CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Aoife
THE FIRST THING I hear is beeping.
Steady. Rhythmic. The kind of sound that belongs to a hospital, and the realization sends a spike of cold through my chest before I've even opened my eyes. I know this sound. I've spent too many hours listening to it while sitting beside my mother's bed to mistake it for anything else.
My eyelids are heavy. The light is wrong when I get them open, too white, too flat, and for a moment, everything is shapes without names. A ceiling. A curtain on a metal rail. A window with blinds pulled shut.
Then the pain arrives.
My head first. A deep, nauseating throb behind my right eye that pulses in time with the beeping.
My shoulder next, stiff and hot under bandages I can feel but can't see.
My feet, wrapped in something soft. And underneath all of it, something else.
Something bone-deep that doesn't belong to any single injury but to the accumulated cost of the last forty-eight hours catching up with me at once.
I turn my head on the pillow, and the room swims.
William is in the chair beside my bed.
He's asleep. His head tipped back against the wall, his mouth slightly open, one arm across his stomach, and the other hanging off the armrest. His knuckles are wrapped in white bandages, spotted through with old blood.
There are stitches above his left eyebrow, a neat black line against skin that's bruised yellow and purple around the edges.
The IV in my hand pulls when I reach for him. I stop. Let my arm fall back.
He's here. He's breathing. That's enough for now.
The door opens. A woman in scrubs steps in, checks the monitor, checks my IV, then looks at me and stops.
"Oh, good, you're awake." She keeps her voice low, glancing at William. "How's your head?"
"Terrible."
"That's honest." She shines a penlight in my eyes, and I flinch. "Follow the light. Good. Your pupils are evening out. That's a marked improvement from when you came in."
"How long have I been here?"
"Two days." She writes something on a chart. "You had a significant concussion. Some swelling. We kept you sedated to let it settle."
Two days. I look at William again. At the dark circles under his eyes and the way his body is angled toward my bed, even in sleep.
"Has he been here the whole time?"
The nurse follows my gaze. Something softens in her expression.
"He discharged himself against medical advice after twelve hours.
Three cracked ribs, a laceration on his left side that needed thirty-two stitches, and a hyperextended knee.
The doctor told him he needed to stay for observation.
He said no." She clips the chart back to the end of my bed. "He's been in that chair since."
That sounds about right.
"I'll let the doctor know you're conscious. Try not to move too much."
She leaves. The door clicks shut.
I lie still and let the beeping fill the silence, and I think about the field.
Not images. I didn't have images. I had sound.
Viktor's voice was accented and unhurried.
William's voice, wrecked and steady. The word no.
And then engines, and gunfire, and hands pulling me into wet grass, and after that nothing until this room.
I don't know what happened between my eyes closing in that field and opening in this bed. But William is here, alive, in a chair he hasn't left in two days. And I'm here. And whatever he did while I was face down in the dark, it was enough.
I chose him. And whatever happened in that field while I couldn't see it didn't undo that choice. It welded it shut.
William stirs. His head comes forward off the wall, and his eyes open and find me immediately, like he was looking for me even before he was fully awake.
"Hey." His voice is rough. Unused.
"Hey."
He leans forward. His hand finds mine on the blanket, and his thumb runs over my knuckles once, slow. "How do you feel?"
"Like I got hit by a car."
"Close enough." He doesn't smile, but something eases behind his eyes. He looks at me the way he did in the field like he's checking. Making sure I'm real and solid and still here. "Your pupils look better."
"The nurse said the same thing."
"Good." He sits back, but he doesn't let go of my hand. "Your father's been calling. Three times. Aidan's been fielding them."
My chest tightens. "Is he okay?"
"Recovering. He wanted to come, but Aidan talked him out of traveling." William pauses. "He knows about Viktor. Aidan told him everything."
I wait.
He looks at our hands on the blanket. "He said he's glad I was there."
That's as close to an acceptance as Dillon O'Rourke will ever give.
The man who promised me I'd never be forced into something I didn't want, then signed a contract with my name on it.
