Chapter 13 #2
He looked at me then. Sort of. His gaze skittered somewhere behind my shoulder. “No. I’ll set the alarm and have Rhys come check on you.”
This was absolutely unacceptable.
I charged forward. “You’re just going to leave me here, alone and unchained? What if I swallow a whole bottle of pills? What if I stab Rhys with a knife? I can do a lot of damage here alone.” My lips curled into a sneer as I fisted my hands at my sides. “Or did you forget who I am?”
He finally met my gaze head on. I’d expected him to shout. To wrap those inked fingers around my throat. To get the chain out and make me behave. Instead, his eyes tore through me like claws as he let out an amused huff. “I see.”
“You see what?” I spat.
He grabbed a pack of cigarettes and began tapping it against his palm. “You want attention. Boundaries. You want me to keep my boot on your neck.”
Did I want that?
Yes. No. Yes.
I didn’t know how to respond. My anger had me twisted up and confused. I couldn’t even remember the point of my outburst anymore. All I knew was that the thought of him leaving me like this, without a leash, left me feeling unstable.
Cian let out a long sigh as he pulled a cigarette from the pack and stuck it in the corner of his mouth. “Let’s go.”
I froze. “What?”
“Let’s. Go.”
“Go where?”
“Don’t question me, devil. You don’t want me to leave you, so I’m taking you with me.”
By the time we walked into the main room downstairs, it was late afternoon.
Mads and Dylan were on the couch playing Mario Kart, with Jeremy sitting between them, his little legs dangling off the end of the cushion.
Cian whistled, and Mads’s head popped up.
He gave Jeremy’s hair a quick ruffle before heading our way.
Mads looked me over from head to toe as he approached, and Cian shifted closer to me—almost protectively. I wondered if he even realized he’d done it.
“Everything go okay last night?” Cian asked.
“Yeah. Jeremy and Dylan slept in my bed, and I slept on the floor.”
Cian frowned. “We can get them their own room. We have the space.”
“It’s fine. Dylan will probably head back to his apartment soon. We just wanted to be together last night.”
“All right. But let me know. We can make space, and Dylan doesn’t have to pay us anything.”
Mads smiled, and his dimples popped. “Thanks, boss.” Then he looked back at Jeremy, and his smile faded.
“When we went to pick him up, he was alone. The place was a mess. This is Dylan’s visitation time, and we’re spending this week fighting for full custody.
This whole situation is bullshit.” His voice had begun to rise. “The kid has bruises!”
“I saw them,” Cian gritted out. “Keep your voice down.”
Mads clenched his jaw. “I need Rottie.”
I had no idea who Rottie was, but I assumed he was a lawyer when Cian assured Mads that, while Rottie didn’t do family law, he could find someone who did.
Mads’s attention shifted to me. He was quiet for a long moment, then blew out a harsh breath and ran a hand through his blond hair.
“I don’t know why you did it, but thanks. For the food. And for the frog. He loves that stupid thing.”
I could see the keychain ring looped around Jeremy’s middle finger from here. I didn’t want to get into this again, especially not with Cian’s eyes boring a hole through me. So I nodded.
Mads narrowed his eyes. “I don’t get you.”
I shrugged. “No one does.”
Cian and Mads exchanged a few more words before we headed for the front door. The second it shut behind us, Cian grabbed my chin and dug his fingers into my cheeks.
“I do,” he growled.
I winced. “I do what?”
He shoved me away, and I rubbed my jaw as he stalked toward a dark SUV with tinted windows. “I get you,” he called over his shoulder.
I absolutely refused to verbally agree, but I didn’t need to. We both knew he got me. He got everything.
Once we were both buckled in, I turned to him. “So, where are we going?”
“Errands.”
“Like the grocery store? They have delivery apps for that, Cian. Welcome to the twenty-first century.”
He rolled his eyes. “Work errands, dumbass.”
“For the restaurant?”
He stared at me for a few seconds, then he faced the windshield and put the car in drive.
Okay… So without words, then.
I suspected these errands were for the illegal side of his business.
And I wasn’t quite sure how I felt about that.
I’d been a law-abiding citizen since I’d nearly been beaten to death a year ago.
While sometimes I missed the adrenaline rush of my former life, I didn’t miss constantly looking over my shoulder, strategizing my next move, and hanging onto power by my fingernails.
Cian’s crew lived on the outskirts of a small city called Brighton, and we reached the city limits shortly around four in the afternoon.
