Epilogue #2
I holster the gun and sheathe Henrietta, letting the familiar rituals ground me. Three dead men. An operation shut down. A message sent to anyone else thinking about skimming from the ó Briain empire.
I look around the space, at the pallets stacked to the ceiling, industrial shelving, three corpses and a spilt bottle of whiskey seeping into the cracks between floor tiles. The fluorescent lights buzz overhead, one of them flickering at the far end, casting the shelving in uneven, strobing light.
“Call in the cleaners,” I say to Aidan. “I want this mess cleaned up fast.”
“On it,” he replies, already pulling out his phone.
Cormac moves to my side, his hand finding mine. His fingers are warm, solid, real. “You really should send other people to do this type of grunt work,” he says, not for the first time.
I look at him, at the blood spatter on his jaw that he hasn’t noticed yet, at the way his eyes are still sharp with adrenaline. “Where’s the fun in that, though?” I reply lightly.
Because the truth is, I need this. Not the killing, that’s just business.
But the doing of it myself. The being present, the getting my hands dirty, the reminder that I’m not some distant figurehead giving orders from an ivory tower.
I’m in the trenches with my people. I’m the one willing to pull the trigger.
That matters. That’s what keeps loyalty in a world where everyone is always looking for an angle.
Aidan finishes his call and pockets his phone. “Forty minutes for the cleaners. We should move.”
“Give me a second.”
I look around the warehouse one more time, committing it to memory, because every operation teaches me something new about how people think, how they scheme, where the next threat will come from.
Three dead men who thought they were invisible. Who thought they could take from me without consequences. Who learned, in the last seconds of their lives, exactly how wrong they were.
Two years of this. Two years of finding the discrepancies, tracing the rot, cutting it out before it spreads.
Two years of learning that power is not a thing you seize once and keep.
It is a thing you defend, every single day, with your hands and your head and sometimes your knife, and the moment you stop paying attention is the moment someone decides you’ve gone soft.
I run my fingers over my forearms. Declan’s and Aidan’s names carved into my flesh to match Cormac’s between my tits.
“Ready?” Declan asks.
I nod, turning away from the bodies. “Let’s go. Our evening was interrupted, and I had something to say.”
“What is it?” Cormac asks, his brow furrowing with immediate concern. After two years, he still hasn’t learned to hide his worry for me, not completely.
“I’ll tell you when we get home.”
“Tell us now,” Aidan says, his voice sharp with the kind of worry he masks as impatience.
I look at the three of them. We’re standing in a warehouse with three bodies at our feet, blood on our clothes, and death still hanging in the air.
It’s hardly the place for what I want to say, but then again, maybe it’s exactly the right place.
Maybe this is the most honest version of us. Violent, messy, unbreakable.
“Okay,” I say, taking a breath that tastes of gunpowder and rust. “Hardly the place for it, but here goes.”
They go still, all three of them, their attention focused on me with an intensity that makes my skin prickle.
“I want to get married,” I say, the words coming out steadier than I expected.
“To all of you. I want a ridiculous last name made up of six different names. I want to maybe start a family and put the grunt work behind us. Not all of it—I’m not going soft—but enough that we’re not standing in warehouses every other week putting bullets in people’s heads. ”
The silence that follows is so complete I can hear my own heartbeat, fast and nervous in a way I haven’t felt in months.
“Is that what you really want?” Aidan asks, his blue eyes searching mine with the kind of scrutiny that would make most people flinch. Not me. Not anymore.
I hold his gaze. “Yes. It’s time, don’t you think?”
“Past time,” Declan says, his voice rough with something that might be emotion if he’d let it out properly. “We didn’t think you were ready. We’ve been waiting for you to say it first.”
That surprises me more than it should. “You’ve been waiting? Why didn’t you ask?”
“Because you needed to be the one to decide,” Cormac says, stepping closer. “After everything with your father, with Séamus, with this whole fucking empire landing on your shoulders, we couldn’t push. You needed to come to it on your own.”
My throat tightens with love, of being understood by people who know exactly how fucked up I am and choose me anyway.
“Well, I’m here now,” I say. “So we’ll do it.”
We stand there for another moment, the four of us in this blood-stained warehouse, planning a future that most people would never understand.
It should feel wrong. It should feel like tempting fate.
Instead, it feels perfect.
“Come on,” I say finally, turning toward the exit. “Let’s go home. I need a shower.”
They follow me out into the night, leaving the bodies and the blood and the evidence of our violence for the cleaners to handle.
Above us, the sky is dark, the stars visible.
In the distance, sirens wail. The world keeps turning, oblivious or uncaring about the small dramas that play out in its shadows.
We pile into Aidan’s car, and as we pull away from the warehouse, I catch Declan’s eye. He winks at me, and I roll my eyes, but I’m smiling.
Two years ago, I was a girl with too much anger and not enough purpose, manipulated into claiming an inheritance I didn’t understand.
Now I’m a woman who knows exactly what she wants and exactly how to get it.
I run St. Augustine’s with an iron fist and Henrietta’s blade.
I’ve dismantled terrorist organisations and absorbed their assets.
I’ve survived assassination attempts, family betrayals, and my own father faking his death.
I’ve discovered a grandfather I never knew I had, and an aunt who is present and looks so much like my dad that it sometimes hurts to look at her. But I wouldn’t be without Maeve now.
And then, these three men have been here, protecting me, challenging me, loving me in ways I didn’t know I needed.
Arriving home, to the estate that Séamus gave us, we pile out of the car and head inside, tracking mud and probably blood across the expensive floors that we’ll have to clean later.
For now, I just want a hot shower, some food, and my men around me as we plan the next chapter of our ridiculous, violent, perfect life.
Tomorrow, we’ll deal with the aftermath of tonight’s raid. Tomorrow, we’ll start planning a wedding. Tomorrow, we’ll continue running an empire, raising hell and being exactly who we are.
But tonight, we’re just four people who found each other in the darkness and decided to make something beautiful out of it.
Tonight, that’s enough.