Chapter 7 Axl
CHAPTER SEVEN
AXL
Resisting the urge to roll my eyes when Cillian slips out of the crappy student block of flats on the rough side of campus, I know exactly where he’s been and what he’s done.
I knew from the second she sliced his neck that he was falling into a mad obsession with Sorcha Gannon.
It seems the little red-haired witch has beguiled both him and Ciar.
She won’t find me so easy to crack. I come from a family, a bloodline of ice and indifference.
The English nobility has a way with emotions, and that is…
you don’t have them. You master them. You turn them into scalpels to dissect the people around you.
Cillian stalks off into the mist, a fucking brute sated for the moment.
I pull a silver flask from my jacket pocket, take a sip of whiskey that costs more than this entire shithole of a building.
“What are you doing?” Ciar asks, stepping up beside me.
“What does it look like?”
“It looks like you’re not finding O’Malley.”
“Neither is Cillian.”
He snorts. “Figured. He’s obsessed.”
I stare at him with incredulity. “And you aren’t?”
He lifts his arm and stares at the carving, now crusting over. “It’s a reminder,” he says, his voice a low growl.
A reminder that he’s lost his fucking mind over a girl he’s known for a few hours.
“A rather permanent piece of art for a temporary infatuation, wouldn’t you say?” I ask.
Ciar’s gaze flicks to me, his eyes chips of blue ice. “She’s not temporary.”
“No,” I concede, taking another sip of whiskey. “She’s a fucking complication. A beautiful, violent little problem that you two are approaching with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer.”
He doesn’t deny it.
“The Gannon legacy is a hornet’s nest,” I say, swirling the last of the whiskey in my flask. “And you’ve just gone and kicked it.”
Ciar’s jaw tightens. “She’s different.”
“Of course she is,” I agree. “She’s a woman, for a start. She is about to blow a hole through the Gannon name and leave blazing trails behind her.”
Ciar nods. “She is definitely a first for them. It will be interesting to see how they handle her.”
“They lay a fucking finger on her, I will cut it off and shove it down their throats to pull out of their arses.”
“Ah,” Ciar murmurs. “Now who’s obsessed?”
“Intrigued,” I snap. “There is a difference.”
“There really isn’t. She mocked you and you liked it.”
I give him a withering glare. “Call me a masochist, then.”
“Aren’t you already?”
“Semantics,” I say, capping my flask with a soft click. “There’s an art to deconstruction, Ciar.”
Ciar turns his full attention to me, the Victorian lamp post casting his face in harsh shadows. “And what’s your approach, Rhodes? Death by a thousand beautifully worded insults?”
A slow smile spreads across my face. “Something like that.” I want to see what makes her tick.
I want to find every gear, every spring, every sharp little cog that makes Sorcha Gannon run, and then I want to take her apart, piece by piece.
Not to break her. Just to see how she works.
To admire the craftsmanship. “You two want to own the storm. I just want to collect the lightning.”
He grunts, a sound that could be agreement or dismissal. It doesn’t matter. We all want the same thing. We just have different ways of taking it.
“O’Malley,” Ciar says, his voice pulling me back to the immediate task. “He’s still out there.”
“He’ll keep,” I murmur, my eyes still fixed on her window. “Let him run and think he’s free. Let him think Sorcha saved him from his fate, so he latches onto her, and then she will be the one to take him down.”
“Now you’re talking,” he says. “I like the way you think.”
“Like a strategist, not a thug.”
“Spoken like a true blue-blooded prick.”
“You think that’s an insult, but it’s not.”
He grunts at me and slides back into the night.
I stay where I am, watching, waiting. A movement near the tree line catches my attention.
“O’Malley,” I murmur. “You idiotic fuck.”
I sigh and watch him watching her building. It seems that everyone knows where she lives. That’s not necessarily a good thing. It puts her in danger.
Turning on my heel, I stride across the campus, shoving my hands in my pockets.
The so-called golden row is on the opposite side, a twenty-minute walk from Sorcha’s run-down building.
My townhouse is situated in a prime location on this row of eight properties.
Three storeys high, built by one of my ancestors, a founding member of St. Bart’s, called Edward Rhodes III.
I flash my keycard at the lock and push open the front door, stepping onto a marble floor in a grand entrance hall adorned with portraits of my grim-faced ancestors.
They all look like they’ve got a stick shoved permanently up their arses.
I bypass the formal living room, and head for my study.
The room is my sanctuary, panelled in dark wood, smelling of old books and expensive scotch.
I pour a measure of Lagavulin into a crystal tumbler, the amber liquid catching the low light from the desk lamp.
My gaze drifts to a locked glass cabinet in the corner of the room.
Inside, nestled on velvet, is my collection.
Small, intricate things. Souvenirs from people who decided to cross me and paid the price for their stupidity.
I want to add to it with something from Sorcha.
A lock of her perfect red hair. I can almost see it now, a single, fiery strand resting on black velvet.
Her mockery in the crypt wasn’t an insult; it was an invitation. She looked me, a Rhodes, in the eye and threw my own name back at me wrapped in a joke. Audacity like that deserves a more delicate touch. It deserves study.
I set the tumbler down on the polished mahogany of my desk, the sound a sharp crack in the silence.
I pick up the folder from my desk. A preliminary background file on Sorcha Gannon.
Illegitimate daughter of the deceased Oisin Gannon, one of the family’s fiercest leaders, until he got whacked.
Raised in the gutters of Dublin by her mother, she fought her way up to lead her own crew, the Red Reapers.
It’s a fucking fairy tale, if the princess carried a blade instead of a glass slipper.
But she has since disbanded the crew. I assume she came here looking for the most elite place she could think of to start over, build from the ground up with the best of the best.
I trace the edge of her photograph in the file.
A grainy CCTV still from some back-alley brawl in Dublin.
Even blurry, the defiance is there, the sheer fucking will to not just survive, but to dominate.
Everyone else here was handed their kingdom.
She built hers from rubble and blood. I close the file.
She isn’t just a Gannon by name; she’s a self-made queen of a shit-heap kingdom. She didn’t inherit her power, she fucking took it. That makes her infinitely more interesting. The Cerberus Order are going to have fun claiming this queen in every way possible.