Chapter 23
TWENTY-THREE
seamus
“So,” Cal says, leaning against the wall in the garage. Ava’s right, garages like this are rare in the city, private, and hidden behind a false facade.
I continue working on my bike, happy to have it here, rather than loitering in a rented garage we have in Midtown. It’s not that it’s far; it’s just I never have the time to go there. But here… I can tinker, spread pieces out, and rebuild her to what she should be at my leisure.
“So?” I turn a page in the manual, still tasting that delicious sauce Ava’s making, and the more delicious sweetness with bite that is all her own.
He sighs, walks over, and taps his cigarette pack on the saddle.
“I thought you were quitting.”
“Trying. Big difference. For Lucie. She wants…” He doesn’t finish.
He doesn’t have to.
She wants him not smoking, and I’m gonna guess she might want a baby sometime soon. Thank fuck it’s not something I’ll be facing. Ever.
“So?” I prompt.
“Your little wife. What’s the fucking deal? We agreed no problems from the Romanov factor. But he was right about the other evening, feelings about him aside.”
I put down the wrench and stand up. “What are your feelings?”
“I fucking don’t trust anyone outside the family. That little get-together was what he said. But I can say it clearer if you like. They were circling like fucking vultures.”
“There’s no real difference if we, with Ava, take over her bratva. It’s basically only a small shipping company and smuggling routes. Right now, it’s running with a couple of changes in leadership. She’ll be another, but the fundamentals stay the same.”
“Yes and no. What if the circling’s been going on longer? What if the uncle, or the uncle’s second, was making a deal with someone, or promised one, and your bride, along with us, have come along and upset things? I guess I’m saying we’re in this, so we should push to see the players.”
He’s right. Someone wants that bratva. Or rather the smuggling routes.
Which makes us want them more.
But it isn’t just that. Everything, right from us stepping into that security job, seems to hold parts of a bigger picture.
Perhaps we were targets the moment word got out the Murphys were the security detail of the Assisi and Romanov wedding. And the whole marriage to Ava sweetened the pot with regard to people trying to take what’s ours.
No one in my family is na?ve enough to think we’re not ever going to be a juicy target to a greedy fool.
Maybe the planets aligned and the perfect shitstorm of events have happened. Ava coming to me to propose—literally—opened us up to someone who wants her smuggling routes and then saw the opportunities that taking our territories would offer.
Someone like Romanov?
Or maybe… “Ava knew Paddy and learned to make shite bombs from him.”
Cal leans on the bike. “Do you think she’s manipulated us from the start, carrying on the vendetta of a dead man?”
He doesn’t sound convinced.
I’m not convinced.
And yet… Ava hates me.
Every attack on her, or situations where I’ve gotten close to getting information, like finding out who the man with the scar is, has ended with her in one piece and a number of bodies scattered around her.
Like the guy she worked with. Her friend in the gutter in the rain.
What if she’s out to kill me and take what she can from my family with her end goal being me dead and… what? Paddy avenged?
“I honestly don’t know. The Semtex trail fizzled, which isn’t a shock, but her involvement from the start would mean a mighty big plan.”
“Paddy’s been dead a while now,” he says. “And none of this fits. Which makes me think we need to be more proactive.”
I look at him. “Poke around and see what happens?”
“Exactly.”
The door leading to the brownstone where Ava is cooking opens and the cat and dog barrel in, followed by Dec. “What the fuck is for dinner, because it smells amazing?”
All through dinner I can’t help but circle back to what, exactly, Ava’s involvement is in this whole shit show.
But while I might be missing something, and I know she’s not telling me everything about her altercation outside of Romanov’s townhouse, a grand plan with Paddy being carried out now is ridiculous.
Ridiculous doesn’t mean wrong.
It just means it’s unlikely.
My main issues are that she’s untrustworthy and she despises me as much as she’s attracted to me. From firsthand experience of both, it makes for a very volatile situation.
But no matter how I spin the details around in my mind, I keep coming back to two things.
I don’t trust her. And she seems to be focused on her bratva.
She is trying to settle into this uneasy place we’re in, of having to be together for the next twelve months.
Ava sits at the table, barely eating as my family raises the ceiling with their rowdy noise and chatter as they scarf down the food. Compliments flow over her, and she’s like a deer in headlights.
“You have to give me this recipe,” Harry says. “If it’s simple. I’m not much of a cook.”
“She doesn’t have to be. Harry has other skills.” And Torin hooks his arm around the back of his wife’s chair, kissing her throat as she blushes.
Lucie takes a piece of bread and slathers it in butter. She’s about to take a bite when Cal steals it and feeds it to her, earning a groan and a puking sound from Dec. But Lucie smiles at her husband. “I’m not cooking for you.”
“Do I look like I care, Lucie Joy?”
And she laughs.
They’re boisterous, wild, relaxed.
Ava looks between them like she’s at the circus.
I lean toward her. “Sweet thing, relax.”
She digs her fingers into my thigh, and all it does is send a bolt of need through me. I like her violent streak. I like it when she fights me.
Which bothers me, because what if I’m missing a piece of this puzzle by being dickmatized by her?
“I’m relaxed.”
“Yeah?” I say. “Either you’re up to something or you’re completely out of your element.”
“Maybe it’s you.”
I reach under the table and pluck her hand from my thigh, putting it on my crotch. I might be playing with fire, but I don’t think she’s going to try to maim me, not with the entire family here.
For a moment I think I might be wrong. Her fingers tighten. But almost instantly she lets go and pulls her hand away to set in her own lap.
