Chapter 22
Aoife
I’m stupidly pleased with myself.
Aran’s eyes drag over my face, bright and sharp now in a way that has nothing to do with sex and everything to do with a lead.
Dave keeps typing, fingers flying. “If this works, I might be able to catch the bike at the next bus gate.”
A new feed opens. Grainy road. Bus lane. Red light.
Nothing.
Then the bike appears, slipping through the frame like it knows exactly where not to linger.
“There,” I say.
“I see it,” Aran replies at the same time.
Dave freezes the frame. The rider still has the helmet on. Nessa is on the back, head down, one hand gripping the driver’s jacket. He clicks again. The bike cuts right at the junction.
Dave is already moving, pulling up the next camera in the network before I’ve even processed the turn. The new feed loads slowly, pixelating at the edges before it sharpens.
“Come on,” I mutter.
The bike appears at the top of the frame. It slows at a pedestrian crossing, waits for the lights, which tells me the rider is careful enough not to jump a red in front of a camera. Smart. Disciplined.
“Where is that?” Aran asks, leaning over Dave’s shoulder.
“Leeson Street junction.”
Aran goes still for half a second. I watch it happen. Something clicks behind his eyes.
“What?” I ask.
He doesn’t answer me. Not yet. He straightens and pulls out his phone, scrolling fast. Dave keeps the feed running. The bike moves off through the green light, heading south.
“Next gate,” Aran says.
Dave switches feeds again. This one is of worse quality, washed out from the angle of the sun, but the bike is there. Still south. Still disciplined. Still not rushing.
I watch Nessa on the back. Her posture hasn’t changed since the hotel. No tension in the shoulders. No white-knuckle grip on the rider. She looks like someone being driven somewhere she chose.
That’s what gets me.
She doesn’t look like a woman who just broke a terrorist out of illegal custody and narrowly escaped a four-way ambush. She looks like she’s on her way to lunch.
Aran says nothing, but I can feel him thinking. His whole body does this thing when he’s processing something, goes very still and very quiet, like he’s conserving every resource for his brain.
Dave clicks through to another feed. The bike is smaller now, further away, moving through a residential stretch I don’t immediately recognize. Tree-lined. Wide road. The kind of street that costs money without advertising it.
The bike pulls up to a nice-looking house, and Nessa gets off. Without a look back, she pulls a key out of her jacket and opens the front door. The bike zooms off, and she shuts the door.
Dave freezes the frame.
The house sits there on the screen, perfectly ordinary-looking. Red brick. Black railings. Window boxes. The kind of house that wouldn’t make you look twice.
“Where is that?” I ask.
“Rathmines,” Dave says, already typing. He pulls up a map overlay and drops a pin. “Castlewood Avenue.”
Aran is very still behind me.
Too still.
I turn to look at him. His jaw is locked, his eyes fixed on the screen with an expression I haven’t seen before. Not anger. Not calculation. Something that looks almost like dread, which on a face like his is deeply unsettling.
“You know it,” I say.
He doesn’t answer.
“Aran.”
“Yes,” he says. Just that. One word, flat and final, and he straightens up and moves away from the table.
I watch him go to the window and stand there with his back to us.
Dave quickly starts packing up. He knows it’s time to move. Part of me wishes I could, too. I don’t want this life. I want my life. My shitty, crappy life that has been blown up by this woman who rides around on motorbikes like she doesn’t have a care in the world.
Dave leaves quietly, and I stay at the table.
Aran doesn’t move from the window. His hands are at his sides, loose, but the rest of him is locked up tight.
“Who lives there?” I ask.
He lets out a sound that’s half laugh, half scoff. “Granville.”
“Oh, you are kidding, right?”
“I wish I was.”
“So they’re a couple or something?”
“It would make sense,” Aran says. “Why she went to such lengths to break him out. There are a number of men, albeit a very small number, who are just as good as Granville on a job. She could’ve found someone a lot easier to work with.”
“So they’re a couple. He gets locked up by the O’Neills. She plots day and night for however long—”
“Two years.”
My eyes widen. “Two years to get him free. But why did Connor agree to let him go?”
He turns to me. “That is need to know.”
“I’m pretty sure I’m in the middle of this shitshow, so I’d say I need to know.”
He looks at me for a long moment. The kind of look that measures how much trouble telling me will cause versus how much trouble not telling me will cause.
“Connor’s daughter,” he says.
I stare at him. “Sorry?”
