Chapter 33
Aoife
Aran is very still for a long moment after I say it.
I want to see him afraid.
He doesn’t push back. He doesn’t ask me I’m sure or I’m not sure. He just looks at me from across the small sitting room of a house I’ve never been in, in a city I haven’t lived in for two years, and lets the words sit.
Then he nods. Once. Final.
“Okay.”
That’s it. Okay. As if I just told him I wanted toast.
He stands and moves to the kitchen, and I hear the fridge opening. I sit on the sofa with my hands folded in my lap and watch a man I’ve known for less than a week start preparing to kill someone for me.
He brings me a bottle of water, uncaps it, and hands it to me. My hands are steady when I take it, which surprises me. I expected the shakes. I expected my heart to be hammering. Instead, I feel calm. Not numb. Calm. Like a piece of me that’s been spinning for years has finally locked into place.
“Six,” he says, sitting down opposite me. “Maybe a bit after. He’ll come straight from the office. We give him fifteen minutes to settle, then we move. Until then, we wait.”
I nod. “What do you do to get ready?”
“Not much. There’s a bag in the shed. I’ll go through it. That’s it. There’s no big ritual.”
“I want to see.”
He studies me for a beat. “Why?”
“Because I’m coming with you tonight, and I don’t want to find out in the moment what your version of getting ready means. I want to know what I’m walking into.”
He doesn’t argue. He just nods and gets up, and I follow him out the back door into a small, paved yard with a high wall and a shed at the bottom. He unlocks it with a key from his jacket and opens the door.
It’s not a shed. It’s a workspace. Shelves, a bench, things I don’t have names for and don’t want to. Everything is laid out neatly. Nothing looks accidental.
He pulls a black holdall off a shelf, sets it on the bench, and starts going through it. I see a gun. I see gloves. I see a few other things I let my eyes slide over, because looking too closely feels like the kind of detail I’ll regret knowing later.
“That’s it?” I ask.
“That’s it.”
“It feels like there should be more.”
“There never is. People think there’s a ritual. There isn’t. There’s a plan. Then it’s done.”
I think about that. About how the worst night of my life—the night I’ve replayed a thousand times—took less than five minutes from start to finish. Real things are fast. It’s only in your head that they take forever.
He zips the bag. Locks the shed behind us. I follow him back into the kitchen.
“There’s something you should know,” I say. “About getting in.”
He looks at me.
“The building has a fob system, but there’s a backup code on the front door.
Six digits. Darragh definitely won’t have changed it.
He always used his fob and complained about the code being too long.
Two-eight-zero-three-nine-six. I picked it when the system was installed.
He told me to deal with it. He never memorized it.
I doubt he’s thought about it once since then. ”
Aran is very still.
“You remember it.”
“I remember everything about that flat. It was my home. I know which floorboard creaks in the bedroom. I know the lift clicks between the ground floor and the first. I know the door code.”
He looks at me for a long moment. His face doesn’t change, but something in his eyes does.
“That changes things,” he says. “Cleaner. Faster. Less to trace. We walk up at six fifteen, you punch in the code, we’re in.”
“Then that’s what we do.”
He nods slowly. “You okay?”
“Yes, but… I want to see him alone first—”
“Absolutely never happening.”
“Just listen, please. He still has my name on the lease. That means he couldn’t be bothered to remove it, didn’t want to, or assumed I’d be back.
Crawling or otherwise. I want to knock on the door, have him open it, see me, and I want to see what that does to him.
I want to see the smugness, or the surprise, or the annoyance.
I want him to know I’m there. That I came back.
You will be right there where he can’t see you, but you can see me. Can you understand that I need that?”
He stares at me for a very long time. I think he’s going to refuse.
I break the silence. “Right next to the door, where he can’t see you. If he grabs me, or tries to hurt me, you are one step away.”
His eye twitches. This costs him. But he is calculating, running the scenario, picking it apart for every way it goes wrong.
“One step,” he says finally.
“Right next to the door, against the wall. I will knock, he will open it. I will see his face, and you move. Simple.”
“If this is what you want.”
“It is. I know you won’t let anything happen to me.”
He pulls me to him and crushes me in a tight hug before he lets go.
He makes me a sandwich. I eat it. I don’t want it, but he says I’ll need it, and he’s right.
By six o’clock, I need my hands steady and my legs working and my head clear.
I’m not doing this with my blood sugar betraying me.
I am knocking on that door with everything I have, and I am never going to be the woman who froze in that kitchen ever again.
The afternoon stretches. I doze on the sofa with my head on his thigh. He doesn’t move. I wake to the feel of his hand stroking slowly through my hair, and I lie there with my eyes closed for a while, pretending to still be asleep, because I want this. The quiet bit before the storm.
When I finally sit up, I realize how much time has passed.
He looks at me. “You can still say no. I’ll do it either way.”
“I know. I’m coming.”
He nods, stands, and picks up the bag. “Get your jacket.”
The drive across the city takes twelve minutes.
He goes a slightly indirect route, and I don’t ask why.
I look out the window at streets I used to drive every day, and I don’t recognize myself in any of them.
The woman who drove these streets is not the woman in this car.
She wouldn’t know me. I wouldn’t know her either.
He turns onto a street parallel to the apartment building and parks about a hundred meters from the entrance, with a clear line of sight to the front door.
He kills the engine.
The street is quiet. A man walks a dog past us without looking. A car pulls out of a space further down. The river is visible at the end of the road.
“That’s the building,” I say. The red brick. The balconies. The corner unit on the second floor. Apartment fourteen.
“He’s not home yet. He’ll come around the corner from the right.
White Mercedes.” Aran’s eyes are on the road.
“Once he goes down to the parking garage, we give him fifteen minutes, then we walk to the front door. You punch in the code. We go in. Up the stairs. To his door. If anything goes wrong, you come back to the car, the keys are under the driver’s seat, and you drive.
The number on this paper will get you somewhere safe. ” He hands me a folded piece of paper.
I take it. Put it in my pocket. There’s something different about him now, sharper than the man who held me in bed last night.
He’s not cold. He’s not absent. He’s just somewhere I can’t follow.
He’s at work. This is what he looks like when he’s at work, and it’s both terrifying and reassuring in ways I’ll have to think about later.
I swallow hard. “Aran... thank you.”
His eyes stay fixed on the road, jaw tight. “Don’t thank me yet. We’re not done.”
He reaches over and takes my hand. He doesn’t say anything. He just holds it.
We sit there in the quiet, watching the road, waiting for a white Mercedes. The clock on the dashboard ticks over.
At one minute past six, headlights swing onto the street.
White Mercedes. Slow. Indicator on. It turns into the underground entrance and disappears down the ramp.
“That’s him.”
Fifteen minutes.
Then I walk into a building I swore I’d never enter again, beside a man who is going to end this for me.
Fifteen minutes.
I can wait.