Chapter 8
Sean
I’m fucked.
This hand is one of the shittiest I’ve ever been dealt in my entire life. The cards swim in and out of view as the booze works its way through my brain, turning it to mush.
“Well?” the guy to my left asks. I don’t know his name. It’s not fucking important.
What is important is that she put me here.
If she had only put her pride aside and followed me, I’d have taken the elevator up and not the stairs down.
She did this.
It’s her fucking fault.
“Fold or call, O’Neill,” the man says again, his voice impatient.
I stare at my cards. A pair of threes. Worthless. The pot in the middle of the table is a mountain of plastic promises. Money I don’t have. Money I’ll owe. It’s the same old fucking story.
A flash of Ciara in my gym, all controlled power and cool dismissal, cuts through the alcoholic haze. This is the opposite of her world. This is my church. The grimy basement, the stale cigar smoke, the stink of desperation. This is where I belong.
“I’m all in,” I slur, shoving the pathetic remainder of my chips into the middle. It’s not a strategic move. It’s a fucking suicide note written in plastic.
The man across from me, a weasel-faced prick, licks his lips. He can smell the blood in the water. “You’re bluffing on nothing, Sean.”
“Am I?” I lean back, my chair groaning in protest. I give him the emptiest, most broken smile I can muster. “Call and find out.”
This isn’t about the money. This is about control. It’s the one thing I have left. The power to burn my own fucking life to the ground before anyone else can. Before she can.
He stares at me for a long moment, then shrugs, pushing a tower of chips to match mine. “Your funeral.”
He lays down his cards. A full house.
I don’t even bother showing my threes. I just laugh, a harsh, grating sound that fills the sudden silence.
Another debt. Another hole. Another perfect reason for a drink.
The weasel-faced prick rakes the pot toward him, the chips clattering like bones.
“Tough break, O’Neill. Looks like the lady’s not with you this fine morning. ”
I push myself up from the table, my chair scraping against the concrete floor. The room tilts, and I grab the edge of the table to steady myself. “Put it on my tab,” I manage, my voice sounding distant and thick.
He smirks. “Your tab’s getting a bit long, isn’t it?”
“You’ll get your money,” I snarl, the words tasting like ash and cheap whisky. I don’t know how, but that’s a problem for another day. A problem for Liam or my father. It always is.
I turn my back on them and their greedy, prying eyes. They love this. They fucking live for it. The spare O’Neill, crashing and burning for their entertainment. I stumble toward the side door, each step a monumental effort.
Out in the alley, the damp Dublin morning is a surprise. How long was I in there?
The alley stinks of piss and wet garbage, but it’s better than the smoke-filled room I just left. I lean against the brick wall, the rough surface digging into my back. My head swims. All I can see is her face. Cool, green eyes judging me from the doorway of my own fucking apartment.
This is what she gets. This is the man she’s shackled to. The man she didn’t choose when I gave her the chance last night. Now she is in my apartment, and I have nowhere to go. I reach into my pocket for my phone and remember that I didn’t pick it up when I left my apartment to confront Ciara.
Groaning, I rub my face with my hand and slide down the wall, sitting in a wet patch of something that smells like old Guinness.
But I can’t move. I lean my head back against the wall and close my eyes, just for a minute, while I figure out where to go.
I can’t call Liam. I sure as fuck can’t call Connor.
It doesn’t leave many people. It hits home how isolated I have made myself in the last few years. Just me, the booze and the cards.
A sob from somewhere deep inside me, that I will deny later, is wrenched from my throat. I need to get up, go back to the apartment, talk to Ciara, and figure out how to make this work, or we will both be miserable.
But the thought weighs too heavily on my chest. I can’t move.
I don’t want to.
Not yet.
In a minute.
It’s dark out when I open my eyes, and the last thing I remember was me in the alleyway in a puddle of what might’ve been Guinness, but might not. I sit up, and the world spins, my head thumps, but I’m inside with a soft bed underneath me.
I glance around and see I’m in my bedroom at home.
Connor’s home.
And at the bottom of the bed, in the shadows, sits the man himself in an armchair, staring at me like I’m shit on the bottom of his shoe.
It’s fair. I probably look and smell like it.
Doesn’t make it better, though. It stings, and I flinch before I can stop it.
“How long was I out?”
“Cillian found you and picked you up around nine this morning. It’s after ten now.”