“Nessa Doyle is Connor’s daughter. She was conceived right before he got married. Arranged, of course…”
I wonder why that matters, but don’t ask.
“He only found out about her two weeks ago. She found out about him first, which is how she knew enough about our operations to pull this off.”
My brain tries to process that and nearly gives up. “So your uncle’s long-lost daughter broke her boyfriend out of your uncle’s illegal prison.”
“Yes.”
“But he doesn’t know it was a set-up?”
“No.”
“Right.” I press both palms flat on the table and breathe through my nose. “That is the most fucked-up family drama I have ever heard, and I grew up in Cork.”
He doesn’t smile, but something shifts in his face. “Now you know.”
“Aran. You have to tell him. This isn’t on you anymore. This is his shitshow to clean up.”
“I know. But I’m the one who lost Granville and grabbed you, dragging you into this fucked-up family drama.” He runs a hand through his hair. It’s the most unsure of himself that I’ve ever seen him. It hurts me. Somewhere deep in my messed-up soul that never wants him hurt, hurts.
“Do you want me to tell him?” I venture.
He closes his eyes briefly as if he is trying to hang on to his last shred of patience with me.
“Don’t take this the wrong way, Aoife, but don’t be absurd.
I’m not scared of him for fuck’s sake. I’m just pissed off that this isn’t over.
It’s far from over, and it goes deeper than I suspected. You are still in danger, and I’m…”
“You’re what?”
“Not in control of this situation.”
“Did it hurt?” I ask, folding my arms.
“What?” he snaps.
“Admitting that you are not in control. Did it hurt?”
He growls at me. I’m provoking the angry six-foot-six man, but all I can think about is climbing him like a tree and kissing him until the pain goes away.
“Yes,” he says after a beat. “A bit.”
That’s all I get, but it’s enough. Coming from him, that’s practically a confession.
I unfold my arms and close the distance between us before I can talk myself out of it. I reach up, curl my hands into his t-shirt, and pull him down to me. He comes without resistance, which surprises me every single time, like some part of my brain still expects him to be immovable.
I kiss him slowly and deliberately, my lips catching on the rough stubble surrounding his mouth.
He makes a low sound—half growl, half surrender—that vibrates all the way down my spine like fingers trailing over each vertebra.
His hands find my waist, fingers splaying wide enough that his thumbs nearly meet at my navel, and grip hard enough to leave marks, hauling me against the solid wall of his chest until I can feel his heartbeat hammering against mine, and for a minute there’s nothing else. No Granville. No Nessa. No Connor.
“Take me,” I murmur against his mouth. “Take me, Aran. Take back that control you just lost on me.”
“Aoife…” His voice is strangled. “Don’t.”
“I know what I’m asking.”
He doesn’t say another word. He just scoops me up and carries me upstairs, placing me on the bed as he stares down at me.
He starts with my shoes, unlacing them slowly.
He takes them off, then my socks and sets them on the floor beside the bed, side by side.
His huge, inked hands go to my jeans, button first, then zip, and he drags them, along with my panties, down my legs with a patience that contradicts everything else about him.
He pulls his t-shirt over his head and drops it.
He reaches for the hem of my t-shirt, and I lift my arms, letting him take it. His eyes move over me slowly. Not hungry. Not calculating. Just looking, the way he does everything, like he’s memorizing it for later. He takes my bra off and dumps it on the floor, forgotten.
He leans down and kisses me, slow and deep, one hand braced on the mattress beside me, the other going around my throat. He squeezes enough to make me cough.
“Too much?” he murmurs.
I shake my head. He releases me and parts my legs, ducking his head as he kneels on the floor, and that’s when the tenderness ends.
He devours my pussy like a man possessed.
Gripping my thighs until I cry out as his teeth nip my clit, sucking, grinding, licking until my hips buck off the bed and my fingers claw into his hair, and I’m making sounds I don’t recognize as belonging to me.
He doesn’t stop.
My thighs clamp around his head, my hips grinding shamelessly against his face as I fuck myself on his tongue.
I arch my back, gasping. “Please, Aran—fuck—don’t stop,” my voice cracking as I twist the sheets between my fingers, words I’ve never said before tumbling out between ragged breaths. “Right there, just like that, make me come, please—”
When I finally shatter, my entire body convulses, my vision blacking out completely as his name tears from my throat—half worship, half damnation.
He holds me through the aftershocks, then he bites my inner thigh, sucking hard until I know I’m going to have a love bite there. Filthy. Dirty. Marked. Claimed.
He rises, undoes his pants, and lets them drop to the floor.