Epilogue
ARAN
Six Months Later
The rain comes in off the bay just after midnight.
Fine and steady, the kind that doesn’t commit to anything, just soaks you by degrees. I’m prone on a rooftop above the target building. Elbows braced. Breathing slowly. Water running down the back of my collar. Below, Dublin glitters in the wet.
I’ve done this a hundred times.
Tonight’s different.
She’s beside me.
Aoife is prone on my right, rifle stock tucked into her shoulder exactly the way I’ve taught her, cheek against the cheekweld, right eye at the scope, left eye open.
She’s been in position for twelve minutes.
She hasn’t moved. Her breathing is slow and even, the way I drilled into her at the range six times a week for six months, one in one out, no drift, no hitch.
Her idea and no amount of resisting was going to get her off this path.
I’ve got my own rifle set up next to me.
Backup. Insurance. If anything goes sideways—if she flinches, if she misses, if the wind shifts wrong—I take the shot a half-second later.
She knows that. She agreed to it. She wouldn’t be up here otherwise, and neither would I.
Connor would skin us both if this went up shit creek without a paddle.
But she’s not going to flinch.
I know that the way I know my own hands.
The target walks out of a door below at twelve seventeen. Right on time. A man in a dark coat, alone, pulling a cigarette from his pocket. Mid-forties. Doesn’t matter who. Doesn’t matter why. Connor wanted him gone quietly and quickly. He knows she’s up here.
He didn’t argue. He loves her as much as if she were his own niece. Nessa-transference? Maybe. That had to fucking hurt. But he did what needed to be done to protect this family, and we were there to pick up the pieces. Me, Logan, Liam and Sean… and Aoife, in her own quiet way.
Aoife’s breathing stays steady. She tracks him with the scope, smooth, no jerking, no anticipation. She waits. Her mouth is slightly parted. Her eyes are clear. There’s nothing on her face at all. No fear. No adrenaline. Nothing.
She’s ice.
My ice.
The target stops at the curb. Raises the cigarette. Flicks a lighter.
“Whenever you’re ready,” I murmur.
She doesn’t answer. She doesn’t need to.
She exhales. The natural pause at the bottom of the breath. The trigger squeeze. Smooth, gradual, no jerk. Just like I taught her. Just like she’s practiced on paper at fifty meters, a hundred, two hundred.
The suppressor coughs once. A small, flat sound.
The man in the dark coat folds.
Cigarette still in his hand. Knees going first, then the rest of him, collapsing down onto the wet pavement like a marionette with its strings cut. The lighter skitters out across the concrete. The cigarette lands beside him, still smoking.
Clean.
In the head. One shot. Exactly where she aimed.
Neither of us moves for a beat.
Then she lets out a slow breath. Her shoulder drops a fraction against the stock. Her finger comes off the trigger and lies flat along the guard, the way I taught her.
“Confirmed,” I say quietly, my eye back at my own scope. “I’m so fucking turned on right now.”
She gives me a sidelong glare. “Fuck off. We need to move.”
Her voice is level. Steady. The voice of a woman who just did something she’d been thinking about for weeks and has found it was exactly what she expected.
She turns her head slowly and looks at me. Her eyes are bright. Not wet. Bright in a different way. Alive in a way I haven’t seen before. Something sharp and more settled.
She’s exhilarated.
I see it for what it is.
She’s not horrified. She’s not broken. She’s not sick. She pulled a trigger on a man she doesn’t know and didn’t flinch, and now she’s looking at me with the kind of brightness in her eyes that I’ve only ever seen after good sex and the night I carved my name into her hip.
Fuck.
“Break it down,” I tell her.
She does. I watch her hands. They’re steady. She disassembles the rifle into its pieces, the way I taught her, stock, barrel, suppressor, magazine, each into its foam cutout in the bag. No rush. No fumbling. Forty-two seconds, which is five seconds faster than last time in the range.
She zips the bag.
I’ve already done mine.
We move off the roof the way I always move off a roof.
Back to the vent. Down. Out through the fire exit on the east side.
Into the alley. Two bags over my shoulder because I’m not letting her carry hers yet in public.
The Q7 is parked three streets over, fresh plates, windows dark.
I put both bags in the boot, and we get in.
She doesn’t speak on the drive out of the area.
Neither do I. I take the coast road south, the same route I took the night of my first chapter of this book, the night I met her.
The rain picks up. The wipers go. She stares out the passenger window with her hand resting on her thigh, and every so often, I glance at her, and every time, her face is that same clear, settled thing.
Twenty minutes out, my phone buzzes with Connor’s name on the screen. I answer on speaker because I don’t have anything to hide from her anymore, and I haven’t for a while.
“Yeah.”
“All good?”
“All good.”
“Well done, girl,” he says to her, knowing she’s listening.
“Thanks,” she murmurs, her mouth turning up into a proud beam.
He hangs up.
Aoife glances at me and then turns her face back to the window to watch the rain.
The road unspools. The coast appears on our left, dark and wet. I take her hand off her thigh and lace my fingers through hers. She lets me. She’s here. She’s safe in a way she wasn’t when I took her out of the hotel corridor.
I turn off the coast road onto the back route home. The roads narrow. The streetlights thin. The rain keeps coming. Beside me, Aoife is quiet and settled, and somewhere in Dublin, a man is lying on a pavement with a neat hole in him and no witnesses.
Home appears at the end of the road.
The house in Ranelagh. Lights on in the kitchen. I left them on for her. I always do.
I pull into the garage. Kill the engine. Neither of us moves for a moment.
“Aran.”
“Yeah.”
“Thank you.”
I turn my head slowly. She’s looking at me. Her eyes are still bright. Her mouth has shifted into something that isn’t quite a smile but is close. I hold her gaze.
There are a dozen things I could say. I say none of them.
I say the only thing that’s true, which is that she is not asking me to protect her from this life anymore.
She is telling me she wants in. Not on the edges.
Not as a witness. Inside. Beside me. Prone on a rooftop in the rain with her breath slow and her finger on a trigger, taking shots Connor paid for.
My woman.
My ice.
Mine.
“You’re welcome,” I say.
She squeezes my hand once.
We get out. I carry the bags. She walks beside me to the back door.
Her hand stays on my lower back while I key in the alarm code.
The house smells like the food I left warming in the oven because I knew she’d be hungry.
She slips out of her wet jacket. She reaches up and pulls my face down to hers and kisses me, slow, deliberate, the rain still on her skin.
I kiss her back.
For a long time.
This is what we are now. A man who kills for a living and a woman who has just learned how.
A house in Ranelagh with the lights on, an oven warming dinner, and two rifles by the back door.
A table at Connor’s on Sundays. A man in the ground tonight who earned it.
A past we buried between us in Cork and never speak of.
People would look at us and not understand.
They’d see the house and the job and the silence and the two bags by the door, and they wouldn’t understand how any of it is love. They’d call it something else. Obsession. Codependency. Something darker. Something wrong.
Let them.
I know what this is. She knows what this is. We chose it with our eyes open, both of us, in full knowledge of what the other one is and what the other one does.
In our world, love isn’t safe.
It’s caught in the Crossfire.
Check out Logan’s story: Chaos