The man who got shot because my brother sold us out to the Bratva.
The man who, even from a hospital bed with a hole healing in his throat, is still calculating, still watching, still trying to hold the shape of the world together with the force of his will.
My father. Difficult and stubborn and impossible. And glad William was there.
"I need to call him," I say.
"Later." William shifts in the chair, and I see him wince. His hand goes to his left side, pressing briefly before he drops it. "Aidan's coming this afternoon. He'll bring you a phone."
"Where are we?"
"Private clinic outside Navan. Jason arranged it."
"Matty?" The name comes out first. He's the last person I remember. His hand on my arm, steering me through the dark. The car door. His face before he turned back toward the house.
"He's fine. Not a scratch on him." Something moves behind William's expression that I can't quite read. "He's been running security rotations since we got here. Him and Jason."
"And Jason?"
"Dislocated shoulder. They reset it. He's in the room next door pretending he doesn't need painkillers."
"Raven." The guilt surfaces before I can stop it. Her arm. The blood. The wall I left her behind. "Is she okay?"
"Twelve stitches. She's at a hotel in Trim with Aidan." He sees my face. "She's fine, Aoife. Matty went back for her."
I nod. But the knowing doesn't make the guilt any lighter.
"The men who died at Aidan's house." I watch his face. "How many, in the end?"
"Twelve." He says it flat. No inflection. He doesn't list the names. Doesn't break it down by family—just the number, sitting between us like something with weight.
Twelve men who were alive three days ago. Who had people waiting for them to come home.
"The funerals start tomorrow," William says. "I'll be at every one."
I don't argue. Don't offer to come. These are his allies.
His call brought them to that house, and his war put them in the ground.
That debt is his to pay, and he knows it, and the way his jaw sets when he says it tells me he's already carrying every one of those twelve names somewhere behind his ribs.
The door opens again, and this time it's Matty. He stands in the doorway with two paper cups of tea. Dark hair pushed back off his forehead. No visible injuries. He looks tired, but his face gives nothing away.
"Tea," he says. He hands one cup to William and sets the other on my bedside table. Then he looks at me. "You look rough."
"Thank you, Matty."
"Welcome." He doesn't sit. He stands near the window with his hands in his pockets, his gaze moving between William and the door.
"Raven told me to tell you something." He shifts his weight but doesn't move from the window. "She says you owe her a bottle of wine for leaving her behind that wall."
The guilt hits again. Sharper this time, hearing it from Matty. I'd do it again. I know that. But the knowing doesn't help.
"I'll buy her a case," I say.
Matty almost smiles. It makes him look younger. Then it's gone.
He glances at William. Something passes between them. A look I can't read.
"I'll be outside," Matty says, and leaves.
William watches the door close. His hand tightens on mine.
"He hasn't slept," he says quietly. "Not since the field. He was the one who found me after I went down. He and Aidan carried me to the car." He pauses. "Matty drove. Aidan said he didn't speak the entire way here. Just drove."
I think about Matty at the car door. The way he looked at me once and then turned back without a word.
"He needs to rest," I say.
"He won't. Not until he decides it's safe." William shifts again. Winces again. "He's got the hallway. Jason has the parking lot entrance. Neither of them will stand down."
"William."
"What?"
"When do you rest?"
He looks at me. His thumb is still moving over my knuckles, back and forth, the only part of him that seems to work without conscious effort.
"When you're out of here," he says. "When I know you're somewhere safe and I can lock a door and put my back against it."
That's not an answer. That's a man who will run himself into the ground before he admits he's already there.
I've watched him do it for weeks now. Stay sober when everything around him is collapsing.
Hold meetings when he should be sleeping.
Plan a strategy when his body is screaming at him to stop.
He won't break because breaking isn't something William knows how to do.
He just bends further and further until the distance between standing and falling is so thin you can't see it anymore.
"Thirty-two stitches," I say.
"It's not that bad."
"Three cracked ribs."
"I've had worse."
"Stop."
He stops. Looks at me with that closed expression that used to terrify me. The one I've learned to read from the inside out. Not cold. Not empty. Full. So full of things he won't say that the only way to hold them is to shut everything down.
