Chapter 20
Aoife
Sandra is not a woman you can outrun with normal excuses. She feeds on them.
“Aoife! You disappear mid-shift after an incident, don’t answer your phone, don’t contact management, and now you show up here with—”
Her eyes cut to Aran again, but it gives her pause.
Aran keeps moving, hand firm on my arm, pace easy but definite. Not rushing. Not skulking. Just a man who fully expects the world to get out of his fucking way.
Sandra included.
She tries to catch up, but Aran’s pace outmatches hers, and he is dragging me along in his wake.
“You are fired!” she screeches at me.
“Too late,” Aran says. “Aoife quit yesterday. You didn’t seem to get the memo.”
“Fine. Don’t expect a reference.”
Aran gets me to the elevator and hits the button. “Enough.”
Sandra falters at that. Not because he shouts. He doesn’t. He just says it in that cold, flat way that makes your spine pay attention.
The elevator doors open.
Aran steps in, keeps me in front of him, and turns to face the corridor before the doors shut. Sandra is still standing there, furious and helpless.
The doors close.
“You got something useful up there,” Aran says, completely ignoring the fact that I just got fired. Or quit. That remains to be seen.
“Did I?”
“She was waiting. Not escaping. Waiting for Granville to come out so she could confirm it was done.”
I turn that over. “And then she left before it went sideways.”
“Which means she knew it was going to go sideways. She planned the ambush, which was suspected and now confirmed.”
“Why?”
“To get Granville out of my custody. She knew the shit would hit the fan, and he was given the opportunity to run.”
“Did Granville know all of this?”
“No,” he says. “He has been in solitary confinement for two years. There is no way he was part of this. He saw the opportunity to run, and he did. Nessa made sure he got it.”
“And now what?”
“Now she has probably tracked him down and given him a job.”
“What kind of job?” I ask and then regret it when he gives me that look that screams I shouldn’t have asked. “She broke out a terrorist so he could do a job. That’s not terrifying at all.”
“It’s concerning.”
“Aran. That’s terrifying.”
The elevator opens on the ground floor, and he moves me fast. Not running. Just that purposeful stride that parts people without touching them. I keep my head down under the cap, focusing on his hand at my back.
We clear the service door and cut right toward the car.
He opens the car door for me and waits until I’m in before he closes it. He rounds the front and drops into the driver’s seat, checking the mirrors before he starts the engine. “We need access to the cameras at the front of the hotel. We need to see which way they both went.”
“And how do we do that?” I ask as he pulls out into traffic.
He gives me a grim look. “Connor.”
I gulp. “The same Connor who wants me cleaned?”
He glances at me sideways. “The same.”
“Great,” I mutter.
Aran says nothing, which isn’t reassuring.
He drives with one hand loose on the wheel, the other resting on his thigh, and I watch Dublin slide past the window and try to convince myself that this is manageable.
That I haven’t walked back into a hotel where shit went down and come out with nothing except confirmation that a woman I’ve never met deliberately used my face to break a terrorist out of what I can only assume was some kind of illegal private prison.
“I’m taking you back home, and then I’ll go and see him.”
“Home? You mean your house where two men showed up yesterday to kill me?” My voice is practically a squeak.
He grimaces at me. “You’d rather go to Connor’s?”
That gives me serious pause. I have exactly two options, and neither of them is ideal. “I’m staying with you,” I say quietly. “That’s where I feel safe.”
He looks at me for a moment before his eyes turn back to the road, cutting me off from whatever thoughts were showing.
“All right,” he says finally.
I nod, and he turns back to the road. I settle into the seat and wonder if I’ve just made a mistake.
He’s thinking hard about something he’s not going to tell me yet.
I’ve learned the difference between his silences in approximately twenty-four hours, which is either a testament to how intense the last day has been or how far gone I already am.
We drive into an exclusive area where the houses are large and set back from the road behind high walls and electric gates. The kind of area where the gardens are professionally maintained, and the neighbors, if you ever even see them, don’t make eye contact.
Aran pulls up to a set of black gates, and they open automatically.
My stomach drops. “This is Connor’s?”
“Yes.”
He parks in front of a Georgian house that is enormous, immaculate, and deeply intimidating, and kills the engine. Then he turns to me, and his expression does something I haven’t seen it do before. It softens. Not much. Just enough. “Stay beside me. Don’t offer information. Don’t argue with him.”
“Don’t argue,” I repeat. “With the man who wants me dead.”
“He doesn’t want you dead.”
“He did yesterday.”
“Yesterday is yesterday.” He gets out and comes around to my side before I’ve figured out how to process any of this.
I get out because my legs decide to cooperate before my brain does.
The house is the kind of Georgian that gets written up in architectural magazines. Wide stone steps. A black door with a brass knocker. Sash windows. Immaculate pointing. Not a weed in sight.
I love it immediately.
And hate that I do.
Aran puts his hand on my lower back and moves me forward. I go because stopping now would be worse than walking in.
The door opens before we reach the top step.
A man, who I’m guessing is a butler or house manager, opens the door. He looks at Aran first, then at me, with the particular expression of a person logging information rather than forming opinions.
