Chapter 7
Declan
Ipeel off from the others without a word, following in her footsteps.
The red brick road is quiet. The streetlights are sparse, and the gaps between them are wide enough to swallow a person whole.
I know this road. I know which house is hers.
A Georgian townhouse, three storeys with a glossy black door that belonged to Cillian Callaghan before it belonged to her.
I’ve walked past it four times since she arrived, learning the angles, the sightlines, the way the front garden wall creates a blind spot from the street. Information. It’s all information.
I wait on the doorstep. I count to sixty, slowly, letting her get settled. Letting her think she’s alone, so her guard comes down just enough that when I knock, the surprise will do half my work for me.
At sixty, I rap my knuckles against the black door. Not the doorbell at this time of night. A simple knock will do it.
Silence.
The door opens six inches, and the knife’s tip appears in the gap before her face does.
Her eyes find mine. Grey-green and flat with exhaustion but sharp with something that isn’t quite anger. Recognition, maybe. She’s been waiting for one of us to do this, and she’s almost relieved it’s happening so she can stop anticipating it.
“No,” she says.
I wrap my hand around the door’s edge and push. Not hard. Steady. The kind of pressure that doesn’t spike adrenaline because it doesn’t need to. She can fight me, or she can step back. Those are her options, and I give her exactly enough time to choose.
She steps back.
I walk in and close the door behind me, turning the lock. The click is loud in the hallway. She’s two metres away, blade up, her left hand wrapped around the hilt so tight her knuckles are bone-white. Her right hand hangs useless at her side.
“Get out of my house.”
I don’t move. I look at her. Her torn top clings to her body, where the gauntlet had soaked her through.
Dark strands of hair stick to her neck in wet ribbons.
Raw, bleeding scrapes mark her palms like battle wounds.
Her jaw is set so hard the muscle twitches visibly beneath her skin.
She is wrecked. She is furious. She is the most compelling thing I have ever seen.
“You need your hand strapped,” I say.
“I need you to leave.”
“After.”
“After what?”
“After I strap your hand.”
Her eyes narrow. The blade doesn’t move. “I can do it myself.”
“You’ll wrap it wrong with your left hand, the swelling will set, and you’ll lose fifteen per cent mobility in that thumb permanently. You’re right-handed. You can’t afford that.”
I watch the calculation happen. She hates that I’m right. She hates that I’m here. She hates that her body is betraying her by shaking, a fine tremor running through her frame she can’t control, as the adrenaline crashes and her muscles are shot.
“If you touch me anywhere that isn’t my hand, I’ll put this through your neck,” she says, and I believe her.
“Understood.”
“Kitchen,” she says, and turns her back on me.
It’s a show of contempt, not trust. She’s telling me she doesn’t consider me a threat worth watching. The insult is deliberate, and I let it land because right now, I need her compliant more than I need her respect. Respect comes later. It always does.
The kitchen is at the back of the ground floor. It’s large with a window over the sink that looks out onto an overgrown garden. She turns on the light, and the under-cupboard lights flick on. She drops her knife on the counter and leans against it, cradling her right hand.
“First aid kit?” I ask.
“Under the sink.”
I crouch and find it. Basic but adequate.
Bandage, medical tape, antiseptic wipes, and ibuprofen.
I pull what I need and set it on the counter beside her blade, close enough that she can reach the knife if she wants to.
I want her to know she has access. It will make her calmer, and calm is what I need.
“Give me your hand.”
She hesitates. Just a fraction. Then she holds it out, and I take it.
Her fingers are cold and trembling. The thumb is badly swollen. The joint is hot to the touch where Aidan reset it. He did a decent job, but he didn’t stabilise it, and she’s been gripping things with it since because she doesn’t know how to stop fighting even when fighting is making it worse.
I clean the scrapes on her palm first. She hisses through her teeth but doesn’t pull away.
“You went left in the gauntlet,” I say while I work. Not a question.
She goes still. “How do you know that?”
“The right tunnel is about three seconds shorter.”
“You went right?”
“Right.”
“So I’m the idiot who went left.”