"You discharged yourself with three cracked ribs and thirty-two stitches," I say. "The nurse told me that much. And I can see the rest." I hold his gaze. "So when I say we rest, I mean both of us."
His jaw works. His thumb stops moving on my hand.
"Okay," he says.
I don't believe him. But it's a start.
The room goes quiet. Just the beeping and the hum of the building and the sound of his breathing.
He's still holding my hand, but his eyes have drifted.
They're on our fingers, laced together on the blanket, but they've gone unfocused.
Something in his face shifts. I don't know what it is.
I don't know him well enough to name it.
"Are you okay?" I ask. "You seem almost sad."
He exhales. Slow. Controlled.
"I promise I'm not sad. I'm just thinking."
"About what?"
He looks at me. Right at me. No shift of his gaze to the wall or the window or the space above my head.
"You."
My pulse picks up. I feel it in my throat, in the tips of my fingers where they're pressed against his.
He doesn't say anything for a moment. His thumb starts moving again, tracing the ridge of my knuckle. When he speaks, his voice is lower. Rougher.
"I don't get scared much. I mean, being part of the mafia, not being afraid comes with the territory." He pauses. "But when I saw you lying on the grass..."
He doesn't finish. His jaw tightens, and he looks down at our hands, and the sentence just stops.
My chest aches. A deep, spreading warmth that starts behind my ribs and moves outward until I can feel it in my face, in my eyes, in the backs of my hands.
I know what I feel for this man. I've known it for weeks, maybe longer, the way you know something you're not ready to look at directly.
And watching him sit here, trying to say something he clearly doesn't have the words for, it undoes something inside me.
I need to breathe. I need to not cry. So I do what I always do when the feeling gets too big.
"It almost sounds like you might love me, William Murphy."
He snorts. A real laugh, short and rough, and for a second, the tension breaks.
Then he looks at me, and his face is serious again.
"I don't love you, Aoife."
The words hit my chest like something solid. The air leaves my lungs. I wasn't expecting it. Even though I was joking, even though I said it to deflect, hearing him say it back knocks something loose inside me that I didn't know was holding weight.
He must see something change in my face because he keeps talking.
"Love is flowers," he says. "And nice words. Love is romance." He pauses. His fingers tighten around mine. "Honestly, I've never loved. But..." He shrugs. One shoulder. "What I feel for you goes beyond that."
I stop breathing.
His eyes come up to mine, and they're wet. Not falling, not spilling over, but there. A glaze across the dark of his irises that I have never seen on this man's face. Not when he shot Frank across the table from me. Not when he pressed a gun to my brother's forehead. Not once.
"You reminded me of who I was meant to be," he says. "Of who I am."
The room is so quiet that I can hear the beeping and nothing else. My throat is closed. My eyes are burning. William Murphy is sitting in a hospital chair with tears in his eyes, telling me I showed him who he is, and I don't know what to do with that.
I can't speak. If I speak, I'll cry, and if I cry, I won't stop.
"So the only way you will get out is through death," William says.
I bite my lip. Hard. Trying to hold something inside my chest that wants to break open.
"That's a tall order," I say.
He wipes the tear with the back of his free hand. One quick motion. Then he sits up straight in the chair. Squares his shoulders.
"It's the only order, Aoife."
My chest swells. My eyes spill over. I let them.
"I accept," I whisper.
He smiles. Not the almost-smile. Not the twitch at the corner of his mouth. A real smile that changes his entire face and makes him look like someone I haven't met yet.
"This is it," he says. "You can never leave."
I smile back. Through the tears. Through everything.
"Good."
He leans in. Presses his lips to my forehead.
Soft. Deliberate. His hand on the side of my face, holding me steady.
The kiss stays there for a long time. Longer than it needs to.
And I feel it all the way down to my toes, warm and slow and certain, like a door closing behind me that I never want to open again.
When he pulls back, his thumb brushes the tears from my cheek. He doesn't say anything else. Neither do I.
Some things don't need words.