Chapter 7 Aran
Aran
Internally, I sigh, wondering if I’d have an easy time with the nail gun woman. I lean down and say slowly, “Get out of the trunk and into the passenger seat, Aoife.”
She blinks once, hot tears ready to spill. “Oh,” she says and sits up again.
I offer my hand to help her out. She stares at it like it might bite her.
Then she slaps her palm into mine like she’s doing me a favor, not the other way around.
I close my hand around hers and pull her up. Her fingers are cold. Her knuckles are split open and red. Her hair is half fallen out of whatever it was pinned up in.
I let go.
“Passenger side,” I tell her.
She looks past me at the road. At the hedge. At the field. Working out bad options.
“Don’t,” I say.
“I wasn’t.”
“That look says otherwise.”
“That look says I’m considering murdering you with your own car door.”
I snort once. “Bigger people than you have tried.”
She considers that and moves her ass around the car.
I beat her to it and open the door for her.
She glares at me, feisty as fuck despite the current of fear running underneath.
This is a woman with a smart mouth and street smarts, but she has no fucking idea what she has stepped into. What I inadvertently dragged her into.
I keep my eyes on her as I move around to the driver’s side and climb in. I lock the doors and secure the locking mechanism. She scowls out of the windshield, hands folded in her lap. I lean over her and open the glove box. She freezes as my hand brushes her knee.
“First aid kit,” I say, grabbing it and slamming the glove box shut. I open the first aid kit and place it on the center console. I tear open an antiseptic wipe with my teeth and reach for her hand. She lets me take it, all the fight drained out of her now.
Thank fuck. I need to think and doing that with a smart mouth bitching at you the entire time is impossible.
I take her other hand and do the same. The knuckles are worse on this one.
She split them deep. She doesn’t wince, doesn’t pull away.
Just sits there staring straight ahead with her jaw locked tight while I clean the cuts.
I press the antiseptic into a deeper cut, and she hisses through her teeth.
I tear open two butterfly strips and close the worst of it. It’s not great work, but it’ll hold. I let go of her hand and close the kit.
She immediately tucks both hands under her thighs and turns her head to look out of the passenger window.
I start the car.
“Take me home,” she whispers. “Please.”
The ‘please’ punches me in the gut. “I can’t,” I say, pulling off the grass verge. “What you walked into is… dangerous.”
“Walked into?” she mutters. “You dragged me into it.”
“No. Well, yes. But you were already there. You saw what you shouldn’t have heard or seen.”
“A punch-up and a man running down a corridor? That’s dangerous?”
“Not just those things. Me, as well.”
She goes quiet. The road stretches ahead, narrow and winding, hedgerows pressing in on both sides. I check the mirrors every few seconds. Nobody following. Not yet.
Connor’s last words still ring in my ears. Wrong woman. Find out what she knows. Keep her contained. Contained. Like she’s a fucking chemical spill.
I glance sideways. She’s small in the passenger seat.
Smaller than she seemed when she was screaming at me from the trunk.
The uniform hangs loose on her frame, and her ponytail has given up entirely, blonde hair falling in messy strands around her face.
Her jaw is still clenched, but the tremor in her hands has moved to her knees.
She’s pressing her thighs together to hide it.
She’s terrified. She’s just too stubborn to show it.
“Where are you taking me?” she asks without looking at me.
“Somewhere safe.”
“Safe for who?”
“You.”
“The only place I’ll be safe is my home.”
“The only place you’ll be safe is my home.”
“Yours?” She shakes her head. “You have got to be joking.”
“Not joking.”
“So your solution to kidnapping me is to take me to your house. Like that’s somehow better.”
“It is better. My house has walls, locks, and me,” I give her a vicious smirk that lights up the fire in her eyes again.
She drops her gaze to my hard chest before she catches herself, and it shoots back up again.
“Your home has—what? A chain on the door and a can of deodorant you could use as mace?”
“I use roll on,” she mutters.
“You could always throw it at armed intruders.”
“Fuck. You,” she grits out.
She stares at me with those green eyes, and I can see the calculations happening behind them.
Fight, flight, freeze—she’s cycling through all three and landing on none.
Her breathing has evened out, though. That’s something.
The survival part of her brain is taking over from the panic, and the survival part is telling her that screaming in a locked, armored car on a country road isn’t going to achieve much.
“What’s your name?” she asks. “If you want me to trust you, at least give me that.”
I consider not telling her. Anonymity is safer for both of us. But she’s not going to trust me either way, and a name costs nothing when she’s already seen my face.
“Aran,” I say. “Aran O’Neill.”
She knows the name. Everyone in Dublin knows the name, or at least the surname. The rumors. The warnings. The reason certain streets stay quiet after dark.
“O’Neill,” she repeats. Flat. Like she’s testing the weight of it on her tongue.
“That’s what I said.”
“As in Dublin royalty.”
“If you like.”
“Like? I don’t like. I don’t like any of this.
” She turns back to the window. Her reflection stares back at her in the glass, pale and wide-eyed.
