Riley still be on the patio?
She must be.
The French doors are cracked open, letting in a cool breeze.
In a few hours, the sun will be beating down over the stretch of manicured lawn just beyond them but for right now, all I can see as I look through the glass is my own pallid complexion.
I pull the door wider and stick my head out, expecting to catch sight of Riley curled up on one of the loungers, fast asleep.
But what I see has my stomach turning to lead.
“No,” I breathe as I throw open the door and sprint out onto the patio.
I must still be drunk because there’s no way that I’m looking at dozens of dead bodies littering the lawn. There’s just no way.
But as I stand there, staring at the dark outlines, I know there’s no denying what I see—men I knew and trusted are now bullet-riddled and bleeding out before my very eyes.
The world narrows around me.
For a half-second, I stand still, completely frozen.
Then a raw animal sound rises from somewhere I don’t recognize, builds in my throat, and suddenly I’m yelling.
“Ronan! Get the fuck outside!”
My throat feels as if it’s being sliced open, but I don’t stop yelling.
It would be quicker to go inside and find him, but I can’t seem to be able to move or to look away from the scattering of bodies before me.
If I do, I have to be ready to face what this means.
Somewhere behind me, a door slams.
I blink out of my trance.
I need to move. But I don’t even make it back to the French doors before Ronan appears, already fully dressed, his face a mask of cold fury that falters just a fraction when he looks past me toward the lawn.
“What the—”
“Where is Riley?” My knuckles go white as I grip onto the doorframe because my vision has started to swim. “Please tell me she’s inside.”
Ronan’s eyes flick between me and the carnage laid bare before us, but his answering silence has me doubling over and emptying the contents of my stomach into a nearby plant pot.
“Ronan.”
He shakes his head. “She was outside; she… God, Kieran, I don’t know—”
Suddenly, he’s moving, sprinting back through the house.
I follow behind him, and we split at the stairs, with Ronan taking the rooms on the right and me taking the left.
Inside our bedroom, I find the bed empty, and Riley’s phone is still charging on the nightstand.
I tap the screen and see countless unanswered messages from Lucy, Oscar, and Ciara. I dart into the bathroom, wondering if maybe she decided to take a bath, but it’s completely empty, and yet her robe is missing off the back of the door.
“Ronan?” I call out.
We meet at the top of the stairs and for half a breath, our eyes lock, but we both know the truth.
Riley’s not in the house.
“I’m going to check outside again.” I sprint back downstairs, and Ronan follows close behind me.
We each take a corner of the patio, but I know in my gut that Riley isn’t out here.
“Where the hell—”
A door opens, and Ciara appears, her hair a mess and her robe hanging awkwardly over her bump as she approaches.
“What the hell is going on?” She looks between the two of us. “Where is Riley?”
Her eyes sweep over the lawn, and then her hand flies to her belly as she sways on her feet.
For a terrifying second, I think she’s going to fall, but then Ronan is at her side, wrapping an arm around her waist to keep her steady.
“I need you to go back inside. Now.”
Anything that can spike Ciara’s blood pressure isn’t good for her or the babies. She should be in bed, resting, not standing in the middle of a murder scene.
“No,” she chokes. “W-what… Riley—”
“Ciara.” I take her by the elbow. “You do exactly what Ronan says. You need to keep those babies safe.”
My own child, on the other hand, is missing, and for all I know could already be dead along with Riley.
Ciara must read the thought on my face as she grabs my hand.
“Don’t.” She sobs as tears stream down her cheeks. “Don’t think like that, Kieran.”
“Get her inside,” I order Ronan. “I’m going to check the cameras.”
Tears stream down Ciara’s face, but I can’t look at her because in this moment, she represents everything that I might have lost.
My hands start to shake at the thought, and I can’t seem to stop them because the steadiness I trained into myself is gone, and all that’s left is dread.
I suck a breath and force my feet to move. I head along the length of the property, looking up at each of the cameras along the roofline, but each one of them has been shattered.
“Fuck.”
I pull out my phone to call Brennan. Even though it’s the middle of the night, he still answers after the first ring.
“Is this a booty call—”
“Riley’s missing, and Ronan’s security are dead.”
“What the fuck—”
“All the cameras were hit, but I need whatever footage exists up until they were disabled.” I move toward the lawn.
There’s silence on the line for a second, then the faint clack of keys.
“Give me a second.”
While I wait, I survey the scene before me.
Each of the bodies lies where they fell, so there was no obvious fight.
