9. Ronan
CHAPTER NINE
RONAN
NOW
Being alone with someone I’d like to watch bleed out in a ditch is irritating.
Relying on said person I’d like to watch bleed out in a ditch is even fucking worse.
Ryker and I said goodbye to Camilla and her men when the jet landed in New York and waited for the crew to refuel, and now we’re back in the air.
Alone.
This is a bad idea.
I’ve known it since the second the others stepped off the plane, but I become surer of it by the second.
There’s only one way this little trip goes, and it’s with one of us in a body bag.
It’s just until we find Chloe, I tell myself.
But then what?
Neither of us is going to give her up without a fight, and that’s provided we ever find her at all.
Kingston has spent years evading us. Why would he make it any easier to find him now?
Especially now he has something valuable to hide.
Someone.
Fuck. How did this happen? How could I possibly let Kingston take Chloe…again?
I had her back for such a short amount of time I barely had the chance to consider what our future could look like now that so much time has passed.
When we were teenagers, it was easy. There was a path laid out in front of us, and we just had to follow it. Finish college. Move back to Miami. Step into the family business. Get married. Have a family.
It was so easy back then, but not now. Not with all the baggage we both have and the trauma my family inflicted on my sweet sparrow.
It’s probably a good thing I’ve left the family, because for how long could I continue looking my father in the eye knowing he would have killed the mother of my child given the opportunity?
For a long time, being a Lombardi was just a waiting game. Damon’s time would come, and I would no longer answer to the man that raised me. A man I had come to loathe over the years. Even before I knew the truth.
Which means if for some reason we can’t find Kingston, and therefore can’t find Chloe, I have no one. Nothing.
“Are you still sulking over there?” Ryker grunts, looking up from his phone for the first time since we took off.
Other than the fact he works for my sworn enemy, I don’t know about him or his past. But I’m curious.
Even after several deep dives and my best hacker searching for anything they could find, Ryker is an enigma.
“You’re an asshole, you know that?”
“Been called worse.” He shrugs.
“Shocking,” I deadpan.
He drops his phone to his lap, folding his arms over his chest to consider me. His intensity is one of the first things I noticed about him, but he wasn’t like that with Chloe.
He was soft. Gentle even. And from everything I’ve seen, that goes against his very nature.
“Kingston won’t hurt her,” he informs me after long minutes of staring one another down.
“You don’t know that.”
“Actually, I do.” He sighs, reaching for the unopened bottle of water sitting in front of him.
He doesn’t open it immediately, and I realize he needs something to do with his hands.
“King is obsessed with Chloe. Has been for a long time. If I were a betting man, which I absolutely am, I’d guess he has her in one of his mansions wooing her. ”
I open my mouth to reply only to snap it shut a moment later. There are an endless number of things wrong with the picture Ryker just painted, starting with the eighteen-year age gap and ending with the fact Kingston killed my mother, a woman that Chloe loved just as much as she did her own.
Ryker takes my silence as an invitation to keep talking, and I can’t seem to find my voice to tell him to shut the fuck up.
“I don’t know much, only that not long after I started working for him, he disappeared for a few weeks. He told us to fend for ourselves and that he’d murder anyone that interrupted him. And then when he returned, he was different.”
“Different how?” I find myself asking.
“More driven. The goal was always to build an empire, but when he came back, he was tenacious about building the company as quickly as possible. I thought it was strange at the time, but I understand it now.” He stares off into the distance.
“It was too dangerous to bring Chloe into his world at the time, but he’s spent a decade building an impenetrable kingdom for his future queen. ”