Chapter 2
Aidan
Declan has her halfway across the quad before I stop and scan the courtyard behind us.
He doesn’t speak. Doesn’t need to. I check her damage methodically: forearm bleeding through pressed sleeve, hairline bleeding from the headbutt, right hand tucked uselessly against her ribs.
Declan’s got his hand at her back, steering her home.
His eyes sweep the path, then the shadows.
Looking for threats. Good. That’s his job tonight. Mine comes next.
He glances back once.
I nod.
That’s the conversation. He walks her home. He cleans her up. He doesn’t let anything through the front door that isn’t one of us. Cormac and I do what comes next.
They vanish under the south archway.
I turn. Cormac is already beside me. He hasn’t said a word since we left the basement, which is how I know exactly what mood he’s in. Loud Cormac wants something off his chest. Quiet Cormac has made a decision and is waiting for me to catch up.
I spot the service door half-hidden behind the bins. “Side exit. She won’t walk out the front with her brother bleeding out.”
Cormac’s jaw tightens, his eyes fixed on the door like he’s already seeing her through it.
I catch his arm. “We don’t kill her tonight.”
“Just tonight?” His voice is quiet, almost conversational.
We move.
The side exit is the exit you use when you don’t want your picture taken. Roisin will know it, because Roisin knows every back door in this place.
I take the shadow against the stone. Cormac plants himself a pace off the path with his hands out of his pockets and his feet apart. He isn’t pretending to be anywhere other than where he is.
The door opens a moment later.
She comes out alone.
She sees us and stops.
Not startled. The pause of a woman who was expecting company and is confirming which particular company has arrived.
“Boys.”
“Roisin.”
Her gaze moves past me to Cormac, weighs him, returns.
“Is Dervla all right?”
“No.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“You’re not.”
She smiles. Small. Polite. No warmth in it. “I’m sorry she was cut. I wasn’t sorry she was challenged. There’s a difference.”
“Where is he?”
“Receiving medical attention.”
“Where?”
“Not for you to know.”
I let that sit.
Cormac doesn’t.
He covers the space between himself and her in two strides, gets a hand around her neck, and walks her the three steps it takes to put her back against the assembly hall wall. Her gaze is vicious.
Cormac’s forearm goes across her collarbone. Not her throat. Cormac knows the difference between a message and a murder.
“Where?” he asks.
“You don’t want to do this,” she says, to him, to me, to both of us.
“You put my girl in a ring with a man who brought a blade into it,” I say. “What part of tonight makes you think I don’t want to do this? Where is he, Roisin?”
“Gone. Off campus. You won’t find him. I’m not that stupid.” Her breath is short under Cormac’s forearm, but her voice isn’t.
Cormac’s forearm shifts up half an inch. Her chin lifts with it. She doesn’t fight him. She’s clever enough to know what fighting him looks like.
She smiles.
They come from the dark between the assembly hall and the chapel, from the service drive behind the Range Rover, from somewhere off to my right I didn’t clear.
Three men in dark suits, the kind whose bodies tell you what they do for a living before their hands have to.
They don’t draw anything. They don’t need to.
They stop where I can see all of them at once, spaced so that Cormac and I can’t cover any two without losing the third.
Professional work.
Roisin hasn’t moved under Cormac’s forearm, but the smile is back.
“Step back, Cormac.”
He doesn’t look at me. He looks at the three men. Weighs them the way he weighs everyone. I can feel him calculating how many of them he can put down before one of them gets a hand on him, and whether that maths ends with Roisin still breathing.
It doesn’t end the way he wants it to.
I know.
He knows.
He steps back. Slowly. Roisin adjusts her dress. She doesn’t look at her men. She doesn’t need to. They’re an extension of her, and they know it.
But that never fucking stopped us.
I move the same second he does. I go right, he goes left.
The first guy throws a right hook with enough force to shatter concrete.
I slip under it. He’s thrown that same punch at a hundred other men, and his muscle memory betrays him.
I take his wrist on the way past, twist, and drive my elbow up under his jaw.
Bone cracks. He staggers backwards, eyes glazing.
I drive my knee into the meaty part of his outer thigh, right where the nerve bundle sits, and watch his leg crumple beneath him like wet cardboard.
He goes down with a grunt that sounds like surprise more than pain.
Cormac takes a hit to the ribs and answers with his forehead straight into the bastard’s face. Cartilage gives. Blood spills. He catches the man by the lapels and slams him into the stone hard enough to rattle the service light above the door.
The third comes for me low and fast. No wasted movement. No warning. At least one of them knows what he’s doing. I like knowing when I’m dealing with competence.
He drives for my middle. I turn, take the impact on my side, and we crash into the bins with a metallic bang that tears through the courtyard. His hand goes inside his jacket.
I catch his wrist before he can pull whatever he’s carrying and smash it into the rim of the bin once, twice, three times. His fingers open. A knife clatters to the ground.
I hammer my fist into his throat. He chokes and stumbles back. I kick the knife away into the dark and go at him properly. Two strikes to the face. One to the liver. He folds enough for me to grab the back of his neck and drive him face-first into the wall.
Cormac is tackling the first guy who got up. It’s not surprising. These guys aren’t designed for staying down and are paid by Roisin to stay standing.
“Call them off,” I grunt.
She grins wickedly. “Not a fucking chance. Bye, boys. Have fun.” She ducks out, leaving before I can get a hand on her.
“Fuck,” I spit.
One of her men swings for my head. I get my forearm up in time, feel the jolt rattle through bone, then drive my fist straight into his mouth. Teeth cut my knuckles. He comes back with a knee aimed at my ribs. I turn enough to take the worst of it on my hip and slam him into the wall again.