We stopped at a nondescript townhouse, where Cian told me to wait in the car while he hauled a large black duffel from the back seat and disappeared through the screen door.
I did as I was told, bored as fuck. I didn’t have a phone, and Cian had taken his with him, so I couldn’t even catch up on the news.
I didn’t want to think about it too hard, but it was odd how little I missed things like having a phone.
And my supposed freedom. Under Cian’s control, I felt freer than I had in a decade.
I fiddled with the radio until I found a station that wasn’t playing total crap.
With nothing else to do, I watched the street outside.
Two girls were riding their bikes on the sidewalk near the car, the bright streamers fluttering from their handlebars sparkling in the sun.
One fell, cried for a few seconds, then got up and tried again.
Back when Dennis had told me that his girlfriend, Amara, was pregnant, I’d been ecstatic. Dennis had been the only family I’d had left, and while he had many, many flaws, he was still my brother. My blood. And that mattered to me.
Then Amara’s brother, Tav, decided Dennis was a monster. He claimed Dennis didn’t want the baby. Claimed he planned to kill Amara. So Tav killed him first.
I’d gone absolutely mental after that, convinced that Dennis would never kill the mother of his unborn baby.
I made Tav pay for what he’d done, forcing him to give up his future as a mixed martial artist and fight in my underground boxing league, threatening to kill Amara and Holden if he ever went near them again.
I’d lived with those monstrous choices for five more years—until Tav met Conrad, the one person who could destroy me. They fell in love, and together they brought me down. Because Conrad was also Soto, the faceless crime lord who’d made it his mission to ruin my criminal empire.
Over the past year, I hadn’t let myself consider whether I was capable of hurting my nephew.
Holden was a four-year-old who looked a whole lot like Tav and not much like Dennis.
But even now, as I tried to imagine myself staring into that little boy’s eyes and doing anything to harm him or his mother, something inside me recoiled.
I turned away from the window and the girls on their bikes. I refused to think about Holden anymore.
Cian finally emerged from the townhouse a half hour later, which was twenty-nine minutes too long for my liking. He climbed back into the car, started the engine, and pulled onto the road without so much as a glance in my direction.
I crossed my arms over my chest and narrowed my eyes. “You weren’t worried I’d run?”
He looked straight ahead. “No.”
“Why not?”
He briefly glanced in his rearview mirror before answering. “Where the fuck would you go?”
I hated that he had a point. I had no money, no ID, no phone, no transportation, and no more connections.
Cian had made me dependent on him, and that probably should have pissed me off more.
But as I stared out the window and chewed on my ragged thumbnail, I realized that those were all just excuses I told myself.
Escape was still possible. I could figure something out. But I didn’t want to.
I wanted to stay with Cian.
Despite all his threats, despite the way he tore me open, I craved his presence. I liked the way he treated his men. The way he ran his business. He promised to keep me until he killed me, and that was more than anyone had promised me in my entire life.
Cian didn’t tell me what the “errands” were, and I didn’t really care. He was probably delivering guns or selling drugs or collecting money.
“Why don’t you send one of your men for stuff like this?” I asked after the third stop.
“I’d rather deal with some of our clients myself,” he answered without hesitation.
Meaning, he protected his crew.
That was something The Detroit Devil had never done. Men had always been expendable to me. Nothing but minions. I didn’t respect them, and they didn’t respect me. They only respected my power.
But with Cian? His men respected him. Not just his power, but who he was down to his core. It was obvious in the way they treated him, and in the way he treated them, that he’d earned it. I’d never gotten the impression Patrick’s men felt that way about him.
An hour or so later, we stopped for dinner at some hole-in-the wall Italian place in a derelict part of Brighton.
I was even allowed out of the car this time, which was a fun change of pace.
The restaurant only had three tables, one of which was occupied by a moldy-looking old man who looked like he hadn’t moved from that chair in years.
A woman in her seventies with white hair and rosy cheeks worked a large grill behind the counter, while a thin young man watched us from behind the register. “Mr. O'Shea,” he said in greeting.
Mr. O’Shea, I mouthed at Cian, who rolled his eyes at me.
“Where’ve you been?” the woman at the grill asked without turning around.
“Busy,” Cian muttered. “Sorry, Frances.”
“Make it up to me by letting me feed you.”
“Why else do you think I’m here?” He smiled at her. A real one. I didn’t even know he could smile like that.