I can see her throat working, swallowing something down.
Fear, probably. Or the urge to open the door and throw herself into a hedge at sixty kilometers an hour.
“I’m a hotel cleaner,” she says quietly. “I clean rooms. I scrub disgusting toilets and pick up after inconsiderate guests. I don’t deserve this.”
“No,” I agree. “You don’t.”
That catches her off guard. I can tell because her head turns back toward me, just slightly, like she wasn’t expecting honesty. Most people aren’t. They expect threats, deflection, bullshit wrapped in a bow. I don’t have time for any of that.
“So let me go.”
“I will. When I know it’s safe.”
“When you know. Not when I know. Not when I decide. When you do.”
“Yes.”
“That’s insane.”
“That’s reality. You are a nobody, remember?”
Her soft gasp tells me that it landed exactly where I needed it to. It’s harsh. It’s true.
She opens her mouth and then closes it. Her fingers come out from under her thighs, and she wraps her arms around herself instead, gripping her own elbows.
I take the turn for the N7 and merge with the flow of traffic heading back toward the city.
We’ve been driving for thirty minutes, and nobody has appeared in the mirrors.
That’s either good luck or good planning by whoever decided not to follow us.
I’m betting on the latter, which means they already know who I am and have decided pursuing isn’t worth the cost.
The city starts to form around us. Suburbs first, then the tighter streets, the terraces, the traffic lights that take forever.
Dublin crawls past the windows like it always does, oblivious to the fact that I have a woman in my passenger seat who should be scrubbing a toilet right now instead of white-knuckling her own elbows in my car.
I take the back streets through Inchicore, cut through the canal, and come into Ranelagh from the south side.
The lane entrance to my house is clear. I hit the remote for the garage door.
It rolls up. I pull in, and it rolls down behind us, sealing us in.
The garage is dark except for the strip light that flickers on automatically.
I kill the engine. The silence lands heavily.
She doesn’t move. Doesn’t reach for the door handle. Just sits there with her arms wrapped around herself, staring at the garage wall like it holds the answers to every question she’s too afraid to ask.
“Inside,” I say.
“No.”
“No? Do we need another demonstration of how easily I could make you?”
Her jaw clenches tight. “I want to know what is going on. I want to know your intentions with me. Am I safe, or are you going to kill me in my sleep? What did I see? Who were those other men? Who was the man who ran?”
“I can’t answer any of those, except I’m not going to kill you in your sleep. You are safe here.”
“I’m not going anywhere until you answer my questions,” she says again. “If I am in danger, I deserve to know why and from who.”
Well, I can’t argue with the logic.
“It will put you in even more danger.”
“How?” she asks. “How? Why did you grab me?”
I look at her. She looks at me. The garage light buzzes overhead, casting everything in that flat, industrial white that makes shadows disappear.
She’s got a point, and she knows it. The stubborn tilt of her chin tells me she’s not moving until I give her something.
The thing is, she’s right. If someone comes looking for her—and they might, because she was standing in that corridor with her face on full display—she needs to know enough to stay alive.
“The men in the hotel were there for an exchange,” I say. “A… prisoner swap. I was delivering one person in return for another. It went sideways. Multiple parties showed up who weren’t supposed to be there. The man you saw running was the prisoner I was delivering. He’s gone.”
She processes this. I can see it moving behind her eyes, clicking into place like tumblers in a lock.
“And the person you were supposed to collect?”
“Wasn’t there. Or was moved before I arrived. I don’t know yet.”
“So you grabbed me instead.”
“You matched the description.”
“I matched the—” She stops. Blinks. Her eyes closing for longer than necessary. “I did see her.”
That grabs my attention in under a second. “What?” I snap. “You said you didn’t see anyone.”
She flinches from my tone, and I try to pull back. Scaring her won’t make her talk. It will make her shut down.
“I wasn’t thinking clearly,” she defends herself. “But I did see a woman on the fourth floor with blonde hair. She was dressed in black jeans and a black leather jacket.”
“What was she doing?”
“Walking,” she replies.
“Walking.” I pinch the bridge of my nose. “Where to?”
“The elevator. I think. I saw her and looked away.”
“Did she look like she was in a hurry?”
She pauses, her face dropping into a concentrated expression. “I don’t know. She was walking toward the elevator. She wasn’t running, like that man was.”
I nod slowly. “That’s helpful, Aoife. Thank you. But you know more than you thought you did, and that makes it even more imperative that you don’t go back to your house or your job. Not just yet.”
“Flat,” she murmurs. “Fuck. Who was she? Who was the man? Who are you? Why are you exchanging prisoners in my hotel? Why do you even have prisoners?” Hysteria has set in, and her voice has gone up several octaves.
I regret, for one instant, telling her all of this, but telling her gave me something she didn’t give before.
The woman either escaped and was trying to play it cool, or she was let go.
I get out of the car and walk around to her side. “Inside,” I say. “We can’t sit out here all fucking day.”