Chapter 34
Sean
The steering wheel is slick under my palms, but it’s sweat, not the tremors. For the first time in a decade, the comedown from violence doesn’t scream for whisky. It screams for blood. Ryan O’Sullivan’s blood.
I glance at Ciara. She’s pale, her teeth gritted against the pain radiating from her shoulder, but she hasn’t made a sound.
She’s pressing her hand against the wound, eyes scanning the perimeter like a seasoned soldier.
She is fucking magnificent. And she is mine.
The thought hits me harder than the recoil of the shotgun earlier—she took a bullet for this plan. For me.
I pull over to the side of the road, bouncing up the curb as she glares at me.
“What are you doing?”
“Slowing down a fucking second. I want to make sure you’re okay.”
“I told you, I’m fine.”
I press my fingers to her lips. “Can I just take care of you for a second?”
“While we have enemies on our tails?”
“We’re clear. No one has tailed us. Give me this, Ciara.”
She looks over her shoulder, but then the fight goes out of her. She nods.
I kill the engine. The street is empty—residential, quiet. A dog barks in the distance. For a moment, it’s almost peaceful.
“Let me see,” I say.
She shifts in her seat, wincing as she peels her hand away from her shoulder. Blood has soaked through her shirt, dark and spreading. My jaw tightens.
“It’s not that bad,” she says.
“Shut up.”
I reach into the glove box and pull out the seriously lacking first aid kit I’d bought one night when I’d hit my head on a bar during a fight and it wouldn’t stop bleeding. My hands are steady as I open it—steadier than they’ve been in years.
“This is going to hurt,” I warn.
“I’ve had worse.”
I don’t doubt it. But that doesn’t mean I have to like it. “I hate that you have.” I use two of the antiseptic wipes and press them to the wound. She hisses through her teeth, her fingers digging into the seat. I keep the pressure firm but gentle, watching her face.
“Breathe,” I murmur.
“I am breathing.”
“Then breathe slower. Obey your husband.”
She glares at me, but she does it. Her shoulders drop, her jaw unclenches. I wipe away the blood, relieved to see it’s not as deep as I feared. The bullet grazed her—tore through muscle, but didn’t lodge.
“You were lucky,” I say.
“I know.”
I tape a bandage over the wound, my fingers lingering on her skin longer than necessary. She’s warm, alive. Real. I can feel her pulse under my fingertips—fast, but steady.
“Sean.”
I look up. Her eyes are softer now, the adrenaline fading.
“Thank you,” she says.
“For what?”
“For stopping. For this.” She gestures at the bandage. “For not treating me like I’m made of glass, but also for caring.”
I lean back in my seat, exhausted suddenly. “You’re the strongest person I know, Ciara. But that doesn’t mean I don’t want to protect you.”
“I know.” She reaches across the console and takes my hand. Her fingers thread through mine, grounding me. “But we protect each other now. That’s the deal. For better or for worse.”
I bring her hand to my lips and kiss her knuckles. “For better or for worse.”
For a moment, we just sit there. Two people covered in blood and soot, holding hands in a beat-up car on a quiet Dublin street. It should feel wrong. But it doesn’t.
It feels like the first thing I’ve done right in years.
“We should go,” she says eventually. “Connor’s waiting.”
I nod and start the engine. But I don’t let go of her hand.
The drive to Connor’s takes fifteen minutes. I stretch it to twenty.
Ciara doesn’t comment, probably thinking I’m taking the scenic route to avoid tails.
She leans her head against the window, her fingers laced through mine, and watches the world go past. I go through side streets, and anywhere that buys us a few more minutes of this.
Of her hand in mine. Of the loud rattle of the engine and the warmth of her skin and the knowledge that, for now, we’re both alive.
I don’t want to let go.
I don’t want to walk into Connor’s house, hand over the ledger, and watch her become a soldier again. I want to keep driving. I want to take her somewhere far away from the blood-soaked world we were born into.
But I can’t.
I pull onto Connor’s street. The house looms ahead—dark, imposing, familiar. The iron gates open as we approach, which tells me everything I need to know about his eyes on us.
We crawl up the red-bricked drive. I kill the engine but don’t move. Neither does she.
