Chapter 18 Siobhan
SIOBHAN
Shivering, I sit where he left me on the sofa, wrapped in a blanket.
My body feels like a stranger’s. I feel bruised and boneless, every nerve ending humming a low, exhausted frequency.
The fight has been scoured from me, leaving behind a hollowed-out calm that’s more terrifying than the rage.
I reach for the bottle of water and take a slow, tiny sip.
I need to brush my teeth, but I can’t move more than an inch.
He moves through my kitchen, sweeping up the shards of crystal from the glass he shattered, like he does this every day.
Who knows? Maybe he does. There’s no anger in him now.
Just a quiet intensity that’s almost more unsettling.
He destroyed me in that shower. Tore down every wall, broke every rule, and claimed the ruins.
Now he’s cleaning up the evidence with the same methodical focus.
My father’s threats, Chris’s rage, the gallery…
it all feels distant, like a story about someone else.
The only thing that feels real is the ache between my legs and the phantom weight of his body pressed against mine.
My mind struggles to connect the man gently wiping wine from my refrigerator door with the one who took me against the tiles like an act of war.
He threw me into a storm and then became the anchor. I don’t know if that makes him my savior or my captor. Right now, wrapped in the aftermath of his possession, I’m not sure there’s a difference.
He finishes, tying off the bin bag with a final, definitive pull. The quiet efficiency is terrifying. He doesn’t look like a man who just fucked me against a shower wall until I came apart screaming his name. He looks like a man who knows how to clean up a crime scene. Maybe there’s no difference.
He turns, and his eyes find mine across the room.
There’s no trace of the cold fury from before, just an unreadable calm.
Possession. He walks over to me, still only with a towel wrapped around his waist. His bare feet are silent on the wooden floor, and he crouches in front of the sofa and hands me a mug of coffee.
He doesn’t touch me, but stares at me with an intensity that makes my heart ache.
“Better?”
Taking the mug, I can’t find the words for that, so I just nod. After a long moment, I take a sip and then ask, “What did you want to talk about?”
He frowns. “It can wait.”
“It was important enough for you to come here after I told you to get lost,” I point out. “Just say it.”
He studies my face for a long moment. “It’s not a conversation for right now, Siobhan.”
“No?” I challenge, my voice raspy. “You broke into my apartment, threw me in a shower, and fucked me against a wall. I think we’re past the point of waiting for a ‘right time’.”
“I didn’t break in.” He looks away, just for a second, toward the window, as if gathering his thoughts or his courage. When his eyes meet mine again, the unreadable calm is back, but it’s heavier now, weighted with something final.
“War is coming,” he says.
“No shit,” I spit out. “It’s always fucking coming with the families. This life…” I huff out a breath and duck around him to stand. He turns, tracking me with his gaze. I sit down on the adjacent sofa facing the windows and take a sip of coffee.
“This is different,” he says.
“Isn’t it always? My mother ran from this war, and it killed her. So what difference does it make? I am caught in the middle because of who my father is.”
“This time is different.”
“No,” I say, shaking my head. With another sigh, I lean forward to place the mug on the table.
A sharp crack splits the air, but before my brain can process it, Liam’s body slams into mine.
His weight crushes the air from my lungs as he drags me to the floor, his muscled torso pressing me flat against the cold hardwood.
“Fuck!” he roars, his voice vibrating through my ribcage where we’re pressed together.
“What?” I mumble, splayed out beneath him.
“Sniper,” he growls, his breath hot against my ear. “For you.”
“What?” I squeak again, horror flooding my veins like ice water. I peek out from under the shelter of his shoulder just as another bullet tears through the air where my head had been moments before. It punches into the sofa back, sending a spray of fabric and foam into the air like snow.
“Stay down,” Liam commands, his muscles coiling against me as he reaches out with one powerful arm and flips the heavy oak coffee table onto its side, the porcelain and glass on top crash to the floor as he creates a makeshift shield, the thick wood now between us and the shattered window.
My world shrinks to the space beneath him. The solid, living heat of Liam’s body shields mine, a warrior of ink and muscle poised over me in just a towel. The vulnerability of it should be absurd, but it’s not. It’s primal.
“Dammit,” he mutters, realizing he isn’t within reaching distance of his weapon. “Crawl,” he orders, his voice a low command that cuts through my paralysis. “Toward the door, stay low, close to the wall, don’t make yourself an open target. Go now.”
I nod, my instincts kicking in. We practiced this, Mom and me. It sounds absurd, I’d roll my eyes through every motion, every drill, every time she screamed suddenly at me to hit the deck. But I thank God for her now. I’m panicking like fuck, but my body knows what to do.
“Wait,” I say, when I realize he is pointing in the opposite direction. “Where are you going?”
“To get my gun,” he grits out. “It’s in the bathroom.”
I shake my head and point to the base of the sofa, which just had the stuffing shot out of it.
He grins. “That’s my girl.” He reaches underneath and grabs the Glock that my dad insisted I place there. Just in case.
Just in case he went rogue and decided to order a fucking hit on me?
“Go,” Liam says, and I focus.
Focus on staying alive, so I can find out who just tried to kill me. “You need clothes.”