Half a fucking day. That’s a new fucking low.
I swing my legs over the side of the bed and haul myself up. “Well, I’ll just have a shower and be on my way.”
“Sit,” he says in that voice that has made harder men than me piss in their pants.
I obey.
To do anything else would be suicide.
“Look at me.”
I turn and face him, lifting my legs and stretching out on the bed again in a show of fuck you.
It doesn’t even register on his face.
“This is your last chance, Sean. Clean up, or I will put a bullet between your eyes and put everyone out of their misery.”
“You’ve said that before. Not to mention filicide… think of the optics…”
The crack of the gun and a bullet whizzing over my head to slam into the headboard behind me makes me freeze. I daren’t even breathe.
Fuck. That’s a first.
“Try me,” Connor says.
We lock gazes. Mine is full of fury and hatred. His is full of scorn and pity.
He says nothing. He doesn’t even lower the Glock.
The silence stretches, bordering on agonizing.
“What do you fucking want from me?” I eventually spit out, unable to take it a second longer. I always crack. He knows it as well as I do.
“I’m glad you fucking asked,” he says conversationally, as if he didn’t just take a shot at his own son.
“You are getting married in five days to a good woman. A woman who knows her place and will do her duty to her family. You are going to stay here, in this room, without a phone, tablet or TV. You will eat when I say you eat, and you will not even catch a whiff of booze. The room has already been cleaned out. The hideyhole under the floorboard in the corner… empty. You will sober up as much as humanly fucking possible in the space of five days. Then, I will hand deliver you to the church on Monday, where you will marry Ciara O’Byrne, and consummate the marriage as soon as you can get your hands on her without a public indecency charge being filed against you.
You will go back to your apartment with her and play happy families.
You will produce an heir with her. You will forget about the cards, you will forget about the booze, and you will stop being a fucking embarrassment to this family and me. ”
He lays it all out, a fucking blueprint for the rest of my miserable life. The Glock is still steady in his hand, aimed not at me, but at the space just above my head. The smell of gunpowder hangs in the air, sharp and acrid, cutting through the stink of stale booze on my clothes.
He’s not bluffing. Not this time. The cold reality of it sinks into my bones, chilling me more than any hangover ever could. This isn’t a threat; it’s a fucking business proposal, and the terms are non-negotiable. My life for my compliance.
“And if I don’t?” I ask, the words tasting like poison.
He doesn’t smile. Connor O’Neill never smiles. He just lowers the gun, the click of the safety echoing in the dead quiet room. “Then Ciara O’Byrne becomes a very wealthy widow before she’s even a bride.”
He stands and walks to the door without another word, closing it quietly behind him. The lock turns with a heavy, final thud.
I’m alone. The silence is deafening. The first tremors are already starting in my hands. Five days. Five days of this fucking room, with nothing but my own demons for company.
But then I smile. “There is no way,” I mutter and slide off the bed.
Crawling under the huge four-poster, I reach the foot and tap the wood where I had a custom-made safe built in.
It holds fake passports, a spare gun, a burner phone, enough cash to disappear with and a flask of whisky.
The little door pops open, and rage courses through me.
Empty.
All of it. Gone.
“You fucker!” I hiss and roll out, going dizzy as I land on my back and stare at the ceiling.
But that’s not the only place. When you start drinking at fourteen, you learn to be creative where you hide your booze.
I get on all fours and crawl to the en-suite bathroom.
The tiles are a cold shock against my sweaty palms. Reaching behind the toilet, I scrabble against the porcelain, searching for the loose tile I’d prised up sixteen years ago.
It was my first real stash. A small flask, always kept full.
The tile is sealed. Solid. Mortared back into place as if it had never been moved.
Every single one. He knew about every single one.
A cold sweat breaks out across my forehead.
The shakes are worse now, a tremor that starts in my gut and radiates out to my fingertips.
The walls of the bathroom close in, the opulent space shrinking into a white-tiled coffin.
He has imprisoned me, and he has systematically dismantled every escape route I ever built.
I collapse back, my head hitting the cabinet under the sink with a dull thud.
The pain is distant. All I can feel is the gnawing, clawing need in my veins and the raw, terrifying certainty that I am well and truly fucked.
There is no bottle to dull this. There is only the raw, unfiltered reality of what he’s doing to me.
He’s not just sobering me up. He’s unmaking me, and I’m not sure what the fuck will be left when he’s done.