Crave (Kings of St. Augustine’s #2)

Chapter 1

Dervla

The bell rings, and the whole basement drops out from under me.

Eoin fucking Brennan.

I didn’t make the connection before. Now I do.

Standing across the ring with his hands loose at his sides and that same charming tilt to his mouth he wore the night he followed me out of a bar in Temple Bar with two whiskies too many in him and an assumption about how the rest of his evening was going to go.

He is bigger than I remember. Taller. Broader.

The kind of man who fills a room on purpose because he’s always been allowed to.

My eyes snap to Roisin at the edge of the makeshift ring.

She’s watching me the way you watch a bet you’ve already placed, and I see the whole thing arrange itself in my head in one ugly click.

Criminal Law. The seat three rows ahead.

The coffee in the courtyard. The come find me after your initiation.

The endorsement. The friendship. Every conversation she’s had with me since I walked onto this campus, and I never once put the surname together with the handsy prick in the Dublin doorway, because why would I?

Brennan is a name on half the doors in the country.

I filed her as Roisin. I filed him as a bad memory.

I never once looked at them in the same room.

I do now.

Eoin rolls his neck. Makes a show of it. The crowd around him is loving it, the posh man with the easy smile, stepping in to teach the new Apex her manners. A few wolf whistles carry above the noise.

He meets my eyes across the ring.

“Evening, sweetheart.”

Aidan growls behind me. I don’t look back.

I don’t answer Eoin. My right hand throbs as I flex my fist, but I’m done being a pussy about it. I flex my left, slowly, feeling every knuckle settle.

He moves first.

He comes in lazy and cocky. He thinks I’ve got nothing without my blade.

His swing is wide and obvious. I see it coming the moment his shoulder turns.

I duck under his arm and drive my left fist into his side, hard, right into the soft spot under his ribs.

He grunts. Not from pain exactly. From surprise.

That’s the thing about Eoin. Last time he saw me, I was a drunk girl in a doorway with a blade pulled with the intent to use it to get him to back off. He walked away with an injury he probably lied about.

He swings again, harder. I twist sideways, and his fist clips my shoulder instead of my jaw. Pain forks down to my elbow. I pivot, come back inside his reach, and hit him again in the same spot under the ribs.

He grabs at me. I don’t panic. I don’t freeze. The basement sharpens into perfect clarity as my body remembers exactly what to do. That doorway in Dublin taught me everything I needed to know about Eoin Brennan. He fights dirty and thinks he can get his own way with or without consent.

I slam my forehead into his face with a sickening crack that sends stars bursting behind my eyes.

He staggers back, blood streaming from his nose, that charming smile finally wiped clean away.

I press forward without hesitation, driving my left fist into his mouth while he’s still reeling.

When he manages to block my next punch, I pivot smoothly and catch him in the throat with the edge of my hand.

As he coughs and his hands fly up instinctively, I seize the opening to deliver two rapid strikes to his ribs, feeling the satisfying give of flesh beneath my knuckles while he struggles for breath.

He gets an arm around my neck and drags me into him, his breath hot on my ear as my pulse drops and the basement recedes into the distance.

Without hesitation, I drive my elbow into his sternum, feeling his grip loosen before I step not away but deeper into his space.

My left fist connects under his jaw with a satisfying crack that snaps his head upward, and before he can regain his composure, I deliver a precise kick to the inside of his thigh.

Though he doesn’t completely collapse, his balance wavers perceptibly, a fact we both immediately recognise.

Around us, the crowd’s roar transforms into something thicker, more primal than mere spectator noise, while through the chaos I sense three particular gazes fixed on me, knowing instinctively that Cormac is following me around the ring.

When Eoin lunges forward with desperate clumsiness, I sidestep and drive my elbow into his kidney as he stumbles past.

Then, the dirt shows.

He bends and pulls a blade out of his boot.

I see it a beat too late. A switchblade.

The crowd roars, but it isn’t excitement this time, it’s outrage. Someone shouts that it’s against the rules. Roisin says nothing. She isn’t moving to stop it.

He swings.

I throw myself back and feel the edge of it sing past my collarbone close enough to part the air against my skin. The second swing follows before I’ve finished retreating. This one catches the sleeve of my top, opens the fabric cleanly and drags a thin hot line down my forearm.

The blood is bright when it hits the concrete.

I step back further. Eoin has a knife and a sudden return of confidence. He knows it, the smile is back, blood-smeared, ugly, coming at me again.

I sense rather than see Declan to my right. I hold my hand out with a savage smile, my gaze never leaving Eoin’s.

“Two can play at that game,” I say as Henrietta hits my palm and I grip it, ignoring the white-hot agony that lances through my hand.