“You’re the one who made it out seven seconds inside the limit going the long way.
” I start wrapping the tape around her thumb, anchoring it to her wrist to limit movement.
Firm. Not tight. Enough support that the joint can heal without her being able to use it as an excuse to keep punishing herself.
She’s quiet while I finish the wrap. I can feel her pulse through her wrist, fast and hard, and I know it’s not just the pain.
She’s aware of me. Aware of the proximity of my hands on her skin, of the fact that we’re alone in her house, the door is locked, and neither of us is pretending this is normal.
I secure the last strip of tape and hold her hand for a beat longer than necessary. Not to make a point, but because I don’t want to let go, and for once, I don’t rationalise the impulse. I just feel it.
Then I release her and step back.
She pulls her hand to her chest and looks at the wrap. It’s clean. Professional. The kind of job that comes from practice, and she knows it.
Her gaze lifts to mine, and something passes between us. Not warmth. A recognition. Two people raised by men who taught them how to survive before they taught them how to live, and the quiet understanding that comes with that.
I could leave now. I should leave now. The hand is done.
The excuse is spent. But she’s standing there in her torn clothes with her wrecked hand clutched to her chest and her blade on the counter, looking pale and bruised, and I don’t want to leave her like this.
Not because she’s fragile. She isn’t. She’s held herself together through the gauntlet, the interrogation, the cuffs, the boathouse, all of it, and she hasn’t cracked once, and the effort of that is written across her body in a language I can read because I speak it fluently.
She needs to stop holding.
“You’re shaking,” I say.
“I’m cold.”
“You’re crashing. The adrenaline is wearing off, and your body doesn’t know what to do without it.”
“I know what adrenaline crash feels like, thanks.”
“Then you know you need heat, sugar, and sleep. In that order.”
“What are you, a field medic?”
“Something like that.” I move to the kettle and fill it.
She watches me with an expression that’s halfway between outrage and bewilderment, like she can’t decide whether to stab me or let me make her tea.
I turn back to her while the kettle heats.
“Sit down before your legs give out. You’ve got about ninety seconds before the shaking gets worse. ”
“Stop telling me what to do.”
“Stop pretending you’re fine.”
Her jaw locks. Her eyes burn. For a second, I think she’s going to pick up her blade and make good on her promise.
Instead, she pulls out a chair from the small table by the wall and sits, heavily, like her strings have been cut.
The tremor in her hands is visible now, and she shoves them between her thighs to hide it.
I make the tea. Strong. Two sugars, even though she’ll probably hate it. I set it in front of her and lean against the counter across from her, giving her the full width of the kitchen between us.
She wraps her left hand around the mug and stares into it. The silence stretches, and I let it. Silence is my territory. I’ve lived in it my whole life, and I know the difference between the kind that suffocates and the kind that holds. This one holds.
She drinks. Her shoulders drop a fraction. The shaking eases.
“They asked me if I killed him,” she says, and her voice is raw in a way it hasn’t been all night. Not angry. Scraped clean. “My own father. They stood there in their robes and asked me if I murdered him.”
I don’t respond. She doesn’t need me to.
“I found him in the dining room. At the table.” She takes another sip. Her eyes are fixed on the dark window. “The Redbreast was still on the table. He’d poured a glass and hadn’t touched it. I remember thinking that was wrong, because Dad never wasted good whiskey.”
Her voice cracks on the last word. Barely. A hairline fracture that seals itself almost instantly.
I cross the kitchen, take the mug from her hand, set it on the table, and stand in front of her. She looks up at me.
“Don’t,” she whispers. “Don’t you dare be kind to me right now. I can’t take it.”
I reach forward and take her face in my hands.
My fingers curve around her jaw with a firmness that steadies us both.
Her skin fits against my palms as though the contours of her face were shaped precisely for my touch.
Her skin is cold. Her pulse hammers against my fingertips. She doesn’t pull away.
“I’m not being kind,” I tell her. “I don’t do kind.”
“Then what is this?”
“This is me telling you that you survived tonight. All of it. The gauntlet, the Board, the cuffs, the lot. And you did it alone, because that’s the only way you know how. But you’re not alone in this house right now, and you don’t have to hold it together for the next five minutes.”
