Chapter 21
Aran
Idrive us out through the gates and don’t look back.
Connor has what he wants for now.
Aoife goes quiet beside me. Not upset quiet. Wrecked quiet. There’s a difference. Her hands are in her lap, fingers laced too tightly. I reach over and pry them apart with one hand, then keep hold of her for a second.
She glares at me, but she takes a deeper breath anyway. I let go and put my hand back on the wheel.
The drive home is shorter than I’d like. I need longer to think. Longer to work out whether bringing her there was smart or me showing Connor exactly how much leverage he has if he wants to be a prick about it.
Too late now.
When I pull into my garage and kill the engine, she doesn’t move straight away.
“Well,” she says eventually. “That was one of the worst social calls of my life.”
I get out and come around to her side. “You did fine.”
“He looked at me like I was a stain he hadn’t decided whether to scrub yet.”
“That’s just Connor.”
“You keep saying that like it makes him normal.”
“It doesn’t.” I hold the passenger door open and wait for her to get out.
She slides out slowly and looks around the garage like she’s checking it’s still the same one we left this morning.
I shut the car door and guide her toward the kitchen door. “Connor doesn’t do warm. He does useful.”
She stops dead. “There. That. That’s the thing I hate.”
I turn back to her. “What thing?”
“The way you all talk about people like they’re tools in a box.” Her eyes flash. Tired, angry, shaken. “Useful. Not useful. Problem. Asset. Witness. It’s fucked.”
She’s not wrong. I don’t bother pretending otherwise. “It is.”
That takes some of the steam out of her. Not all. Just enough that she blinks at me.
Inside, the house is quiet in the way mine always is. Controlled. Ordered. Safe, if a place can be called that after two men bled out in the kitchen yesterday.
I lock the door behind us and set the alarm.
Aoife stands in the middle of the kitchen, arms folded over herself, cap still on, looking like she’s trying to decide whether to scream, cry, or ask for tea. I take the cap off her head and toss it on the table.
“Sit,” I say.
She does it without argument and drops into the same chair as before, hair a mess from the hat, green eyes too bright. I grab the kettle and fill it.
“I don’t want tea,” she says.
“You do. You just don’t know it yet.”
“I want my life back.”
That one lands. I keep my face blank and switch on the kettle. “Working on it.”
She laughs once. It’s not happy. “By doing what? Dragging computer man to your house so he can play spy games with hotel cameras while I sit here waiting to hear if I’m about to be murdered by a terrorist, your uncle, or some woman who looks like me.”
“Yes.”
She stares at me. “You are impossible.”
“I know.”
I pull mugs from the cupboard.
The kettle clicks louder than it should in the quiet.
I set two mugs down and reach for the tea bags just as the doorbell rings.
Aoife’s head jerks up. “Is that him?”
“Probably. Intruders don’t usually ring the bell.”
I leave the mugs on the counter and head for the hall. I check the camera feed before I open up. Dave stands on the step with a backpack over one shoulder and a laptop case in one hand. He looks like he should be fixing printers in an office park instead of wiping CCTV access for an O’Neill.
I disable the alarm, unlock the door, and let him in.
He glances past me into the house. “Connor said it’s urgent.”
“It is. You can work in the kitchen.”
He follows me through. Aoife is sitting where I left her, chin up, gaze sharp. Dave gives her a polite nod. “Hi.”
“Hi,” she says, flat as fuck.
I point at the table. “Can you pull exterior feeds from the Regeant without lighting up anything?”
Dave snorts and drops his cases on the table, but says nothing. That’s the job. He unzips the laptop bag and pulls out a slim black machine, a tangle of cables, a little box I don’t ask about because I don’t care how he does it as long as he does it fast. “Specifics?”
“Front exterior. Yesterday. Noon to two. How long?”
“Twenty minutes to get in.” He plugs in, boots up, and starts typing.
I gesture with my head at Aoife to follow me. She gets up without a word, and I lead her into the sitting room.
“They must’ve already seen it,” she mutters. “The Garda will have the footage. Maybe it’s even been wiped by the hotel.”
“Maybe.”
“There was a shootout in the stairwell,” she says.
“Hardly a shootout. Two shots were fired, and both were suppressed.”
“But not suppressed from sight.”
