22. Lorcan
LORCAN
I don’t kick the door. I don’t have to. I walk into the bathroom and find her sitting on the corner of the shower, her knees to her chest, her forehead pressed against them.
She is a broken mess of cotton and diamonds and trauma I didn’t inflict but intend to finish.
She looks like that, and I forget, for one dangerous second, that I am not a man who kneels.
It’s a weakness I should despise, but all I feel is a cold, lethal focus.
“Don’t make me come to you,” I say. My voice is flat, stripped of the anger that chased her up the stairs.
She doesn’t move. Her sobs are jagged, the kind that tear a person open from the inside.
Knowing this is a concession I’m going to have to make to show her that she isn’t just some possession we use to get our dicks wet, I step into the shower and drop to my knees in front of her.
I don’t care about the suit or the optics.
I grip her wrists, forcing her hands away from her face.
Her blue eyes are bloodshot and wild, filled with a terror that doesn’t belong to me.
“I’m not him,” I growl. She fights me for a second, a frantic flutter of limbs, before she collapses.
“Whoever convinced you that you’re the one to blame for their sins was a fucking liar and a first-class arsehole.
I’m going to find him, Elle. I’m going to make him bleed for every tear you’ve shed tonight. ”
She doesn’t answer me. She pulls in a breath so raw it sounds like it costs her something vital, and then she does the last thing I expect.
She breaks.
She breaks like she’s been holding herself together for so long that it becomes its own damage.
Her body shakes with it. Her hands come up and grip my shirt, and she buries her face in my chest. The sound she makes is so small and so wrecked that I want to burn the world down to its foundations and salt the earth where whoever did this to her once stood.
I don’t pull back.
I don’t say anything clever. I don’t make a threat, a promise, or a demand this time. I wrap both arms around her and hold her against me with a force that probably borders on painful, and I let her cry herself hollow.
My phone vibrates in my pocket. I ignore it.
Fintan’s message is still sitting in my head. Found something. Three of us need to talk.
It’s typical of my youngest brother. But I know whatever it is, he doesn’t want it in writing where it can be found and used against us, or Elle.
I realise, with a certainty usually reserved for business deals, that Elle is one of us now.
Holding her in my arms, I know I will never let her go.
I lift her into my arms. She weighs nothing.
I stand up and walk out of the bathroom.
I carry her to the bed and place her on the duvet.
She doesn’t let go of my shirt. Her fingers are locked into the fabric.
I sit on the edge of the mattress and pull her against my side.
“Breathe, Elle,” I murmur.
She shudders. Her breathing slows down, and she finally looks up at me. Her face is red. “Just go,” she says, but she doesn’t release me. “I’m not your fucking problem.”
“You aren’t a problem, but you are mine, Elle. Are we going to have to go through this again?”
“Just go!” she says and slams her fists against my chest.
“No.”
“Lorcan…” Her plea is desperate. It only fuels the fire in my gut that someone will die, and it will be painful.
I pull her hands away from my chest and pin them to the mattress. I don’t use my full strength, but I use enough to let her know the struggle is over. She stares at me, her chest heaving, the million-pound stones at her throat jiggling with each panicked breath.
“You don’t get to run from this,” I say, my voice dropping to a low, dangerous frequency. “And you don’t get to decide what you are to me. I’ve already made that choice.”
She stops fighting. The defiance in her eyes flickers and dies.
It’s replaced with an exhaustion so deep it affects me on a level that is savage and profound.
I release her wrists and reach for the clasp of the necklace.
My fingers work the clasp, tossing the fortune aside onto the bedside cabinet like it’s trash.
I want her to see that the stones, the collar, doesn’t matter.
It’s her I want, not the obedience, or the performance she thinks she can give me to survive. The blow-job in the kitchen takes on a whole new meaning.
It leaves me feeling cold inside.
She broke before this moment. She broke when she decided to give me what I want to make her life easier.
It’s what I wanted. But knowing it has happened now disgusts me.
Enough to pull away.
I step back, shutting down and filled with self-loathing. Even when she looks up at me, fear in her eyes that I’m going to leave, it doesn’t stop me from moving away from her.
“Lorcan,” she says, the plea is now a different one.
“I’ll leave you to clean up,” I state as coldly as I can and retreat, a coward’s way out.
Her stifled sniff of pain is hard to ignore, but I am not the man she needs. I can fight for her. I can ply her with luxury and jewels. I can kill those who hurt her.
