Chapter 14 Aoife
Aoife
His cock is jerking inside me, pumping his cum out until I can feel it pooling out of me.
“Fuck,” I gasp, knowing sex will never be the same again. He has ruined me for any other man. He stays buried in me for a long moment, both of us breathing hard. His forehead is still pressed to the plaster beside my head, his chest heaving against mine.
His hands go under my ass, and he carries me to the bed, lifting me off his cock and laying me down gently before he disappears into the en-suite. He comes back with a damp cloth and crouches in front of me without a word.
He parts my legs, and I watch him as he cleans me up, careful and thorough, his big hands gentle in a way that doesn’t match anything else about him.
I don’t say anything. I can’t. My throat is wrecked, and my brain is somewhere on the other side of the room, trying to reassemble itself into something functional.
He rinses the cloth in the en-suite and comes back. Then he gets into the bed beside me like we’ve done this a hundred times.
I pull the t-shirt back down over my thighs and crawl under the covers.
The room is quiet.
I turn my head and look at him.
He’s staring at the ceiling. His chest rises and falls, slow and steady. The tattoos move with his breathing, dark lines and shapes I haven’t had time to read yet. The bruise on his ribs is deepening to purple, and I reach out and touch it lightly.
He doesn’t flinch.
“Does it hurt?”
“No. Used to it.”
“Do you get bruises often?”
“No. Most people aren’t stupid enough, but there’s always one.”
I snicker. “That’s true. Idiots.”
The corner of his mouth lifts up slightly.
“What now?” I ask quietly.
“Now you sleep.”
“And after that?”
“After that, I figure out who sent two men after you.”
“And me?”
“You stay close.”
Close. Like I’m something he needs to keep track of. “How close?”
He turns his head to look at me. “What are you really asking, Aoife?”
I chew the inside of my lip and look down. “I don’t know.”
“You do know, you just don’t want to say. I’m not going to let anything happen to you.”
“Why? Because you feel responsible for me or because we fucked?”
“What about the third option?”
I blink.
“I want you close because no one has made me feel this possessive about them. It’s got nothing to do with feeling responsible for you, or because we fucked. You’re mine now, Aoife.” He reaches out and curls a lock of hair behind my ear.
I shiver.
Mine.
“What does that mean?” I whisper.
His gaze stays on mine. Steady. Certain. “It means,” he says, voice low, “that no one touches you. No one takes you. No one makes decisions about you except me.”
“Aran,” I croak as the fear from his words sinks in.
“Mine,” he says again, daring me to refute it so he can prove it to me.
“I don’t know what to think about that,” I whisper.
“Then don’t think about it. Not tonight.”
Easy for him to say.
I let out a shaky breath and stare at his chest instead of his face. “You can’t just say shit like that.”
His fingers slide under my chin and tilt my face back to his. “I’m not asking you to like the wording.”
I wet my lips. “And if I say I’m not yours?”
His eyes go very still. “You can say it.”
“You’ll ignore me?”
“Yes.”
Jesus. What did I get myself into? I remind myself that none of this is my fault. I was at work, cleaning hotel rooms, and my whole life just skidded sideways into a psycho who is looking at me like he is expecting me to leave, and he isn’t going to let me.
“You seemed more normal before we fucked,” I mutter.
“That was before we fucked. Now, you’re mine. Get used to it.”
His gaze is intense. I want to laugh it off like he’s joking, but I know he isn’t. My stomach clenches, and my instinct is to run. But where would I go, and would he even let me get two feet?
I close my eyes and breathe. His hand is still under my chin, warm and steady, and I don’t pull away because pulling away feels like a dare, and I’m not stupid enough to issue one right now.
“Sleep,” he says again. His thumb traces my jawline once before he lets go and settles back against the pillow.
I turn onto my side, facing away from him. I can feel the heat of his body behind me, close but not touching. The space between us hums like a live wire.
My brain won’t shut up. It cycles through the day on a loop. The hotel. The corridor. The trunk. The kitchen. The wall. His hands. His mouth. The way he said mine like it was a fact, not a question.
I press my face into the pillow and try to breathe.
The thing is, I’m terrified. But underneath the terror, there’s something else. Something warm and sick and dangerous that curls in my stomach when I think about the way he looked at me. Not at my body. At me. Like he saw something worth keeping.
Nobody has looked at me like that. Not once. Not ever.
That terrifies me more than the men in the kitchen. More than Granville. More than the fact that I’m lying in a criminal’s bed after being fucked to within an inch of my life.
I could survive the danger. I’ve survived worse.
Two years of worse, clawing my way back from the kind of rock bottom that doesn’t even have a floor.
Bad flat. Bad job. Bad everything. I survived all of it by not needing anyone.
By making myself small and quiet and unattachable, so that when the next bad thing came, there was nothing for it to grab onto.
Aran O’Neill just grabbed onto me with both hands.
And I let him.
I squeeze my eyes shut tighter and curl into a ball.
Behind me, his breathing is evening out.
Not asleep yet. I can tell by the quality of the silence.
He’s lying there, awake, listening to the house, listening to me, recording every sound the way he catalogues everything else.
Mug handles, deadbolts, and the exact location of every weapon in reach.
I am now on that list. Filed away. Positioned where he wants me.
I squeeze my eyes shut tighter.
My thighs are still shaking. I can still feel him between my legs, the ache of being stretched around something that size, the bruised feeling that I know I’ll carry into tomorrow, and underneath it, the treacherous pulse of wanting it again.
I hate myself a little for that. For wanting it. For wanting him. For the way my body has already memorized the shape of his hands and filed it somewhere I can’t delete.
Sleep doesn’t come easily. It circles like something cautious, approaching and retreating, testing whether it’s safe.
Every time I start to drift, my body jerks me back with a spike of adrenaline that tastes like metal in my mouth.
The corridor. The trunk. The kitchen. The gunshots—those quiet, suppressed pings that sounded nothing like the movies and everything like death.
Two men are dead because of me.
Not because I did anything. Because I exist. Because I was standing in a corridor with a cleaning cart at the wrong moment on the wrong day, and now people are dying in kitchens, and I’m lying in cotton-soft sheets next to a man who killed them without hesitation and then made me come against a wall like it was the natural next step.
My life was shit before today. Objectively, measurably shit.
But it was my shit. I owned it. I knew the dimensions of it.
I knew the exact temperature my shower would betray me at, which floorboard creaked outside my bedroom door, and which brand of instant noodles were on offer. I had it mapped. Contained. Survivable.
Now I don’t even have a phone.
I press my knuckles against my eyes and feel the butterfly strips pull. The sting grounds me, just enough. I focus on it. The small, sharp reality of split skin and antiseptic. Something I can measure. Something I can understand.
Behind me, Aran’s breathing changes. Deeper. Slower. The kind of breathing that means he’s either asleep or doing a convincing impression of it. I don’t believe it for a second. Men like him don’t sleep. They power down to a low hum and wait.
I lie there and count my breaths until I lose track, and then I start again, and somewhere between the second count and the third, the darkness behind my eyelids stops flickering with hotel corridors and gunfire and just becomes darkness.