Chapter 3
3
FIONA
T he first time I wake, Moran is carrying me up a flight of stairs. There’s noise behind us, music and people talking, and I hide my face against his chest, trying to escape the dull glow of a bare bulb hanging on the wall. Moran swears as he reaches a landing, Irish words Da uses when he thinks I’m not listening.
Words Da used when he thought I wasn’t listening.
Da won’t be swearing anymore.
Moran juggles me, a key, and the door, and then the noise of the crowd is locked safely outside. He brings me over to a couch and lowers me to a cushion. My muscles are overcooked spaghetti, and I slump to one side, which is fine because all I want to do is sleep.
“Not yet,” Moran orders. “Sit up. It’ll help the swelling.”
It’s easier to sit straight than to argue. I’m too tired to open my one good eye as I hear him cross the room. He must be in the kitchen, because a cabinet opens and closes. He runs water in a sink.
When he comes back, he presses something into my palm. I crack my eye open and stare, blinking hard enough to make out two round pills.
“They’ll cut the pain,” Moran says.
“Wh—What are they?”
“Oxy.”
“Oxy’s for b— bad shit.” I’m slurring, but I need to make my point. “Gimme Advil.”
He laughs. “Any worse shit, and you’ll be in the feckin’ hospital, mandatory reporting or not. Take them.”
He could force me to swallow the pills. I put them on my tongue. He holds the glass for me, tilting it just enough for me to fill my mouth. I swallow.
“Good girl,” he says.
Before I can remind him that I’m not a girl at all, that I’m twenty-four years old and I’ve killed men for the Old Colony Crew, he goes back to the kitchen. This time, I hear the rattle of a freezer drawer sliding open, and the clatter of ice cubes in a tray.
I’m dozing off when he eases a cloth-covered lump against my side. “Hold it close,” he says. “No.” He adjusts my arm. “Like this.”
I suck in my breath as the cold pack bites my ribs.
“Here’s another,” he says. “Keep it on your nose. Your eye, too.” He guides my free hand into place.
My fingers feel like they’re rolling over tiny marbles. “What?—”
“Frozen peas,” he says. “They’ll mold to your face better than cubes. Take it from an expert.”
For just a moment, I wonder where he gained his expertise. Then I remember he’s Braiden Kelly’s Warlord. He manages his clan’s soldiers for a living. He’s seen every possible way a human body can be bruised and broken .
“Wait here,” he says.
The frozen peas must be helping, or maybe the oxy’s already in my blood, because I’m suddenly tempted to laugh. I don’t know where Moran thinks I’m going. He could leave me here for hours, days even, and I wouldn’t be able to follow him.
I don’t know how long he’s gone. I think it’s only a couple of minutes, but my mind is playing tricks. It seems like I’ve been sitting on this couch for a lifetime.
I hear a scrape of plastic on plastic, the familiar sound of a lid twisting free from a jar. I recognize a scent as well—sage laced with rosemary. It’s arnica cream, like the stuff I keep in my travel kit, next to my birth control pills.
That reminds me—my travel kit is back at Madden’s apartment. And that reminds me of the last time I rubbed arnica into my wrists, when Madden fastened a pair of handcuffs tight enough to cut off circulation to my fingers, and he wouldn’t listen when I told him to cut me loose but just kept pumping away between my legs.
“Hush,” Moran says, and I realize I’m crying again.
I don’t cry. But I’ve shed more tears tonight than I have in the past eight years. That’s only because my body hurts so much.
I haven’t cried for Da, and I won’t, because he was King of the Old Colony Crew. Now I’ll be the Queen. That’s the way I’ll mourn him. That’s the way I’ll honor his life.
Moran’s thumb is gentle as he wipes tears from my cheeks. He’s not at all like a warrior who spends day and night enforcing his mob boss’s commands. His fingers are soft as he smooths on the arnica. He’s still saying hush , so I know I’m still leaking tears, and he comes back with the soothing motion again and again.
I want to fight. I want to tell him I’m not a helpless child. He needs to know I’m Fiona Fucking Ingram.
Instead, I fall asleep.
The second time I wake, I’m wedged into the corner of the sofa. Someone has piled cushions beside me so I stay upright. That same someone must have replaced my cold packs, because they’re icy enough to make me shiver.
And someone has changed my clothes.
I’m free of my boned corset and my tight leather skirt. Instead, I’m swimming in a black hooded sweatshirt, with matching fleece pants rolled up to bare my ankles. My feet are lost in thick terry socks.
It’s an ocean of softness, a universe of warmth. I’m floating on the memory of a stuffie called Bunbun—a once-pink rabbit with long floppy ears, bought by my mother the day she found out she was pregnant.
But my mother died giving birth to me. She’s been dead two dozen years. And I threw out Bunbun when I was sixteen. I didn’t need him anymore. Didn’t want him after…
Forget about fucking Bunbun.
If someone dressed me in these warm clothes, then someone—Moran, I know it’s Moran—has undressed me. He knows I wasn’t wearing panties. He knows what Madden did before he beat me.
Groaning, I force myself to sit up straighter. I still feel pain—my face, my ribs, my tongue, where I must have bitten it. But everything is quiet now. Subdued. Like my injuries have been packed in cotton and layered in a shipping crate, and stored far, far away.
Moran was right. I needed the oxy.
I lower the ice pack from my face to my lap. I force my eyes—both of them—to open. My head feels like it’s swaying in a breeze, like I’m one of those inflatable waving-arm tube men outside some store’s grand opening.
“Go back to sleep,” Moran says. He’s sitting in the shadows across the room, knees spread wide, wrists anchored on the arms of a massive leather chair.
“I can’t?— ”
“You can,” he says.
“But you?—”
“You’re safe,” he says.
“But I?—”
“Sleep.” It’s an order, one I can’t resist.
I do.