Chapter 18
Nora
The motel room smells like mildew, pee, and stale cigarette smoke. The carpet is a pattern that might have been green once, or yellow, but is now multiple shades of gray and brown. The comforter has a beige stain I’ve been trying not to look at.
I stand near the door with my garbage bag at my feet. I didn’t unpack. Unpacking would mean staying, and I don’t know how long I’m staying, and that uncertainty is the only honest thing in this room.
I keep looking at my left hand.
The pale line where my ring was is barely visible, but I feel it. The absence of weight. Something that belonged there, taken off by my own hand and left on his desk like an apology that wasn’t big enough.
I’ve been standing here crying ever since I arrived. Not the loud kind—I’ve never cried loudly in my life. The quiet kind, where tears fall and fall, and you don’t bother wiping them because more are already coming.
Every time I close my eyes, I see his face when he kissed me goodbye this morning. The way he held on a beat longer than usual.
He knew something was wrong. He knew.
Maybe I should go back to him.
The thought surfaces for the hundredth time, but I push it down the same way I’ve pushed it down every other time.
Go back to what? Go back so I can watch another deal collapse because of me?
So I can sit at another dinner table and feel Kathleen’s judgmental eyes measuring everything I’m not?
So I can read another document that proves, in black and white, exactly what my presence costs the man I love?
I love him. That’s the problem. I love him so much it’s an ache that doesn’t stop, and love means wanting what’s best for someone, and I am not what’s best for Cillian O’Rourke.
Suddenly, there are three sharp knocks on the door.
I take a step away from it and my body goes rigid. My first instinct is what it’s always been—run, hide, make yourself small. I’m not going to answer. It’s probably one of the junkies outside planning to beg me for money for their next fix.
Then I hear the lock turn.
Cold fear spikes through my veins. I’m not safe. I should have known I wouldn’t be safe in a place like—
The door flies open, and Cillian fills the doorway.
His shirt is wrinkled, his hair is out of place like he’s been running his fingers through it, and his expression is frantic. The knuckles on his right hand are split and crusted with dried blood.
His eyes find me, and he goes completely still.
He looks devastated. Wrecked in a way I’ve never seen.
A wave of relief seems to sweep over him like a man finding water after days in the desert.
Neither of us speaks.
He steps inside and closes the door.
“How did you find me?” My voice is too small and quivery.
“Did you really think I wouldn’t?”
Yes. Yes, I did. I didn’t think he’d look.
He takes in the room—the peeling wallpaper, the stained bedspread, the sticky carpet under my feet. His jaw hardens.
“You shouldn’t have come,” I say with more bravado than I feel.
“You’re my wife.”
He moves toward me, and I shrink.
“Why did you leave me?” His voice breaks—just once, just slightly, and it’s the most devastating sound I’ve ever heard from him.
“You know why. I left a note—”
“I read your note.” His expression is controlled, but I can see everything underneath it—the rage, the hurt, something raw and desperate he’s holding together by sheer will. “I want to hear you say it to my face. Why did you leave?”
My throat closes. “Because I love you.”
“You have a fucked up way of showing it.”
I flinch.
“I’m protecting you—”
“From what? Happiness?”
“From losing everything because of me.”
“I’m not losing anything.”
“Your mother, business deals, your brothers—”
“None of it means a fucking thing without you!”
The words are loud and angry. They hit the walls and bounce back. He catches himself, reins in his temper, and when he speaks again, his voice is quieter. Harder in a different way.
“Why do you think I care more about money than I care about you?”
“Because money doesn’t disappoint!” The words tear out of me louder than anything I’ve ever said to anyone, and I’m shocked by the sound of my own voice shouting in this terrible room. “And eventually, you’ll realize…”
I stop.
The truth is right there. Rising to the surface.
Cillian is very quiet. “Realize what, Nora?”
I’m crying heavily now. My shoulders are shaking as I sob. “What everyone else realizes. Everyone. My mother left. My father sold me. Every person who was supposed to love me—gone. Every single one.”
“I’m not the one who left.”
“Not yet. But you will. Once you realize—”
“Realize what?” he asks again.
I look at him. At this powerful, dangerous, beautiful man who came to a skid row motel room with dried blood on his knuckles and desperation in his eyes.
“That I’m not worth it.”
The words land in the room and sit there.
My hand goes to my mouth. I didn’t mean to say it out loud. I can’t take it back, and it’s the truest, most terrible thing I know about myself.
Cillian moves. His hands cup my face, tilting it up, forcing me to look at him.
“Listen to me.” His voice is rough. “Are you listening?”
I nod. Tears slide down my cheeks and onto his thumbs.
“You are worth everything to me. There is no dollar amount I would trade you for. To me, you are priceless.”
“Do you really mean that?”
“I mean every word.” His grip doesn’t hurt, but it doesn’t waver. “You want to know what I realized tonight? While I was driving around trying to figure out where I went wrong?”
I can’t speak, so I just nod my head, urging him to continue.
He sits on the edge of the bed, draws me down next to him, and takes both my hands in his. His palms are warm, calloused, the skin split across his right knuckles.
“My world is ugly, Nora. It’s violence and blood money and moral compromises.
It’s my mother’s cruelty and Declan’s coldness and business deals built on suffering.
” He pauses. “But you—you’re the best thing that’s ever existed in it.