“You ready?” she asks.
“No.” I turn to look at her fully. “But we’re doing it anyway.”
She leans across the console and kisses me—soft, deliberate.
Her hand finds my jaw, thumb grazing the stubble there as she presses closer, her breath warm against my mouth.
She kisses me like she’s memorizing the taste of me, like she’s afraid this moment might be our last. I return it, knowing it might.
When she pulls back, her eyes are fierce. “Just keep thinking of St. Kitts.”
“St. Kitts,” I echo, locking the promise into the forefront of my mind. It’s the anchor I’ll need for the storm we’re about to walk into. White sand, blue water, and no bloodshed.
I grab the ledger from under the seat, clutching it like a grenade with the pin pulled.
It’s heavy, dirty, and worth more than the rusted heap of metal we drove in on.
I get out and round the hood to Ciara, wrapping a protective arm around her uninjured side.
She leans into me, favoring her shoulder, her face pale, but her chin held high.
I open the massive oak doors and lead her inside, crossing the entrance hall to Connor’s study, where we find him practically vibrating with unexpressed rage.
“Where in the name of God have you been?” Connor bellows, his gaze snapping from my split lip to the blood soaking Ciara’s shirt. “Did you know there is a fucking price on your head?”
“We know. But that is the least of your worries.” I don’t flinch.
I don’t look for an exit or a drink. For the first time in my life, I don’t feel small in his shadow.
I meet his glare with a cold, sober stare of my own.
“We were fixing a problem you didn’t know you had.
” I drop the blood-spattered ledger onto his desk.
“Ryan O’Sullivan is broke and is selling his assets off to the Bratva to pay his debts. Here’s the receipts.”
For a second, he just stares at me, the fury over my disappearance warring with the bombshell I just dropped on his desk.
“Bratva?” he spits the word like it’s poison, his face twisting in disgust. He opens the ledger, his eyes scanning the frantic scrawl of names and numbers.
“Seven figures,” I say, my voice hard and unyielding.
“He’s betting with his last euros, and the Russians are picking up the winnings as payment.
That hit on me wasn’t personal. It was business.
Me gone means Ciara is free to remarry, her dowry is up for grabs again, and he goes some way to paying off the wolves at his door, while bargaining with O’Byrne for territory. ”
The room goes dead silent. I watch the realization sink in. The man who has looked at me with disappointment for a decade finally sees me. Not as the spare. Not as the drunk. But as the man standing between him and a hostile takeover.
Connor snaps the book shut, his knuckles white. He rises slowly, and I brace myself for what’s coming.
He surprises me by letting out a roar and swiping the glass of Bushmills off his desk to go crashing into the wall, smashing crystal and poison everywhere. “That fucker! This is war. I’m going to annihilate that piece of shit—”
“No.”
The word stops him in his tracks.
His gaze lands on me again, icy cold.
“No,” I say again before he can say anything.
Moving forward, I lean on the desk, calm and collected despite the stench of the booze in my nostrils.
“You can deal with the Russians. They aren’t going after my territory.
I don’t give a single fuck about them. They aren’t even in my periphery.
But O’Sullivan… he is mine. He is pissing on my territory, and he will pay for it.
No one fucks with my wife and lives. Now, if you will excuse me, we both need a fucking shower and food.
Ciara needs patching up with a decent medikit, not some two-euro piece of shit that is only good for a scratch.
Arrange to have that sent up to my room, deal with the Russians, but you leave O’Sullivan out of this until I’m ready to end him. ”
Connor stares at me, surprise and pride in his gaze as I straighten up and turn from him, taking Ciara’s arm and leading her out of the room. She hasn’t said a word. She is pale and needs to get off her feet and food into her before she passes out.
I don’t look back. I don’t wait for his permission to leave, or for the explosion that might follow. For the first time in thirty years, the silence behind me feels like respect. But the only thing that matters is the woman leaning heavily against my side, her blood seeping into my hoodie.
We take the stairs slowly. Ciara doesn’t complain, but I feel the fine tremor running through her body. She’s tough as nails, forged in the same brutal fire as me, but everyone has a breaking point, and she’s been running on adrenaline and spite for hours.
“You’re a rockstar,” she whispers, her voice breathless as we reach the landing.