“Maybe it is,” I say. “But I have questions.”
She shoots me the dirtiest look. “You always have questions. And I’m not in the mood. My friends were murdered, and I was attacked.”
“Only because you didn’t obey the order to go home.”
“Forgive me for wanting to know what you’re up to,” she snaps in a low voice. And then she pours herself a big glass of wine. “I think I’ll start clearing up.”
I lock eyes with Cal.
He and Torin will start looking into things. Dec, too. We have fronts to cover. I won’t rule even an Irish faction out. Because there are some we don’t know. There are those we missed in the Siobhan purge.
Then there’s Romanov. Something with him doesn’t sit right. Shit, maybe this is all a long game that was set up and Ava was the bait.
I make myself stop. They’ll look into everyone who was at the club, if Cal doesn’t already have Torin and Dec on it by now. But if I keep spinning this shit in my head, I’ll go crazy.
Instead, I stand, take her wine and my whiskey, and say, “I think we’ll skip dessert. Dec, you’re on cleanup.”
We leave, giving Ava no other choice but to follow.
I’m halfway up the stairs before I realize she’s not following. I down my drink and set down the glasses before storming back down.
There she fucking is. In the foyer, shoving her feet into shoes. Something in me snaps. I would love to fucking chase her down in the streets, burn off the energy from the entire day. To kill the buzz of doubts and accusations in me with some good old-fashioned primal chase and play.
I want to dominate her, have her on her knees with my dick down her throat and me showing her just who her boss is.
No, I want her to fight and push back and release her claws. I want it all to be the perfect storm of anger, fight, and erotic desire.
Of needs hard fought for and killed.
But I can’t do that. I’m not letting her out. Not until I get some answers. So I grab her and throw her over my shoulder.
“Let me go, you bastard,” she says.
But I don’t. She struggles in my grip, punching my back.
I spank her damn hard. It only seems to incite her, though. She twists and bites as high up my back as she can get, her nails clawing my skin.
So I slap her again on her tight ass and stomp up the stairs, my dick rock hard.
When I get to the room I try to pull her off, but she’s not letting go, and we land on the bed in a heap. It doesn’t take much to roll her onto her back and I pin her down, rising up, her hands now above her head, her purple eyes spitting fire, black hair a wild storm around her.
She pushes up, her legs coming around me as she grinds into me.
Sweet Ava’s either a genius or can’t quite get hold of her responses to me.
I want to think it’s the latter as that’s where I am, but I can’t rule out the former.
“At first I thought with the Paddy-style bombs,” I murmur, “you shooting the Bombs ’R Us salesman dead—”
“I didn’t,” she says, voice a hiss. “I was shooting at someone else to save your pathetic ass—”
“—and all the other deaths that swirl around you, that you were trying to infiltrate my family.”
That’s a lie. In everything, I’ve never really thought that. But her face backs that up. She looks a little horrified.
But there’s also something else there, something I can’t decipher… Guilt? The problem is she might feel guilty believing Paddy. Or it could be for another reason or some other emotion.
“My problem is,” I mutter, biting down on her ear, her shiver a dynamic undulation against me and I want to be inside her. Now. “My problem is I keep coming back to you and Romanov. The crest. Your bratva. Why he’s still somehow in our lives. What’s the truth there?”
Her gaze flickers. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I told you he knew my family. That’s it.”
“I don’t believe you.”
Her eyes now flash fire at me. “I don’t care what you think or believe.”
“You really should.” I bite her throat and suck hard. “He’s not the type to seek help outside his many circles of allies. And we’ve made it clear we don’t want skin in his game. So why keep coming to us? Why dick around in our periphery? And why the fuck is he so interested in you?”
She struggles against me, and I just hold her in place. “I told you, he knew my father and stepmother.”
“The truth, Ava.”
“That is the truth.”
If she’s hiding something, she isn’t going to tell me. So I kiss her. I take my time, and it both calms and riles her. Calms her into slowly melting into me, and riles her into fighting me, but this time to get off my clothes, to pull me into her.
And I oblige.
I kiss my way down her body, pushing her dress up and through her panties, I breathe the musk of her in, the dampness an aphrodisiac of its own.
She’s something else, my sweet thing, and if there wasn’t a world of lies and hate between us, a gulf where trust should be, I’d dine on her until I passed out. I’d fuck her so stupid that neither one of us could walk.
There’s still a beat of violence in my blood, the need to harm every single fuck at that club who looked at her wrong, looked at her with lust, said vile things to her. I want to hurt the men who tried to hurt her in the little courtyard garden outside the Romanov townhouse.
But instead, I suck on her clit through her panties, using the lace as added friction that makes her arch up, and I thrust two fingers into her.
I make it cruel, a slow burn designed to stoke her fires to a certain level, to get her closer to the brink so I can make her come apart.
Her breathing starts to change, body writhing uncontrollably.
Then I stop.
And it’s one of the hardest things I’ll ever do.
“You need to start being honest,” I say.
“I’m being honest,” she snaps, trying to kick me as I scoot away. “You have everything of mine. My bratva’s future is in your hands.”
“Remember that.”
I start for the door. If I stay here, I’ll fuck her senseless. And I want her aching, a mess, needing me.
“Give me my crest.”
“Maybe if you start being honest.”
And with that, I actually leave, heading down to continue working on my bike. Once there, I lose myself in it.
I don’t know what time it is when Arnold starts barking like crazy as a car’s tires squeal and the front door slams.
I race out, my gun in my hand.
A shadow moves under the tree right outside our townhouse.
Holding something in its hand.