Chapter 28 Cillian
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
CILLIAN
To say I’m dreading this phone call is an understatement. Daragh Sullivan doesn’t deal in problems. He deals in bodies. Bringing him this clusterfuck feels like admitting failure, a weakness I can’t afford to show. But Sorcha’s life is on the line because of me. That changes everything.
Axl watches me from his desk, his expression unreadable. “He’ll want a name,” he says, his voice a low murmur that cuts through the silence.
“I know.” I pull out my phone, the screen a stark black mirror reflecting my own grim face. The number is etched into my memory, a direct line to the man who built an empire on blood and fear. My fucking legacy.
My thumb hovers over the call button.
My jaw clenches. Fuck this. Whoever this is seems to have forgotten the golden rule. If someone wants a war with Cillian Sullivan, they have to deal with Daragh first.
I press the call button. The line rings once, twice. The sound is a death knell in the quiet room.
“What?” His voice is a blade of ice, no greeting, no preamble. Just a demand.
“We have a problem.”
“Would it have anything to do with a sniper missing your head by inches while you turned your back to play with that new Gannon girl?” His tone is droll, no signs of accusation. Yet.
The urge to laugh is a reaction I wasn’t expecting. “You already know.” I shake my head. I should’ve known. Question is, why didn’t he call demanding answers? But then I guess he was waiting for me.
“I make it my business to know when my only son and heir is being used for target practice,” he states.
“They missed,” I point out. So far, this isn’t going as savagely as I expected.
“A warning. Sloppy. Who?”
“We don’t have a name.”
“Find one.” The command is absolute. “This Gannon girl, is she the reason? Have you hurt her?” There is an edge of concern that is difficult to ignore.
“She’s the excuse,” I say, my grip tightening on the phone. “She was with me. The shot was for me.”
“A distinction without a difference. A Gannon is always a liability.”
“She’s under my protection.”
A silence stretches between us. He is the only, and I mean the only person in this entire world who can make me ramble like a fucking idiot just to fill that deep, nauseating silence.
“I know what’s at stake,” I mutter and ignore Axl’s snicker. He knows, and he finds it hilarious. I turn my back on him.
“Do you?” Dad asks, his tone laced with a chilling amusement. “Oisin Gannon made enemies that have been waiting twenty, thirty years for a chance at revenge. They see his daughter, a lone wolf without a pack, and they smell blood. You’ve just painted a target on your back by standing next to her.”
His words are interesting. He’s not telling me to back down. He’s telling me the cost of the war I’ve just declared. “So you think this is about Sorcha?”
“Without a doubt. If someone wanted my son’s head on a pike, I’d know about it.”
“Pike, notwithstanding,” I grit out as the gruesome imagery swirls around my mind. “We don’t know that for sure. Cian Gannon doesn’t seem to think they are after his sister.”
“Sister?” he says in a tone that is far too interested, and I feel that I maybe should’ve kept that under wraps a bit longer. “Seems we are at an impasse. Guess you need to get to work.”
He hangs up, and I grimace. That got us precisely nowhere.
“Well, that was fun,” Axl says.
I spin to wipe the smirk off his face, but the bullet that comes whizzing through the window, shattering the glass into a million pieces and nearly taking Axl’s head with it, stops me.
On autopilot, we both duck, rolling behind protective cover.
“Okay, this is starting to piss me off,” he growls.
“No shit,” I growl, and then my brain does that thing where everything stands still and switches flick, locking puzzle pieces together with a clarity that is so real it’s like they are in front of me and I’m moving them with my hands.
I stick my head out from behind the leather chair and glower at him, parked to the side of his massive mahogany desk. “They’re after you, you fucking cunt!”
Axl returns my glower. “That’s rich,” he hisses. “Pass the fucking buck, why don’t you?”
“Look,” I growl, pulling out my blade and stabbing the tip into the plush rug. “Cian says the hit wasn’t on Sorcha. Daragh says the hit wasn’t on me. That leaves you.” I lift the blade to stab it in Axl’s general direction.
“I was nowhere near the two of you cosying up before,” he hisses.
“No, but you were there and now you are here.”
Axl’s smile is a flash of white teeth in the dim light, a truly unhinged expression for a man who just nearly lost his head. “So my mere presence is a bullet magnet? Flattering.”
Another shot rings out, this one thudding into the thick wood of the desk, sending splinters flying. Axl doesn’t even flinch.
“Fuck this,” I snarl, my patience gone. The logic holds. No one wants to start a war with the Sullivans or the Gannons right now. But the Rhodes family? Their English ties make them outsiders, a perceived weaker link on Irish soil.
It’s a stupid assumption. The Rhodes crime family go back centuries. Somewhere to the fucking Crusades. They are more powerful than all of the Irish families dumped together.
“This is war,” Axl says, pressing on the side of the desk to reveal a hidden compartment that falls open.
He reaches in and pulls out several handguns.
He slides one over to me, and I snatch it.
Not my favourite choice of weapon, but bringing a knife to a sniper fight is probably the dumbest thing you can do.
“We need to get upstairs,” I state. “On three, move.”
He nods.
“One, two, three—”
Before I’ve even finished, Axl is launching his way through the air towards the doorway.