“I handled myself like a fucking O’Neill.” Pushing open the door to my bedroom, I lead her inside and kick the door shut, locking the world out. I guide her straight to the en-suite. She is wrecked.
“Sit,” I order, lowering her onto the closed toilet lid.
I turn on the tap in the tub, letting the water run hot before adding enough cold water so she can sit in it comfortably. I help her undress and get her into the steaming water.
She sighs and leans back, wincing at the pain in her arm. I hear the door opening to my room and probably Bridgit, one of Connor’s housekeepers, bustling about.
“I’ll be right back,” I say to her.
She nods, her eyes closed.
Moving into the bedroom, I see trays of food, and my stomach growls, but I grab the medikit and return to Ciara. I set the kit on the vanity and kneel beside the tub. She is under the water, rinsing sweat and sex out of her hair, exposing her wound to God knows what.
But I get it.
We are disgusting.
My chest tightens. That’s my fault. All of it.
“How’s the pain?” I ask when she surfaces with a hiss, dipping a cloth into the hot water.
“Manageable,” she rasps, keeping her eyes closed. “Better now that I’m not being jostled in a death trap.”
I wring out the cloth and gently run it over her arm, washing away dried blood and the grime of the day. She hisses when I get close to the graze, but she doesn’t pull away. She trusts me.
“I’m going to clean it properly now,” I warn her, uncapping the disinfectant. “This will sting.”
She cracks one eye open, a faint smirk playing on her lips. “Do your worst, O’Neill.”
I work quickly, applying the antiseptic and taping a fresh, sterile dressing over the wound. My usually shaking hands are steady. She is my anchor.
“Done,” I say, sitting back on my heels. “Now, I’m going to wash the rest of you because you fucking stink, before I bleach myself. Then we eat.”
“We don’t have time for all of this, Sean. We need to move on O’Sullivan.”
“He will still be there tomorrow. If we go after him now, like this, we will fail. You need to rest, and I need to eat. I’m fucking starving as well as stinky.”
She narrows her eyes at me. She knows I’m doing this for her.
If it were just me, I’d be all guns blazing, but I know she will gut me like she has threatened to if I leave her on the sidelines.
But then she smiles and nods. She knows as well as I do that going after him now would be a deadly mistake.
“Fine. Have your shower, and then we eat.”
I strip off the rest of my clothes, kicking them into a heap in the corner. They belong in a fucking incinerator. I step into the shower stall and crank the heat until it’s nearly scalding.
I scrub until my skin is red and raw, watching the water swirl down the drain.
It takes the physical grime, but the itch inside my veins remains.
It’s quieter now, though. Muted by the adrenaline and the terrifying realization that I actually have something to lose.
For the first time, the water isn’t washing away the shame of a hangover; it’s baptizing me.
Cleansing me so that the crucible I face doesn’t seem like the end of the world anymore.
When I step out, Ciara is already out of the tub, wrapped in a towel. She looks pale, dark circles bruising the skin under her eyes, but she’s standing. That’s Ciara. She’d stand on a broken leg just to prove she could.
“You look better,” she lies, handing me a towel which I wrap around my hips.
“I look like shit, but at least I smell better now.” I move to her, running a thumb over her damp cheek. “Let’s eat before you fall over.”
We move to the bedroom where the food waits. I pile a plate high with sandwiches and lift lids from the soup that has been hastily warmed up.
Ciara sinks to the bed and brings a sandwich to her mouth with a shaking hand. I sit next to her, the bowl of soup in my hand. I bring it to my lips and drink it like it’s from a mug, gulping it back and letting the warmth of the chicken and vegetables revive me.
We eat in silence, and when Ciara is done, I help her lie down so she is comfortable, crawling up next to her and lying flat on my back.
She is already asleep, but I’m too wired.
Being as quiet as I can, I climb off the bed and move to the closet to pull on a fresh pair of jeans and a tee.
Staying barefoot, I move out of the room like a ghost and head down the stairs, just for something to do. To move.
When I reach the bottom of the stairs, the muted voices make me pause.
Then a flash of fury hits my chest so hard, I nearly stumble back from the violence of it.
“James,” I growl under my breath.