But I can’t love her.
She is crying out for someone to care, but that man cannot be me.
I pull out my phone and dial Fin. As soon as he answers, before he has a chance to say anything, I say, “Get here now. She needs you.”
Then I hang up, gather up my jacket, leave the penthouse and the woman inside who broke under my watch, for my brother to pick up the pieces. He will ensure she is safe and warm tonight.
But tonight, I need to fight. A real, honest-to-God fight with someone who will fight back.
My driver nods as I slide into the back seat. He knows where I want to go by the look on my face. He knows me too well.
Minutes later, we pull up outside the club, and I slip in the back way. The corridor behind the club is quiet and empty. I don’t want polished violence sold to rich men as entertainment.
I want pain.
Jacob appears at the end of the hall before I reach the security office. He takes one look at me and stops.
“Ring?” he asks.
He pulls his phone out. “Anyone specific?”
“Someone who can stay upright long enough to fight back. Hard.”
His jaw tightens. “I’ll find you one.”
I stare back until he drops his eyes and starts typing.
I walk past him into the changing room and strip out of my shirt. I toss it onto the bench and flex my hands. My knuckles still ache from Clifton. Pain sharpens things. It cuts through noise.
Elle’s face keeps forcing itself into my head.
Bloodshot eyes. Trembling mouth. Fingers locked into my shirt like I was the last solid thing in her world, and I still walked out.
I drag in a breath and hate the sound of it as I remove the rest of my clothes and pull on a pair of black joggers.
Going barefoot and bare-knuckle seems fitting.
I’m not even going to wrap my hands for this one.
I want to destroy myself and whoever else is in that ring with me.
Jacob comes back five minutes later with his face carefully blank.
“Ro—” he starts.
“Don’t need a name,” I interrupt. “Just want the fight.”
He nods once and steps aside.
The noise hits as soon as I push through the door into the main room.
Money, laughter, music, people pretending they came for pleasure and not blood.
The ring sits under the lights, empty for now, ropes gleaming dark red.
Men turn when they see me. Conversations die in pockets.
They sense the shift before they understand it.
Let them see what happens when I lose control in the only place I’m allowed to.
I step into the ring. The stone under my feet is cold. The crowd responds, voices rising, bets already starting before anyone announces a fight.
Bets are placed, and the level of violence rises. They know this is going to be an all-out brawl from a man who has no fucks left to give.
I roll my neck and look toward the opposite side as Ronan Doyle climbs in. He is a big bastard. Thick through the chest, broken nose, shaved head, scar through one eyebrow. His hands are wrapped.
I see why Jacob wanted to warn me.
Doesn’t change a fucking thing. It only makes it better.
He stares at me and my bare hands. He questions it for a second before the look on my face must tell him to drop it. He shrugs.
The bell goes.
He comes in hard.
I let him.
His fist catches me across the cheek, and my head snaps to the side. Pain explodes bright and clean. The crowd roars. I taste blood and welcome it. Ronan follows with a body shot that lands under my ribs. It drives the air from my lungs.
I smile.
His grin fades.
Then I hit him.
My fist connects with his jaw hard enough to send a jolt up my arm. He stumbles one step, catches himself, and drives back at me. We crash together in the centre of the ring. No finesse. No polished showmanship. No neat footwork for rich men to clap over. Just bone, blood, breath, impact.
He gets a hand on the back of my neck and tries to drag my head down. I drive my fist into his stomach once, twice, three times. He grunts and slams his forehead into mine.
Pain detonates through my skull.
I drive my knee up, catching him in the thigh hard enough to buckle his leg. He swings wide. I duck under it and slam my fist into his ribs. Once. Twice. He catches me with an elbow across the side of my head, and my vision blanks for half a second.
The crowd loses its fucking mind.
Ronan grabs me by the back of the head again and drives another punch into my side. It lands clean. I feel something pull sharp beneath my ribs, but I don’t step back. I don’t want distance. Distance gives a man room to think, and thinking is the whole problem.
Elle crying into my shirt.
Elle asking to be loved.
Elle flinching because I made her believe I was another man walking away when she broke.
I slam my fist into Ronan’s face.
His nose breaks under my knuckles. Blood sprays across his mouth and chin. He snarls and comes at me harder, which is exactly why Jacob chose him. Ronan Doyle doesn’t go down easy. He has no interest in making me look good.
It’s fucking perfect.