The only clean, good thing I’ve ever had.
I think I knew it the moment I laid eyes on you. I knew you’d changed my life.”
“I’m not good—”
“You are. You’re kind when you have every reason not to be. You’re gentle when the world has been nothing but cruel to you.” His voice drops. “You love me even though I don’t deserve it.”
“You do deserve it,” I protest.
“I don’t. But I’m selfish enough to take it anyway.”
I stare at him. The honesty in his face undoes me.
“You think you’re not good enough for me,” he says. “But I’m not good enough for you. I never have been. You should have a man from a clean life. Someone who can give you normalcy and safety and a world that’s not tinged with blood. But I’m not noble enough to let you go.”
He pulls out his phone. “I want to show you something.” He taps through it and turns the screen toward me.
It takes me a moment to recognize what I’m seeing. It’s a photograph. From the charity gala we attended together.
Cillian is in a black tuxedo, and I’m in the midnight blue dress I almost talked myself out of wearing. I don’t remember anyone taking a picture of us.
But a photographer caught it.
I gasp aloud.
Cillian is looking at me. Not at the camera and not at anything else in that glittering, crowded ballroom. He’s looking at me.
But that’s not what makes me gasp. It’s the way he’s looking at me—like I’m the only thing in the room worth noticing.
And that’s not all.
We look like we belong together.
Not at all like a powerful man and his charity case, but like two people who’ve found something very special in one another.
I think about the photograph Aoife showed me. She was trying to make me feel jealous and insignificant, and it worked—because I let it. I remember how certain I was that they were what a couple was supposed to look like.
But now, looking at this pic on his phone, I see how very wrong I was.
Cillian and Aoife looked like friends or colleagues. Like old acquaintances who had learned to stand at the correct angle for photographs. There was nothing wrong with it. There was also nothing special or intimate about it.
This picture of us is very clearly a picture of a man who adores the woman beside him and a woman who loves her man.
“When did you get this?” My voice comes out quieter than I intend.
“Finn pulled it from the event photographer’s archive.” He takes the phone back, looks at it himself. “I had it printed. It’s in my office.”
“You had it printed?”
“You’re my wife. I want pictures of my wife.”
Something behind my sternum pulls tight and releases all at once.
He holds my gaze. “So here’s what I need to know. Do you love me?”
“Yes, but—”
“No buts. Do you love me?”
“Yes.”
“Do you want to be married to me? Before you answer, I want you to know that if you do, I’m taking you home with me and I’m never letting you go.”
Then I study him. Rumpled, exhausted, blood on his knuckles, desperation in his eyes. This man who runs half of Chicago, who makes grown men step aside, who I have never once seen rattled—
He came for me.
He searched, hunted me down, picked the lock on a motel room door, and now he’s sitting on a stained comforter fighting for me with everything he has.
No one has ever fought for me before. Not once in my entire life.
“Yes. Yes, I want to be married to you, but what about your family? Your mother—”
“She can accept you or lose me. Her choice.”
“The business?”
“Will survive. It always does.”
“Your brothers—” Something he said surfaces. “Wait. You said your brothers helped you find me.”
“Declan thought to check the bus stations. Ronan tracked down security footage. Lorcan found this place.”
“They were all looking?”
“Of course. You’re family now.” He says it like it’s simple. Like it’s obvious. “And that’s what family does.”
He pulls me to his chest and holds me so tightly I can barely breathe. “Don’t ever leave me again, Nora. Losing you will kill me. I’d rather die than lose you.”
I fold into him. He holds me like I’m the most valuable thing in the world, and everything I’ve been holding together all night—the long hours, the second-guessing, the grief of leaving—comes apart at once.
“I love you,” he says into my hair. “I love you so much it scares me.”
He kisses me. Soft at first, then desperate, then something between the two—a kiss that holds months of tension and hours of fear and all the things neither of us has ever said out loud.
I kiss him back with everything I have. When we break apart, we’re both crying, and I don’t know whose tears are whose.
“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I should have trusted you—”
“I should have made you feel secure enough to trust me. We both made mistakes.” He wipes my tears with his thumbs. “But we’re going to fix it. Together. Okay?”
“Okay.”
“I need you to promise me that the next time you’re scared, or have doubts, you come to me. You don’t run. You don’t make decisions about our marriage alone.”
“I promise.”
“Say it again.”
“I promise I won’t run. I’ll talk to you.” I pull back enough to look at his face. “Can I ask you to promise something?”
“Anything.”
“Promise me you’ll tell me when I’m wrong. When I’m being scared and self-destructive and I’m about to blow up the best thing that’s ever happened to me.”
“I promise.” He holds my gaze. He reaches into his pocket and pulls out my wedding ring.
“You left this,” he says. He takes my left hand and slides the ring back onto my finger. The weight of it settles where it belongs, and I stare at it until my vision blurs.
“I’m sorry I took it off.”
“Don’t do it again.”
He kisses me again, longer this time, his hands in my hair, pulling me against him with a need that mirrors everything I feel.
When he pulls back suddenly and looks around the room, something shifts in his eyes. “We’re not doing this here.”
“What?”
“I’m not making love to my wife in a place like this.” He stands, pulling me up with him. “Get your bag. Or, better yet, leave it here. We’re going home.”
Home.
Not the penthouse. Not his apartment.
Home.