Chapter 8 Aoife
Aoife
The woman.
I looked up from my caddy, saw her and went back to work. And all of this, me being taken, was because of her.
I sit in the passenger seat of an armored car in a stranger’s garage in Ranelagh, and I think about the fact that my entire life just detonated because I share a hair color with someone dangerous enough to warrant a prisoner exchange.
The universe has a sick sense of humor.
Aran stands there, holding the door open, waiting. The garage is clean. Concrete floor, no oil stains, no clutter. A shelf along the back wall with nothing on it. Even his garage looks like it belongs to a man who doesn’t keep anything he doesn’t need.
I get out because my options are: get out, or sit here until I need the toilet. My legs are unsteady. The adrenaline crash is hitting now, that hollow, wrung-out feeling where your body has burned through everything it had and left you running on fumes and spite.
He leads me through a door into a kitchen.
“Tea or whiskey?” he asks.
“What do you think?” I mutter and sit at the kitchen table, looking out of the window at a barren garden.
He grabs the bottle of Bushmills, and I reconsider for half a second before I decide it doesn’t really fucking matter.
Getting shitfaced might help the situation.
He sets a glass down and pours out a shot that looks suspiciously like a double, and slides it across the table.
Then he pours one for himself and stays standing, facing the window, watching me.
I pick up the glass and drink half of it in one go. The whiskey burns a line down my throat and hits my empty stomach like a match on petrol. I haven’t eaten since the cheese and crackers last night. The stolen ten euro note is still in my pocket, unspent on the sandwich it was supposed to buy me.
The kitchen is like the garage. Clean. Sparse.
Everything in its place and nothing extra.
The counters are bare except for a bread bin, kettle and a single mug on a drying rack with its handle pointing left.
No magnets on the fridge. No post-it notes.
No fruit bowl. No evidence that a human being lives here except for the whiskey bottle and the man drinking from it.
I take another sip. Slower this time.
“Got any food?” I ask. He looks like a man who has food in his cupboards and fridge.
“Got any preferences?”
I shake my head. He opens the fridge, pulls out eggs and butter, and grabs the bread from the neat wooden box on the counter.
No hesitation. No rummaging. He knows exactly where everything is because, of course, he does.
This is a man who keeps his mug handle pointing left and his garage floor spotless.
Chaos isn’t in his vocabulary. Control is.
I watch him crack four eggs into a pan one-handed.
The butter sizzles. He drops two slices of bread into a toaster that looks like it’s never seen a crumb.
His movements are efficient, almost mechanical, and I find myself studying the width of his back as he works.
The t-shirt stretches across muscles that have nothing to do with a gym membership and everything to do with whatever the hell his actual job description is.
Kidnapper. Prisoner transporter. Professional terrifier of hotel staff.
The eggs hit a plate. Toast lands beside them. He sets it in front of me with a fork and nothing else. No garnish. No seasoning. No conversation.
“Got any sauce?”
He smirks. “Brown?”
“Obviously.”
He reaches into a cupboard for it and slaps it down.
I grab it, squeeze, then devour. I eat like I haven’t seen food in a week, which isn’t far off the truth if you count cheese and crackers as a cry for help rather than a meal. The eggs are perfect. Soft in the middle, edges just crispy.
He watches me vacuum up the food but doesn’t comment on it. “More?” he asks when I’m done.
I shake my head and glare at him. He isn’t my friend. He is a man who took the wrong woman, and here I sit eating his food and drinking his whiskey. “Who is she?”
He shrugs. “Above my pay grade.”
“Who has the guy in the corridor?”
“Do you want the truth or a sanitized version?”
“Truth.”
He hesitates for a split second. “A terrorist.”
I choke on my saliva, coughing furiously as the word hits me in my guts. It’s a word that has serious connotations in this country, and every one of them is delicate and dodged around.
“You wanted to know,” he says with that smirk I want to slap off his face.
“You could’ve lied.”
“How would that make you trust me?”
“Why is that important to you?”
He pauses, eyes narrowed. “Because if you don’t trust me, you’ll do something stupid. And if you do something stupid, I can’t protect you.”
“Protect me from what? From you?”
“From everyone who isn’t me.” He picks up my empty plate, washes it, and places it on the rack.
The fork goes in a separate slot. Everything aligned.
Everything precise. I’m starting to think that if I moved his mug handle to the right, he’d have a full-blown existential crisis.
Suddenly, it’s all I want to do. I rise and move over to the sink.