Aran doesn’t acknowledge him beyond a nod.
We go inside, and I barely have time to take in the entrance hall as Aran ushers me quickly through it to a half-closed door on the right. He knocks once and pushes it open.
A man in his sixties, I assume is Connor O’Neill, looks up from his desk, and his eyes go straight to me. Not to Aran. Me.
“Aoife O’Leary, I presume,” he says without preamble.
“Yes,” Aran says before I can. “She isn’t here for an interrogation. In fact, she isn’t even going to speak. I’m here because I need Dave.”
Dave?
Connor sits back in his chair, his shrewd eyes still on me. “Dave? Why?”
“Cams out the front of the Regeant will tell me which way I need to start looking.”
Connor’s eyes move to Aran. “And you need Dave for that?”
“I need Dave to pull them without leaving a trail.”
Connor considers this for a moment, fingers laced on the desk, watching me with the kind of measured stillness that tells me exactly where Aran gets it from.
He is a handsome man for his age. Silver-haired, sharp-jawed, well-dressed.
The kind of man who has always had money and has never needed anyone to know it.
He terrifies me.
I keep my face neutral and my mouth shut.
“Do you want to do this here or at yours?” Connor asks.
“Mine,” Aran says. “I want to get Aoife off the grid. She is in danger.”
Connor’s gaze shifts back to me, and something moves behind his eyes. Calculation. Assessment. The same thing Aran does, except on Aran it makes my pulse spike, and on Connor, it makes me want to back toward the door.
Connor is quiet for a moment. I hold very still under his gaze. I think about what Aran said in the car. Don’t offer information. Don’t argue. I can do both of those things. I am excellent at shutting up when the alternative is getting shot.
“Remember anything… useful?” he asks me.
“She did,” Aran replies for me. “This was one big set up and Aoife was right in the middle of it.”
Connor takes that in and raises an eyebrow. “Set up?”
“Nessa wasn’t escaping. She was waiting by the elevator. Aoife remembered the angle she turned. She checked the corridor, not Aoife. Then the doors shut before Granville came out.”
Connor’s expression doesn’t change much, but I see the shift. Tiny. Interested.
“She used the chaos to get him loose,” Aran continues. “Aoife and Nessa are close enough in build and coloring that I mistook one for the other. Granville may have as well.”
Connor looks at me again, slower this time, like I’ve gone from inconvenience to evidence. I hate it.
“And this came to her in a flash of inspiration?” he asks.
I keep my mouth shut.
Aran’s jaw tightens. “It came to her because I took her back to the hotel so she could reconstruct the scene.”
Connor’s stare sharpens. “You did what?”
“I took her back. She remembered more.”
“You brought a witness under active threat back to the scene of the exchange.”
“Yes.”
Connor lets out a slow breath through his nose. “That is either devotion or stupidity.”
“Results,” Aran says.
I look at the carpet and decide it’s a very nice carpet to nearly die on.
Connor’s mouth shifts, not quite a smile. “And yet you still haven’t found her.”
Aran doesn’t move. “Give me Dave.”
Connor glances toward the door. “Sit down, Aoife.”
It is so clearly an order that my back goes stiff on instinct. Aran’s hand presses lightly at my lower back before I can decide if I’m about to obey or tell a mafia boss to fuck off in his own office.
“It’s fine,” Aran says quietly.
So, I sit. The chair is ridiculously comfortable, which feels insulting somehow.
Connor picks up the phone on his desk and presses a button. “Send Dave to Aran’s.”
He hangs up and folds his hands again. “You’ve had an eventful couple of days.”
I say nothing.
His eyes stay on me. “Good. You can follow instructions.”
The silence that follows is ugly and packed tight. I don’t know the rules between them, but I know a threat when I hear one, and there’s one sitting in the room like a third person.
“I’ll keep you informed,” Aran says and touches my shoulder.
I practically leap up at the opportunity to escape this room. This house.
“Do that,” Connor says, gaze on me.
Aran ushers me out, and I breathe out slowly. “That was terrifying.”
“It’s Connor,” Aran says, like that explains anything.
“It does not make it less terrifying that he has a name.”
His hand stays at my back as he walks me through the hall, quick and steady, like if he keeps me moving I won’t bolt.
He’s probably right. My nerves are all over the place.
My skin feels too tight. That office did something to me.
Connor didn’t raise his voice. Didn’t threaten me outright.
Didn’t need to. Men like that don’t waste words when silence does the same job.
We step outside, and I suck in a lungful of cool air like I’ve been underwater.
Aran opens the passenger door for me. “In.”
I get in, desperate to escape with my head intact. Aran shuts my door, rounds the car, and gets in beside me. He doesn’t start the engine straight away. He looks at the house once, then at me.
“You did well.”
I bark out a laugh. “Did I? Felt more like I sat there trying not to piss myself.”
“You kept your mouth shut.”
“That wasn’t easy.”
“But you did it. I’m proud of you.” He smirks at me and starts the car.
“Gee, thanks,” I mutter, but it does something to my insides that makes me want to tell him to pull over so I can crawl into his lap and have him hold me until I feel completely safe again.