To my left, Cormac has his bastard on the ground and is punching with terrifying focus.
No wasted rage. Just damage. The third one lunges in and grabs Cormac around the middle.
Big mistake. Cormac twists, catches him by the back of the neck, and throws him hard enough that he skids across the stone.
I duck another hit and finally get a clean opening. I take it. Heel of my hand to the nose. Elbow to the temple. Then I stamp on his knee. He goes down with a shout that tears across the courtyard.
“Cormac,” I growl.
He looks up once. That is enough. We are not catching Roisin now. We are not doing this with three more men arriving out of the dark because she has decided to make a point.
The one I dropped is trying to rise. I kick him flat again and grab the knife from where it landed near the bin and slash it across the air between us.
“Back the fuck up.”
It is enough to buy space, not obedience. They regroup instead of retreating. Would’ve been disappointed if they had.
Cormac is beside me, breathing hard, knuckles red. “More coming?”
“Maybe,” I say. “We go now.”
The man with the ruined mouth spits blood onto the ground and reaches inside his jacket again.
I don’t wait to see what he pulls.
I throw the knife.
The blade punches through fabric and into his chest with a wet thwump. He grunts and jerks back, staring down at the knife sticking out of his chest like he cannot believe anyone would actually do it.
“Move,” I snap.
Cormac doesn’t need telling twice. We break for the archway at a run.
“That fucking bitch. She knew.”
“Of course she did,” I grit out. “She knows we aren’t taking her shit.” I slow to a walk and pull out my phone as we cross the road to the house. I dial.
Lafferty answers on the second ring. “Aidan.”
“Get me everything you can on Eoin Brennan, brother to Roisin Brennan. I want his precise location, and if he even farts, I want to know. Last known location, half an hour ago, St. Augustine’s University.”
“I’ll call you back with preliminaries inside the hour,” Lafferty says.
“You’ve got thirty minutes.”
I end the call and shove the phone into my pocket.
Cormac wipes blood from his mouth with the back of his hand. “You threw a knife into a man.”
“He annoyed me.”
“Badass. Next time, I get to have fun.”
I glare at him, grinning at me. “You had fun. I don’t think I’ve seen you have that much fun in a while.”
“Oh, that was fucking epic,” he says and practically smashes the front door off its hinges as he opens it.
Dervla comes running, looking like a woman about to issue some serious pain, but pulls to a stop when she sees us. “Fucking hell. What happened to you two?”
“Roisin happened,” I say.
Declan moves in behind Dervla, towering over her, his expression not quite blank, but close. He is about to lay someone out, so my lecture on him not being with us to even the score earlier can wait. It’s a double-edged blade. Dervla needed him. We needed him. “You got to her.”
“For about twenty seconds.”
“Awesome,” Dervla mutters. “Eoin?”
“Gone,” I say. “Off campus before we could get our hands on him. I’ve got my man on his location.”
Dervla’s face goes very still at that. Not disappointed. Worse. Focused.
“Roisin had men waiting,” Cormac adds, shutting the door with enough force to make the frame complain. “Three of them. Covert. She probably has them all the time, and we can’t see the fuckers.”
Declan’s hand settles at Dervla’s waist for half a second, checking she is steady without making a production of it.
Her forearm is bandaged. Her hair is half brushed back from her face and half still wild from the ring.
She looks violent and exhausted and very fucking beautiful, which is inconvenient timing.
Cormac heads straight for the kitchen, probably in search of ice, whiskey, or both. I strip off my jacket and toss it over a chair. My knuckles are split. One sleeve is torn and sticky. Blood, mostly not mine.
Cormac reappears with a bag of ice and a bottle of Jameson. “Problem solved. Internal and external treatment.” He twists the cap and takes a mouthful before handing it to me.
I take it and swallow twice before moving to the kitchen sink and running water over my knuckles.
Dervla comes into the kitchen behind me. She places her hands on my waist and presses her forehead against my back. “What a night.”
“It did what it was supposed to,” I say, turning into her and crushing her against me.
“Yeah. What a fucking bitch she turned out to be.”
“She was always a bitch. Now she is just being more open about it.”
“She’s been watching me. She had eyes on me in Dublin. Sent her brother in to… well, that part remains to be seen.”
“Did he hurt you then?” I ask, ice-cold.
“He tried. He tried fucking hard. I was pissed. So was he. If he’d been sober, he might’ve done it.”
Something ugly and immediate tears through me.
For one second, all I can see is her in some Dublin doorway, drunk and alone, with Eoin Brennan deciding he gets to take what he wants because no one has ever properly stopped him before.
Then I picture him in the ring tonight, cutting her, smiling at her, and the two images lock together so neatly it makes my vision sharpen.
“No,” I say and face her head-on when she glares up at me. “He wouldn’t have. He was meant to scare you. I think he wasn’t as pissed as he made out. Roisin wouldn’t let him fuck up an opportunity like that if it was the end game.”
“She was testing you,” Declan says.
“Yeah.”
Dervla hisses and steps back. “I’m going to fucking kill her. Eoin isn’t even a blip on my radar. I mostly forgot all about him until he showed his face tonight. I cut him and walked away while he bitched like a little girl.”
“Good,” I say. “He’s still a dead man walking, but I get to save all my worst ideas for his sister.”
The kitchen goes quiet for half a second.
Not stunned. Just recalibrating.
“Sounds like a plan,” she says and steps back. “I’m going to bed. This day needs to fucking end.”
I nod and let her go. Cormac and Declan let her go. She needs this time to reset, to rewire her brain with this new information. I know I’m right about Eoin. She knows it, too, now that it’s been put out there. Now, she has to sharpen her claws and come out swinging.
Because that’s who she is and why I’ve fallen in deep when this should’ve stayed simple.