“Go-bag in my car,” he grunts. “Move, Siobhan.”
Every instinct screams to run, but Mom’s voice echoes in my head, a ghost from a past I thought I’d escaped. Low and slow, Siobhan. A moving target is hard to hit, but a low one is harder to see.
I crawl forward, and Liam positions himself between me and the window. Half-naked, the Glock held steady in one hand as he shuffles on his knees, using his body to shield me from the gaping maw of the window; he is every bit the man my mother warned me about.
Who? The question pounds in my skull with every beat of my heart.
Was it my father’s answer to my defiance?
Chris’s immediate, brutal revenge? Or was this an O’Neill move, a way to isolate me, to make me dependent on my protector?
He’s all ink and muscle and lethal intent, and he’s the only thing standing between me and a bullet.
I shake the thought that was a set-up out of my head when a bullet hits the floor near his knee.
He grunts and reaches for the door handle, practically shoving me through with his other hand on my ass before following me and leaning against the wall, to breathe out.
“Any ideas?” I ask, drawing my knees up.
“No. You?” His gaze bores into mine.
I shake my head.
He gets to his feet and holds his free hand out for me. I take it, and he hauls me towards the stairs.
“Where is your car?”
“Back of the building,” he says, veering off the next corridor to take the service stairs.
The concrete is cold and rough beneath my bare feet.
Liam moves as if this is just another day, and that’s terrifying, because it is.
He pulls me along in his wake. The towel around his hips is a ludicrous piece of civilization in this sudden descent into savagery.
He has an intense focus, the Glock held low and ready, sweeping every corner before we take it.
My mind is a frantic slideshow of suspects on repeat.
Liam glances back, his eyes catching mine in the dim stairwell light. There’s no calculation there. Just a raw, protective fury that feels too real to be faked. It’s the same look he had when he broke Chris’s wrist. The look of a man protecting what’s his.
We reach the ground floor, the heavy fire door a barrier between the stairwell’s relative safety and the unknown outside.
Liam doesn’t hesitate. He cracks the door, peering through the gap, the Glock held ready.
A gust of cold, damp air rushes in, smelling of rain and dumpsters.
It’s a scent I associate with my childhood, with back alleys and quick exits.
“Clear,” he whispers, pulling me through into the narrow alley behind my building.
The rough asphalt bites into the soles of my feet, littered with gravel and broken glass. I wince but keep moving, my hand still clutching his. Liam moves us along the wall, his body a constant, warm shield against the open space.
“How much further?” I mutter, stepping on something slimy that I don’t want to think too hard about.
“Fifty yards. End of the alley.”
Fifty yards feels like a mile. Liam’s focus is absolute, his head swiveling, eyes scanning the rooftops, the shadowed doorways, the fire escapes above us. He’s a predator in his natural habitat, and I’m just trying not to become prey.
The thought keeps circling back, a vulture in my brain: my father. Did he do this? Was this his answer to my defiance? It’s my fucking board. Did those words sign my death warrant? The coldness of the idea is a different kind of wound, deeper than any bullet could make.
We reach the end of the alley. An Aston Martin waits like a promise of escape. Liam shoves me behind it, using the car as cover while he scans the street. He moves to the passenger side and pulls the door open. “Get in. Stay low.”
I scramble inside. He follows a second later, placing the gun on his lap as the engine growls to life with the press of a button, indicating the keys are somewhere in the car.
He really doesn’t give a shit about theft, apparently.
The car peels away from the curb with a squeal of tires, leaving the alley and the sniper and my shattered life behind us.
“Chris,” he says after a second. “It has to be. And probably behind your dad’s back.”
I stare at him, the name hanging in the air between us like smoke.
Chris. It makes a sick kind of sense. The humiliation in my office, the broken wrist—it would be just like him to retaliate with disproportionate, sloppy violence.
But without my father’s approval? That’s a death sentence of its own.
“My father would kill him for making a move like that without an order,” I say, my voice a hoarse whisper. The words feel foreign, discussing my family’s murderous politics so clinically.
“Your father is dying,” Liam says, his eyes fixed on the road, navigating the Dublin streets with an instinctual ease that belies the chaos we just escaped. “Chris is getting impatient. He sees you as a threat to his inheritance. Taking you out simplifies things for him.”
The Glock rests on the towel covering his thigh, a stark piece of black metal against the white terry cloth.
He’s driving with one hand, the other resting near the weapon.
The absurdity of it all hits me—the half-naked man with a gun, the sniper, the shattered window of my beautiful, safe apartment.
My life has been detonated, and the man holding the match is now my only shield.
My feet are scraped and bleeding on the plush floor mat.
“Where are we going?” I ask.
“My place. No one will find you there.”
He’s taking me to his home, absorbing me into his world. The war he spoke of isn’t coming anymore. We’re in it. I have two choices. Trust him or open the car door, roll out like my mom taught me and run.
But run to where?
With a gulp and a leap of faith in the middle of this carnage, I ask, “Tell me everything you know about this war. About why you came to me earlier.”
He nods grimly, but doesn’t speak. Not yet. He will, and I’m not going to like what he has to say.