A bullet follows him, narrowly missing him.
That’s when I move. I launch myself after him, staying low.
The sound of another bullet cracking through the air makes my teeth ache.
I roll, coming up on one knee in the safety of the hallway, gun raised, peering back and scanning the broken window.
Nothing. Just the dark maw of the night outside.
Axl is already at the bottom of the grand staircase.
Sorcha and Ciar are up there, exposed if we are surrounded.
The thought of a bullet finding her makes my blood run cold.
I follow, taking the stairs two at a time, my body a coiled spring of violence.
My priority has shifted. It’s not just about getting out of the line of fire anymore.
It’s about getting to her. Axl is a target, which makes us all liabilities by association.
The house is no longer a fortress; it’s a fucking shooting gallery.
We reach the landing. Ciar is standing in Sorcha’s doorway, a Glock in each hand, looking more like a god of war than a university student.
“What the fuck was that?” he growls.
“Axl’s fan club,” I say. “Turns out, he’s the liability.”
Axl grins. “So glad to be useful.”
“Useful fucking idiot,” I growl. “Where’s Sorcha?”
“She’s passed out. I moved her to the bathtub for protection.”
“Okay, good.” The relief is immediate. It’s the best place for her.
The hallway falls silent as we stand there, our senses on high alert.
“So, Daragh says it’s not you?” Ciar asks after a few minutes, when nothing exciting happens.
That probably means one shooter who doesn’t have us in his line of sight any longer.
“He made a connection that it was still about Sorcha, even if they were aiming for me. So contrasting theories. But they were definitely aiming for Axl downstairs.”
“Not necessarily,” he says. “They fired at you as well.”
“As an afterthought,” I grit out.
“Jesus,” Ciar snaps. “This is ridiculous. We have Cian saying it’s not Sorcha; we have Daragh saying it’s not Cillian; and we have a fucking mafia royal that anyone would be fucking thick as pig shit to try to take out. Where does that leave us?”
I raise an eyebrow at him.
He rolls his eyes. “I wasn’t there either time. Don’t fucking blame me.”
Point taken.
“It leaves us with more questions than answers, and two families that know we are targets and expecting us to deal with it,” Axl says.
“They’ve made their point,” I mutter.
“What point is that?” Axl asks, a mocking drawl from the shadows. “That their aim is shit?”
“That we are scrapping amongst ourselves, trying to play guess who the target is when something bigger is going down,” I say as the cogs start whirring in my brain again.
Ciar nods. “Bingo.”
“Someone is moving us around our own fucking board like arseholes with our dicks in our hands,” I snarl, getting more pissed off by the second. We’re reacting, not acting. Chasing shadows while they dictate the pace. It’s an amateur move, and we walked right into it.
Ciar’s phone buzzes in his pants’ pocket. He shoves one of the guns into the waistband and pulls it out, staring at the screen with a grimace. “Oh, hell,” he mutters and answers it, putting it on speaker. “MacMahon.”
“Where is she?” an unfamiliar voice barks out, but it doesn’t take a fucking genius to figure out who it is.
“She’s safe,” Ciar says. “You’re on speaker with Cillian and Axl.”
“How quaint,” he growls. “Show me proof of life, or I’m coming there to peel your skin off inch by fucking inch.”
Ciar and I exchange a glance of confusion, but Ciar turns on his heel and strides towards the bathroom. He switches to a video call and points the camera at Sorcha. “She’s kinda pissed on Grey Goose, but she’s unhurt. Alive.”
The face on the other side of the phone is of a man around our age, has Sorcha’s eyes, but dark hair.
He draws on a cigarette as his eyes close and he breathes the smoke out through his nose.
His eyes snap open. “Someone is playing a deadly game, and when I find out who, if you stand in my way when I come to collect her, it will be the last fucking thing you do.”
He hangs up.
“Wow,” Axl says. “He’s pleasant.”
“He is showing his hand,” I say. “Whatever this was about is a mystery, but he has told us he plans to situate her in his family. If we stand in his way, we are his enemy.”
“Makes a change,” Ciar says, dryly. “Imagine a Gannon having issues with a MacMahon.”
His phone vibrates and he glances at it. His face turns to thunder, and he shows us a message that has apparently come in from Cian. It’s clearly a photoshopped image of Sorcha dangling from a hangman’s noose, her eyes glassy and expression dead.
“Fucking hell,” I grunt and look away. I can’t unsee that, and it makes me sick to my stomach. “We are dealing with some sick fucks.”
“We are dealing with newbies,” Axl says. “No existing mafia family on either of these two islands would send Cian Gannon a fake photo of his fake dead sister to taunt him. That is fucking suicide.”
“So what’s the bigger picture here?” I ask with a frown. “Is this connected?”
“It has to be. It’s too wide a net not to be otherwise. We move forward focusing on this being one and the same plot to… well, fuck knows what their end game is,” Ciar says and stalks out of the bathroom. We follow.
Axl is already on his phone sorting out the window repair as my brain keeps ticking over.
“They don’t want us dead. They want her dead, but not by a bullet. They can keep shooting at us, but they aren’t going to hit us, unless it’s by accident. This was a distraction. Something else has happened.”
“Yeah,” Ciar agrees. “But what?”