Her breath hitches. A single, sharp intake that she tries to swallow and can’t. Her hands come up and grip my wrists, and I don’t know if she’s trying to pull me away or hold me there. It doesn’t matter. I’m not moving.
“Five minutes,” she says, and it sounds like a negotiation.
“Five minutes.”
Something gives. Not a collapse, but a surrender.
Her eyes close as my hand slides down her neck, over her collarbone, lower.
Her grip on my wrists loosens, then tightens again as I find the hem of her shirt.
She doesn’t make a sound when my fingers trace the warm skin beneath, but her breath catches in a way that pulls at something primal.
She stands and I press her back against the counter, my body crowding hers.
Her hips rise slightly when I slip past the waistband of her leggings, finding heat and a slick welcome.
This isn’t breaking. This is a woman letting go of control she’s maintained for eight weeks, just for a moment, just long enough to feel something besides grief, before she has to become untouchable again.
Her fingers curl into the front of my shirt, pulling me closer instead of pushing me away.
I take that as permission and press deeper, finding the rhythm that makes her breath stutter.
She’s wet. Hot. Her body is answering a question her mouth would never ask, and I hold her gaze when her eyes snap open, wild with something that scares her more than the gauntlet did.
“Don’t stop,” she breathes, and it’s not a request. It’s a command from a woman who doesn’t beg, and I have no intention of disobeying.
I twist my fingers, and her head drops back, exposing the line of her throat.
The sound she makes is quiet, bitten off, swallowed before it can fully form.
She’s fighting it even now, even with my hand between her legs and her body arching into mine.
She can’t let go completely. She doesn’t know how.
But I can feel her getting close, the way her thighs tighten, the way her breathing fractures into short, desperate pulls of air.
I curl my fingers and press the heel of my palm against her clit, and she shatters.
It’s not graceful. It’s not quiet. A sound tears out of her that she’ll deny tomorrow, raw and broken and beautiful, and her whole body locks against mine, her fist twisted in my shirt so hard I hear a stitch pop.
I feel every pulse of it against my fingers, every involuntary clench, and I hold her through it with my free hand braced against the counter behind her, caging her in without crushing her.
She comes down in stages. The tension bleeds from her thighs, her grip on my shirt loosens, her breathing evens out, rough and unsteady but no longer ragged. Her forehead drops against my chest, and I feel the heat of her breath through the fabric.
I don’t move. I don’t speak. I keep my hand where it is until she shifts her hips away, a silent instruction that I follow immediately. I withdraw carefully, and her body shudders once at the loss of contact before going still.
She opens her eyes and blinks twice as I lick my fingers clean.
“That didn’t happen,” she says.
“Agreed.”
“If you tell Aidan or Cormac, I will gut you.”
“Noted.”
She picks up her tea. Another sip. The colour is coming back to her skin, and the tremor has stopped. She looks up at me over the rim, and the vulnerability is gone, sealed away behind those storm-grey eyes like it was never there.
“You should go,” she says.
“I know.”
I don’t move. Not yet. I reach out and tuck a loose strand of hair behind her ear, a gesture so quiet and so deliberate that she freezes.
My fingers graze the line of her jaw, and her breath catches again, but this time it’s not grief.
It’s the other thing. The thing that’s been running underneath all of it, a low current that neither of us has acknowledged out loud.
Her lips part. Her eyes drop to my mouth for half a second before they snap back up, and the fury returns, but it’s different now. Hotter. Complicated.
“Don’t,” she says.
I pull my hand back. “I wasn’t going to.”
“Liar.”
She’s right. I want to kiss her so badly my jaw aches from clenching against it. But not tonight. Somehow, it would diminish what we did. When I kiss her, it will be because she wants it.
“Lock the door behind me,” I say, and walk out of the kitchen, through the hallway, and out through the door into the cold.
I stand on the driveway and wait until I hear the lock turn. Then the deadbolt. Then silence.
I can’t wait to dismantle her. Not to break her, but to see her surrender to me completely.