I crouch beside one of the men and check the angle of entry before glancing toward the edge of the property, trying to determine the position of the weapon.
This wasn’t a sloppy hit. It was planned.
“Anything?”
“It’s hard to make out faces,” Brennan mutters. “They’re all wearing hoodies and masks, but they sure as hell moved in a tight unit.”
“I need you to pull feeds from the last twenty minutes before the recorder died. And get me anything off-site, traffic cameras, CCTV footage, the works. And call Jace. He’s meant to be keeping an eye on Oscar tonight, but pull him onto this and get him running plates. I need leads, Brennan.”
“Already on it.”
The line goes dead, and I tuck my phone away as I keep moving across the lawn, searching for anything the cameras might have missed. A dropped glove, a boot print, or a torn edge of fabric on the fence.
But I come up short.
I can feel the edges of the panic start to sneak in, but I can’t let myself give in to it. Not yet. I can’t afford to lose my focus so early on when there is still a high chance that nothing has happened to Riley, or rather, not yet.
Ronan approaches, but I don’t turn to face him because I can’t seem to steal my eyes away from the barbed wire along the edge of the fence.
There’s something I’m missing.
“Find anything?” Ronan asks.
“The cameras are out, but Brennan is looking into surrounding CCTV footage.”
“Hopefully, that will help give us an idea of who’s behind this.”
I almost laugh at the absurdity of his words. “You’re kidding ,right? This has Sean written all over it.”
“That’s impossible.”
I scoff, running a hand over my face. “Unbelievable. How can you be so blind? Riley is fucking missing—”
“I am aware of that, Kieran. But I have men watching Sean. They would have alerted me if he was on the move.”
“Call your men.”
Ronan pulls out his phone and starts working through his contacts.
After each unanswered call, the more color drains from his face.
“They’re not answering.”
I look at the bodies, the blown-out cameras, the way this has all been executed, and it all starts to settle like puzzle pieces in my head.
“Call again.” The last of my control starts to slip away.
Ronan dials again, but his answering curse is all I need to know.
“They’re dead.”
Ronan flinches, as if I just slapped him around the face. “No.”
“Yes. Whoever did this, did it right. The lack of a struggle and the angle of the shots… This kind of operation screams Sean to me.”
Ronan rubs the back of his neck, his jaw ticking as he stares back up at the house.
“We had men on him. Someone would have alerted us if he moved.”
“Clearly, not.”
“How the fuck did this happen? How did they get in here and kill all of my men without so much as a sound?”
“Silencers. At least, that’s what I would have used.”
Ronan swears. “Unbelievable.”
“What’s unbelievable is how you haven’t taken care of Sean. None of this would have happened if you had just done what you said you were going to do.”
Ronan stares at me, stunned. But then his expression turns cold.
“You think I wanted this to happen? You think I haven’t been trying to stop him? I’ve got people on him twenty-four-seven.”
“And yet, they’re all dead.”
Ronan’s eyes flash with rage. “Don’t put this on me, Kieran. Now’s not the time to point fingers.”
His voice is tight with something I can’t place, maybe guilt.
Perhaps he’s thinking the same thing I am, about the holes in our defenses and the men we chose to trust. And now Riley is the one paying the price.
My stomach coils so tight it feels like I might be sick.
The thought of Riley out there alone, terrified, and in the hands of that psychopath is more than I can bear. Every worst-case scenario claws at the edges of my mind. And for the first time in a long time, I feel completely powerless.
There’s no trail to follow, no ridiculous ransom demand or even a warning. There’s just silence. And in my world that is never a good sign.
I look around at the mess Sean left behind, at the lawn now stained red with the blood of good men, and it’s all I can do not to put a bullet through my own skull for letting this happen.
These men died protecting my family while I was passed out drunk on a couch like some goddamn coward who thought he had time to fix things later.
Now there is no later.
All I have is a field of bodies, a cold bed where my wife, the woman I love, the mother of my child, should be, and a letter in my pocket. Every word she wrote feels heavier now, like it was meant to be a goodbye, and I was too drunk to see it.
I didn’t get to tell her I forgive her. I didn’t get to tell her I’m sorry. I didn’t get to tell her I love her.
I need to tell her. I need her to know she is my world, my life, my everything. That I can’t wait to share this pregnancy with her, to stand by her side while our baby grows. To grow old with her.
But Riley is gone, and unless I get to her in time, she might not ever come back. Might not ever know.