The fight, the crowd, changes in a breath.

Eoin sees the blade in my hand, and the side of his mouth quirks up. “I was hoping to see that again.”

“Yeah? Well, take a good fucking look before I bury it in your throat,” I spit out.

He circles, knife low, testing me.

I do the same. Henrietta is warm and familiar in my grip, blood running down my forearm and making the handle slick. The sting in my right hand is bad enough to make me want to scream, but pain is just information. My arm works. Good enough.

Roisin stays where she is, face cool, eyes bright, letting this play out because that was always the point. Humiliate me. Bleed me. See if I break.

Fuck her.

Eoin comes in fast this time, all pretence gone. He slashes for my middle. I twist away and feel the air move against my stomach. I bring Henrietta up and catch his wrist hard enough to change the angle of his next strike. Metal scrapes metal. He grins like this is foreplay.

I slash across his forearm.

He hisses and jerks back. Not deep, but enough. Blood starts at once.

I lunge before he can settle. He barely gets out of the way.

My blade catches his shirt and opens it at the side.

He tries to jam his knife into me at close range, ugly and direct.

I trap his wrist with my left hand, pain flaring through my cut forearm as his blade bucks against mine. He is stronger. I am angrier.

I knee him straight in the balls.

The reaction is instant and deeply satisfying. His face folds. His wrist jerks. I rip free, twist Henrietta in my grip, and slash across the back of his hand.

“Bitch,” he hisses. The knife drops and skids across the concrete.

The room explodes, baying for blood. Roisin still says nothing, which tells me everything I need to know about what she wanted from this.

Eoin staggers, one hand cupped between his legs, the other pouring blood.

He came at me with a knife in a ring he entered under false rules. He followed me in Dublin. He put his hands on me then. He cut me now. I am finished being the reasonable one.

I drive forward and slam him with my full weight. We go down hard. My knee lands on his stomach. Air leaves him in a harsh grunt. I get Henrietta to his throat before he can buck me off.

He freezes under me, chest heaving, bleeding.

The basement goes quiet.

Not silent. The strip lights buzz. Someone near the back draws a sharp breath. Somewhere to my right, Cormac is growling like a man about to rip Eoin to shreds with his bare hands.

I don’t look for him. I look for Roisin.

She’s standing with her hands at her sides. The cool amusement is gone. What’s left is a woman watching her brother bleed onto the concrete with a blade at his throat, and even Roisin Brennan can’t keep her face entirely still for that.

“Call it,” I say.

She doesn’t.

I draw Henrietta a fraction tighter. A thin bead of red appears under her edge, rolls, falls.

Eoin grunts. A small, broken, very un-charming sound.

“Call it,” I say again.

Her jaw moves. Something works behind her eyes. I watch her weigh it, watch her calculate how much her brother is worth against how much face she’ll lose, watch the exact second she decides.

“Apex wins.” Her voice is a croak, more from anger than shock that I nearly killed her fucking brother.

The basement erupts in cheers and catcalls.

I hold Eoin for one more second. Just long enough to make sure he feels me decide not to. Then I push off him and stand.

I step back.

My chest is heaving. Blood is running down my forearm where his blade opened it. My hair has come loose from the elastic and is stuck to my cheek. Henrietta is warm and wet in my hand, and she feels like the only part of my body that’s working properly.

I look at Roisin.

“Your brother,” I say, and my voice comes out scraped and even, “should have stayed in Dublin.”

Her face doesn’t move.

I walk to my guys.

Declan reaches for me. He doesn’t speak. His eyes sweep me once, and his jaw goes tight. Cormac is a wall on my other side. He hasn’t spoken. He isn’t going to, not in here.

Aidan is already moving ahead of us, parting the crowd like fucking Moses and the Red Sea.

The staircase is narrow, and I take it too fast. The main hall hits me like a different country. Music, light, glassware. Chips clicking. A woman laughing at something on the other side of the roulette wheel. A few heads turn. More follow. The blood does the talking.

We push through the doors and out into the night.

Cold air. Stone. Sky.

I stop.

Not long. Just a breath. Just enough.

My hands shake.

“You know him?” Cormac asks.

“Eoin Brennan. Penchant for rape.”

“That fuck—”

“Her brother.” Aidan’s voice is ice-cold when he interrupts Cormac.

I don’t wait for anything else. I start walking.

They fall in around me, surrounding me, and we cross the quad in the kind of silence that isn’t empty.

Somewhere behind us, the basement is still processing what it just saw.

Tomorrow morning, the story of Casino Night will be on every phone and in every coffee queue on this campus, and it will not be the story Roisin wanted.

The queen doesn’t need the kings to fight her wars. And tonight proved that.