True. But I’m choosing to be optimistic while she is spiraling into a pit of despair.
She paces once across the sitting room rug, then turns back. “Sandra definitely saw something. She looked at you like she was trying to place where she knew your face from.”
“She can try.”
“That’s not comforting.”
“It should be.”
“It really fucking isn’t.”
I almost smile. Instead, I move closer and catch her by the hips when she tries to pace past me again. “Stop.”
She looks up at me, annoyed, wound tight, beautiful. “I’m trying not to lose my mind.”
“You won’t.”
“How do you know?”
“Because if you were going to, you’d have done it already.”
She huffs out a breath, somewhere between a laugh and a complaint. My thumbs press into the denim at her hips. I want to drag her into me and keep her there until her pulse settles. I don’t. I make myself let go.
She doesn’t move. For one second, we stand close together, and just when I think she is going to back off, she moves closer. She places her hands on my chest and fists the front of my t-shirt.
“Tell me this is going somewhere,” she says quietly.
“It is.”
“Not with Dave and the cameras.” Her eyes lock on mine. “With me.”
I go still for half a second because she’s standing in my sitting room after all this shit, asking me for something I don’t know how to give nicely.
I don’t do nice. I do clear. My hand goes up to rest gently around her throat.
“It’s going with you in my house, in my bed, riding my cock until you can’t remember what it feels like to not have it inside you.
You are protected. You are mine,” I say. “We’ve been through this.”
“Possession and caring for someone are two entirely different things.”
“They are,” I say. “For normal people.”
Her eyes narrow. “And what are you, then?”
I slide my hand from her throat to her jaw and cup it. “Not normal.”
“I want you to mean it.”
I look at her for a second too long. She’s standing there wrecked and stubborn, still asking for honesty after everything. After Connor. After the hotel. After seeing exactly what my world looks like when the mask drops.
“I mean every fucking word,” I say, voice dropping to a growl.
“I want you marked as mine. Collared. Claimed. I want to keep you where no one else can touch you. I want to be the only thing standing between you and anything that might hurt you.” My thumb drags hard across her bottom lip, pulling it down slightly.
“I’d carve through anyone who tried to take you from me, Aoife.
That’s what caring looks like when it lives inside someone like me.
It’s not roses and poetry. It’s blood and bone and possession. ”
Her breath catches. Her grip tightens in my shirt. “You make everything sound fucking deranged.”
“And you ruin it with your constant commentary.”
She stares at me, and I can see her trying to decide whether to laugh or cry. Then she presses her forehead to my chest and says, quietly, “I don’t know how to do this.”
I slide my hand into her hair and tighten my grip until she has to look at me. “You don’t have to know how,” I say, voice dropping to a whisper. “You just have to surrender. Give me your fear. Your doubt. Your breath if I ask for it.”
Her eyes search mine like prey sensing a predator’s patience running thin.
“I’m bad at needing people,” she whispers.
“You’ll learn to need me.” My fingers flex against her scalp. “Be mine or be nothing.”
She flinches slightly, but doesn’t pull away.
Exhaustion has hollowed her out, left her vulnerable.
Those words break something in her. I watch it shatter behind her eyes.
Her pulse jumps beneath my fingers as I slide them to her throat, and for a second, I think she might finally understand what she’s gotten herself into.
Instead, she swallows hard against my palm and nods.
A voice carries in from the kitchen. “I’m in.”
I don’t look away from her face. “That’ll be Dave.
” I take her wrist—not her hand—and lead her back into the kitchen.
Dave has the laptop open, one window full of code, another split into camera feeds.
He barely looks up when we come in, which is exactly what I like about him.
No chat. No moral crisis. Just a man and his laptop doing illegal shit in my kitchen.
“Show me,” I say.
Dave scrubs back through a feed from the front entrance. Sunny pavement. Taxis. Guests coming and going. Me and Granville. Then the time stamp hits.
On the screen, the revolving door turns. Nessa steps out. Blonde hair down. Black jacket. Black jeans. Head lowered like any other woman leaving a hotel after lunch. She turns left.
Aoife goes very still.
Three minutes later, Granville appears through the same doors, no hurry, no panic, just a man walking like he owns the fucking street. He glances once behind him and then goes right.