He stares down at me from his giant height, stepping back to make room for me.
“Who were the men who wanted the terrorist?” I ask casually, reaching out to move the handle one-eighty degrees.
His eyes track my hand. I watch his jaw tighten as the mug handle settles into its new position. He stares at it. Then at me. Then back at it.
He reaches past me and turns it back to the left without a word.
I almost laugh. Almost. The impulse dies somewhere between my throat and the reality of my situation, which is that I’m standing in a kidnapper’s kitchen, testing his boundaries over crockery placement.
“The men at the hotel,” he says, ignoring what just happened. “I don’t know all of them. Some were there for the exchange. Some crashed it. That’s what I need to find out.”
“And while you’re finding out, I just sit here?”
“Yes.”
“For how long?”
“As long as it takes.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the only one I’ve got.”
I step away from the sink and fold my arms. The whiskey is warm in my stomach, and the eggs have taken the edge off the shaking, but my brain is catching up now.
“What does the head of your family want to do about me?” I ask, chin raised.
I don’t really know what I’m asking. I don’t know if I’ve got the wrong end of the stick or if I’ve gripped it just tightly enough to make an inroad.
Either way, Aran stares down at me, debating what to say.
“Connor, my uncle, is not happy,” he says eventually.
“Not happy translates to?” I ask slowly because I’m not stupid, but right now I kind of wish I was.
The left side of his mouth turns up slightly. “It translates to not happy the exchange went as far sideways as it possibly could. Your testimony that the woman I was meant to pick up left the building will keep you alive.”
“That wasn’t a guarantee?” I croak.
He ignores that. “Whatever else you can tell me is in your best interest. Did she leave before or after the man ran down the corridor?”
Man. We’re still calling him that, are we?
“Before. Seconds, maybe. I pushed my cart out of the room, looked up, saw her, looked down to close the door and then the commotion started.” Some deep, innate survival instinct has kicked in and is strongly suggesting that I cooperate with this giant O’Neill.
All the way. I chew the inside of my lip and look away. “I saw his face.”
“Why did you lie?”
“I thought it would save me.”
“From what?”
“Everything.”
“Not how it works.”
“Clearly.” I reach out and move the handle of the mug again, more forcefully this time. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s a test. Maybe it’s a challenge. Maybe I just need to feel like I have one shred of control in a situation where I have none.
His hand comes down over mine before I can pull away. Not rough. Not gentle either. Just there. His palm is warm and dry, covering my entire hand. I feel the calluses on his fingers, the controlled strength in his grip. He doesn’t squeeze. He holds.
“Stop touching my mug,” he says.
“Make me.”
The words are out before my brain can intervene, and I watch something shift behind his eyes. Not anger. Something sharper. Something that makes the air between us go tight and thin.
He turns the handle back to the left with my hand still underneath his. Then he lets go and steps back, putting distance between us like he’s the one who needs it.
I breathe.
“Admitting that you saw him puts you in even more danger. Does he know you saw him?”
“Yes,” I whisper. A fucking terrorist knows I saw him, and now I’m being protected by what? The mafia, if the rumors are true, and right now, I don’t have any reason not to believe them. “Will he come for me?” I whimper.
“Truth or sanitized?” he asks again.
This time, I hesitate. I’m not sure I want to know. “Why are you protecting me?”
“Because if I don’t, no one will.”
That lands somewhere deep and raw, in a place I’ve spent two years building walls around.
Because he’s right. There is no one. No cavalry.
No partner waiting up. No family I can call.
Just me, my shit flat, my shit job, and now an enormous stranger who makes scrambled eggs and organizes his kitchen like a crime scene.
“You got me into this mess,” I accuse. “So don’t act like you’re being a hero now.”
“I may have grabbed you thinking you were someone else, Aoife, but you were already in this mess. Where do you think you would be right now if I hadn’t mistaken you for someone else?”
My stomach drops like a stone. I don’t answer because I know exactly where he thinks I’d be.
In a stairwell with a bullet in me. In the back of someone else’s van. Dumped somewhere quiet. Gone.
My skin goes cold all over again.
He sees it happen. I know he does because his face changes, just slightly. The hard edge stays, but something in his eyes eases off, like he didn’t actually want that point to land as hard as it did.
My legs feel watery all of a sudden, like they’ve only just remembered the day I’ve had. I go back to the table and sit.
He stays where he is for a second, looking at me like he has no idea what to do with me.