89. CHAPTER EIGHTY-FIVE
Wake up.
Wake up.
Wake up.
This has to be a dream.
I killed a man.
A man who was about to rape me.
Traffic me.
Then a thought hits me and I gasp. “My mother!”
Eoghan is there, holding me. “Taryn!”
“Aye, boss?” The detective struts up to us.
“You have contacts in Reno?”
“Sure do.”
“Lighthurst Surgery Center and Rehab. Elena Diamond. I want her room guarded,” Eoghan spits out. “Right now.”
“I need to call her.” I exhale. “She won’t know why. She’ll be upset.”
“Balor, you on the line?” Eoghan puts his phone on speaker.
“Sure am. I’m tracking your plane. I’ve deployed one of my weaponized drones in case those Borgia motherfuckers try to blast you out of the sky.”
Oh my God, I didn’t think of that.
“I’m also monitoring military airbase transmissions in case their hackers get the idea to give false commands to scramble some F-14s to do it for them.”
“I’ve got those signals locked, Balor,” Shane says with a laptop at a nearby table.
“My God, you thought of everything,” I choke out.
“Yes, my love.” Eoghan kisses my forehead.
I narrow my eyes because I still have a massive bone to pick with him.
“I just don’t want them to hurt my mother. And I want…”
“What do you want, sparkles?” Eoghan strokes my face. “You can have anything, so long as I’m part of it.”
The plane goes silent. Eoghan slowly turns around and faces Griffin and Shane, who only know Eoghan as a ruthless killer and a playboy. “What? I’m in love with her, get over it.”
“Told you,” Balor says from the phone.
“Told you?” I whisper.
“When I was in New York.”
My heart squeezes. “You knew then?”
“I knew the moment I laid eyes on you.”
“Can Eoghan and I have a minute alone please?” I ask the handsome hulking Irishmen staring at us.
The others turn away, and Eoghan stands up.
“Come on.” He brings me further back and behind a curtain.
I’m shocked to see a…bed. “Um...”
“Don’t worry, sparkles. Even if you were dripping for me, I wouldn’t fuck you with men who work for me a few feet away to hear you.”
“What happens when we get to New York?”
“I’ll meet with my family to tell them I pissed off the Cosa Nostra and they’ll be there soon to kill us all.”
“I’m serious.”
“So am I.” He holds my face. “That’s why I pumped my bullets into Scava, too. That was my kill as much as it was yours. Stuck my nose where it didn’t belong.”
That added his skin to the game. The nose I punched.
“I’m sorry I hit you.”
“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you sooner about the app. I wanted to. But…”
“But…” I won’t throw in his face that if he had, I never would have gone to that strip club.
“I was afraid you’d tell me to fuck off and never want to see me again.”
I fold my arms. “You would have accepted that?”
He laughs. “No.”
I laugh with him and sit on the bed. My right hand stings, and I lift it quickly. “Ow.”
Eoghan whips around and frowns. “You have a piece of glass in your hand, love.”
Glancing at it, I see the sliver. “Shoot.”
“Don’t touch it.” He goes to a drawer and comes back with tweezers.
“I assume you know CPR and other lifesaving measures?”
“Tourniquets and stuff, yeah.” He smiles. “We leave the real medicine to Darragh and Cormac.”
“I want to meet Darragh and thank him for what he did for my mother.” I wince as the shard is removed.
Eoghan gently applies ointment and a band aid. “You will, love. You’ll meet everyone.”
“And his wife, Ana? The one I was trying to put in jail?”
“You were doing your job.” His voice is stern like he accepts what I did.
We settle into a stare. “You lied to me.”
“I pretended to be someone I wasn’t. Not the same thing.”
“You hacked my hook-up app.”
“I refused to let anyone else touch you. I told you when you bled on my cock, you were mine.”
I think about that. “And you pretended to be a man on my app to give me the fantasies I wanted because…”
“I knew I’d give you exactly what you wanted and needed.”
“And it was you every time?” A part of me worries Scava…
“Yes.”
“How can you be sure?”
“Because one way or another, I had eyes on you, sparkles.”
My mind calculates that when Eoghan wasn’t around, neither was Johnny. The real one.
“You used different condoms?” My heart pounds, thinking I’d see some realization in his eyes that Scava had been with me one time.
But he smiles. “I did that on purpose to throw you off. I promise you, sparkles. No one else was fucking touching you.”
“When were you going to tell me?” I ask anyway.
“In fifty years.”
“What?”
“I’m kidding, sparkles. I don’t know. I wanted to wait for the right moment. I was just too late.”
“I haven’t heard an apology…” I touch my ear and lean in.
“I did nothing wrong,” he says sternly, then exhales. “But if you want an apology, I’m sorry.”
“You’re just saying that.”
“I can write it in the sky.” He moves toward the curtains. “Get the pilot to do loops and spell it out.”
“No!” I cry out and grab him.
The plane hits turbulence at that exact moment and we tumble onto the bed, me under him.
“You feel perfect in my arms, sparkles.” He kisses me.
It does feel perfect.
Even if I know things will soon spectacularly fall apart.