“Fuck,” Aoife mutters. “They went opposite ways.”
“Can you track either of them after that?” I ask.
Dave’s fingers move fast over the keys. “Depends on how many city cams I can bounce through before someone notices. Hotel feed only gives me pavement and a bit of the junction.”
“Run Granville first,” I say. “He’s easier to spot.”
Dave nods and switches windows, pulling another camera angle from the corner across the road. Grainy. Shit quality, but good enough. Granville crosses at the lights, keeps his pace steady, turns right again and disappears past a row of parked vans.
“Next one,” I say.
Dave scrubs. Another camera. Another angle. Granville comes into view near a newsagent, glances once over his shoulder, then keeps moving, crossing the road.
“Freeze that.”
Dave does. Granville stands half-turned on the screen, caught near a bus stop, one hand in his pocket, head angled toward the road like he’s waiting for someone or checking timings.
“He’s not running,” Aoife says quietly beside me.
“No.” I step closer to the laptop. “He knows this was a set-up. Somehow. He knows someone just released him from O’Neill custody.”
Dave clicks forward frame by frame. Granville moves on. Another city camera catches him outside a pharmacy. Then another near a bank. He cuts down a side street and vanishes. “No camera on that lane. Dead spot.”
“Can you pick him up coming out the other side?”
“Trying.”
Aoife is so close to me, our arms brush. I can feel the tension in her without even looking. I put my hand on the back of her neck and keep it there, steady.
Dave jumps to another feed. Empty pavement. Cyclist. Two teenagers. No Granville.
“He knows the dead spots,” I say. “He has either scoped this place out before, or he just knows all the dead spots in Dublin.”
Dave switches back. “Want me to run her?”
“Yes.”
Nessa appears again on the hotel camera. Head down. Left turn. Dave drags her path across two more camera angles. She crosses the first junction without hesitating, keeps her head down, then stops dead outside a florist.
“Freeze.”
He does.
I step in closer. Aoife moves with me, pressed to my side now. Nessa stands half-turned at the curb, one hand near her hair, the other down by her thigh.
“She’s waiting,” Aoife says.
“No.” I narrow my eyes at the screen. “She’s looking.”
“For what?”
“For who’s watching her.”
Dave clicks forward. Nessa takes two more steps, then a black motorbike pulls up at the curb.
My pulse kicks hard.
Helmeted rider. Dark jacket. Plate not visible from this angle. Nessa swings onto the back like she’s done it a hundred times, no fuss, no hesitation, and the bike pulls off into traffic.
“Fuck,” I say.
Dave is already moving. “Hang on.”
He bounces to another camera. The bike cuts through a junction, slips between a bus and a taxi, then vanishes behind a delivery truck.
“Next.”
Another camera. Nothing.
Another. Nothing.
“Lost it.”
I stare at the dead feed like that will change something.
It doesn’t. “This doesn’t give us shit,” I growl and turn, swiping the mugs off the counter.
They clatter to the floor and smash. Aoife and Dave are quiet behind me.
I breathe in and regain my control that has snapped like a cheap elastic band because this isn’t over.
Aoife is still in danger. I don’t know what I was fucking expecting, but I needed something.
“It’s okay,” Aoife says.
“No,” I grit out, gripping the counter. “It isn’t. We are just as blind as we were.”
“Not necessarily,” Aoife says. “They went down a bus lane.”
I straighten up and turn slowly. “What?”
“When the bike went between the bus and the taxi, it went into the bus lane.”
“Are you sure?” I ask, leaning over the table again as Dave rewinds.
The grainy footage jerks back a few seconds. The bike slices between the taxi and the bus, and this time I watch the road markings instead of the bike.
Aoife is right.
I look at her. “How the fuck did you spot that?”
She shrugs one shoulder. “I use the bus network.”
Dave glances between us and starts typing again. “If it went into the bus lane, I can try TFI traffic cams instead of standard city surveillance. Different network. Slightly more annoying.”
“Do it,” I say.
He nods and gets to work. Aoife shifts closer to the table, eyes locked on the screen. I look at the broken mugs on the floor, and force my jaw loose before I crack a tooth.
“Useful,” she murmurs. “Be sure to tell Connor.”
I smirk at her. “Oh, he will be the first to know.”