17. Killian
SEVENTEEN
Killian
The sun’s barely up when I wake, and Jhene’s still asleep beside me.
She’s curled into my side with her face pressed against my chest, one hand resting over my heart like she’s keeping track of the beat. My arm’s gone numb from where she’s been lying on it, but I don’t give a fuck. I’d let the whole damn thing fall off before I’d move her.
Last night was… I don’t have the words for it.
Unexpected. Charged. A moment of release.
I went from beating the shit out of The Tank to full blown panic the moment Jhene went missing. I showed up in Sunset Park at the old meatpacking warehouse ready to do whatever I had to in order to get her back.
Then once we made it to the apartment, I couldn’t fight the temptation. I’d spent the whole night doing a different kind of fighting, so I finally said fuck it.
I decided I’d take Jhene up on her offer to celebrate.
Hours later, in the early break of dawn, I wouldn’t change a damn thing.
My phone buzzes on the nightstand, and I grunt in annoyance. It’s too early for this shit. The sun’s barely cracked the horizon and already somebody wants something from me.
Probably Dez.
The greedy bastard’s been blowing up my phone since last night, no doubt pissed that I skipped out on the post-fight media obligations. I was supposed to do interviews, talk to sponsors, flaunt my win for the cameras like a trained monkey.
Instead I tore out of the Barclays Center the second I realized Jhene was missing and haven’t looked back since.
Dez can wait. Whatever sponsorship deal or press opportunity I fucked up isn’t important. None of it matters compared to the woman sleeping in my arms.
The phone buzzes again. And again.
“Mmmm,” Jhene hums. She’s pressed her face even deeper into the crook between my arm and chest like she’s a woodland creature nestling into her den. “Ignore it.”
“Planning on it,” I murmur, dropping a kiss to the top of her curly head.
But the buzzing doesn’t stop. It keeps going, one vibration after another, ’til I realize this isn’t Dez being a pest.
The only other possibility is that it’s clan related.
I reach over to grab the phone from the nightstand without jostling Jhene too much. The screen’s lit up with a string of notifications that makes my stomach clench tighter.
Four missed calls from Ronan. Two from Sean. A dozen texts, all variations of the same message:
Call me back now.
There’s been an emergency.
“Shit,” I mutter, sitting up so fast Jhene rolls off my arm with a startled yelp.
“Nooo… don’t get up.” She blinks drowsily, still half asleep, curls a mess and eyes squinting without her glasses (which broke last night). She slowly pushes herself up and yawns. “What’s wrong?”
“Don’t know yet.”
I hit the call back button and rise from the bed, phone pressed to my ear.
It occurs to me only half a second later as the cool air from the AC hits my crotch that I’m naked. I forgot after we’d gotten done showering last night I’d skipped the sweatpants I’ve been wearing to bed to make Jhene comfortable.
That barrier between us had been broken, and Jhene made it clear she didn’t mind.
The phone only rings once before Ronan picks up.
“Where the fuck have you been?” he growls in place of hello. “We’ve been trying to reach you for an hour!”
“Sleeping. It’s five a.m. But I’m guessing shit’s hit the fan?”
“There was a reason the Bratva fled last night,” Ronan says. “Kidnapping the stray? It was a distraction.”
“What do you mean? What the hell happened?”
“My father—he’s dead.”
I stop mid-pace, narrowing my eyes as I stare ahead of me. But the surroundings of the apartment don’t register. I’m too honed in on what Ronan’s said, the events of last night replaying in my head.
“They killed him and the security I had on his room.”
“Hospital staff—”
“Is it any question?” he interrupts. “Must’ve paid them off to look the other way. These fuckers waited two hours before even phoning me and letting me know he was found dead in his room! It wasn’t the cancer that got him—somebody accessed his room first!”
“Fuck,” I swear under my breath. I start toward the closet. “I’m on my way.”
I snatch the first pair of jeans off the hanger and wrench them on, turning to the dresser next for a T-shirt.
“Killian, what’s going on?” Jhene asks from the bed. “Talk to me.”
“It’s complicated. Don’t know what the fuck’s going on yet. But Seamus Callahan’s dead.”
She gasps, brows knitting close. Before she can ask the question, I answer it.
“Taken out,” I say. “Not the cancer. I’ve gotta go. I’m gonna have Brady come by to watch over the place. Don’t go anywhere, alright?”
She nods fervently, eyes large and wide awake. I can’t resist striding over and dropping a kiss to her brow.
Reassurance last night still meant something; that I don’t regret a second of it, even with these latest developments.
“Your glasses,” I say. “We’ll have to find time to go out and get you a new pair.”
Then I grab my keys and wallet off the nightstand and head out the door.
I arrive to the yellow police tape and uniformed offices at the hospital. The tape stretches across the doorframe leading into Seamus’s room, cordoning off the space as an official crime scene.
Ronan and Cian are in the corridor outside looking livid. More furious than I’ve seen either in a very long time.
“When’d these asshats show up?” I demand loudly as I stride toward them. I’m gesturing to the uniformed officers in the middle of their investigation—or at least pretending like it.
I keep going toward the hospital room ’til some prick with a badge pinned to his chest stops me.
“Sir, you’re not allowed in there,” he says.
I ignore him, going around for a look inside, half tempted to slash the tape.
But even from the doorway, it’s obvious what’s gone down. The state of the room speaks for itself. Two bodies lay rigid on the floor, sheets strewn over them.
Then there’s Seamus, who’s still in his hospital bed… with a pillow covering his face. Suffocated and probably far too weak to even fight back.
More disturbing is the message scribbled in blood on the pillowcase.
til you give her back
we take whats yours
I turn away from the hospital room doorway and toward Ronan and Cian.
“Who the fuck did this? In a hospital of all places?”
“You think if we had a name we’d be standing here?” Ronan asks irritably. “The staff’s refusing to answer our questions. The police are claiming no info’s allowed to be given now that it’s an investigation. Real convenient, right?”
“There’s got to be cameras,” I say. My eyes sweep up toward the ceiling. “They expect us to believe somebody managed to sneak up to the ICU and inside a room that was guarded by private security—killed all three fucking men no less—and got out with nobody seeing or hearing a thing?”
“You need to move,” says the same uniformed asshole. He’s stepped toward us, cutting into the conversation as if somebody important. “This is the scene of an official police investigation.”
I round on him, teeth gritted and fists curled. “So I’ve heard. Do I look like I give a fuck?”
His chest puffs up. “Look, pal. I don’t care who you people are or what kind of pull you think you have. There are rules, and I’m not about to let a bunch of mobsters contaminate my scene.”
“How about I smash your face in and contaminate your fucking crime scene that way? You want to end up in a room on this floor? I can make it happen—”
“Kill,” Ronan grits out. “Not here.”
I hold the cop’s gaze for another few seconds before I back off, shoulder-checking him as I do. I follow Ronan and Cian further down the corridor, safely out of earshot from any of the boys in blue on the scene.
“We’ve got bigger problem than some beat cop with a chip on his shoulder,” Ronan says once we’re alone. “The Bratva played us for fools last night. They knew we’d go for the girl. I called in all the buttonmen. Everybody except a handful I left for security, like here.”
“They guessed right,” Cian sighs, shaking his head.
“I asked you to do that,” I say. “I thought Jhene—”
“I know what you were thinking. Obviously so did the Bratva. We’re gonna need to regain our foothold. Right now, they’re running circles around us,” Ronan says. “They’ve fucking killed my father. Not just my father—the patriarch of the family. The face of our family.”
Tension beats through me as I dig my nails into the palm of my clenched-shut hands. It’s out of anger and frustration that everything Ronan’s said is right.
…and much of what’s gone on is my fault.
I’m the one who demanded he put the clan’s resources into finding Jhene last night. He pulled men away from various security points to make it happen, leaving only two men on Seamus.
Obviously, the Raguzins are aware of how much Jhene means to me…
The question still remains, why did they let her go? If they want her back so badly, why not take her and kill Seamus Callahan?
“This is war,” Ronan says after a beat of silence. “If it wasn’t before, it is now. No more rules. No more holding back. They took my father, which means I’m gonna take everything that’s theirs.”
The clan enters a new phase in the coming days.
This war with the Bratva’s officially escalated to new heights.
The last time things got this bad between our families, it was back in the early 2000s.
Seamus and Fedorov went head to head over some territory disputes in Brooklyn. The feud dragged on for years, with the Irish ultimately coming out on top, and an uneasy truce was brokered.
But Seamus is gone now. The man who ran the clan for decades and became known around New York as the face of the Callahans is no more.
He’d already stepped down from his role as Clan Chief, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t still the spirit of the family. The one people thought of when they thought of the Callahans.
It’s an end of an era. Which means a new dawn’s underway.
I pull up to Callahan House for a war planning meeting and immediately notice the changes around the estate.
The place feels different. Heavy. Grim.
A sense of mourning in the air.