10. Declan
Declan
Maeve remains in my arms after telling me I must earn the years ahead, though every line of her body warns me not to mistake stillness for surrender.
Her lips are swollen from my kiss. Her fingers remain curled against my chest, close enough to pull me back or shove me away.
The photographs of the dead lie scattered across the table behind her, a fitting audience for two people who have survived too much to call desire innocent.
I loosen my hold on her waist. Wanting her has always made control feel like an insult, but taking what she has not freely offered would prove I have learned nothing.
Seven years ago, I believed loving Maeve meant she belonged to me.
Tonight, I understand the more dangerous truth.
I can possess every room she enters and still have no claim on the woman standing inside them.
“You should go to bed.” I step back before hunger makes the decision for both of us. “Alone, before you accuse me of stealing another year.”
Maeve’s eyes narrow. “You kiss me against a table and then discover restraint. Your timing remains offensive.”
“My timing produced a six-year-old son I met yesterday.” I reach for the scattered files because looking at paper is safer than looking at her mouth. “There is evidence supporting caution.”
She catches the photograph before I can lift it. Our hands meet, and heat climbs my arm with humiliating ease. “Do not hide behind the dead. They have suffered enough.”
I release the file but not her gaze. The room holds the scent of her skin, old books, and the whiskey I poured but never drank.
In another life, this would have ended with Maeve beneath me and the library door locked against the rest of the world.
We used to believe desire settled arguments.
In truth, it postponed them until resentment learned to sharpen itself.
“You told me you waited after you fled.” I lean against the table, keeping the distance she demanded even while hating every inch of it. “You did not tell me how long.”
“Until Cillian began moving.” Her defiance softens around the memory. “Five months, perhaps a little longer. Every unfamiliar car slowed my heart. Every man who entered the village made me wonder whether you had finally found the trail.”
“You believed I had come to kill you.”
“I did.” She folds her arms, but the gesture looks less like defence than an attempt to hold herself together. “Some days, I also hoped you had come because waiting for a murderer felt less pathetic than waiting for a man who loved me.”
The words tear through every excuse I have constructed. While I searched account records and cursed her name, Maeve carried my child in a village where every engine sounded like death. She feared me and still waited. Love rarely behaves with dignity. Ours has spent seven years proving it.
“When Cillian first kicked, I stopped waiting.” Maeve glances toward the door, beyond which our son sleeps. “I realised my life could no longer be built around whether you came. By then, I thought you had chosen the Syndicate. So I chose him.”
“You should have chosen him.” The admission costs less than it once would have. “But I wish you had given me the chance to choose you both.”
“I thought you already had.” Pain flashes in her eyes. “Your name was beneath the order.”
I nod because no defence belongs between us. She told me this before, but understanding is not a single revelation. It is a punishment that changes shape each time I imagine her holding that test while my threat reached her over the phone.
“I tracked rumours of you for years.” I take the lighter from my pocket and set it between us.
“A red-haired woman in Montreal using forged Irish papers. A Gallagher cousin seen in Glasgow. A shipment clerk in Cork who disappeared before my men arrived. Most led nowhere. Two were traps set by people who wanted to measure how badly I wanted you found.”
Maeve looks at the worn silver casing. “You told yourself you wanted revenge.”
“I told everyone that.” I strike the wheel and watch the small flame rise. “A man hunting a traitor remains dangerous. A man searching for the woman who broke him becomes vulnerable.”
“So you chose pride.”
“I chose the version of wanting you that allowed me to remain cruel.” I extinguish the flame. “I carried this through every search. When a lead failed, I would light a cigarette and tell myself the next one would end with your blood. It was easier than admitting I wanted to see you alive.”
Her fingers close around the lighter. She traces my crooked initials, the ones she carved while sitting on my kitchen counter with whiskey warming her smile.
I remember holding her knees apart while she worked, warning that she would ruin an expensive gift.
She said anything improved after surviving her attention.
She was right. The lighter is scratched, dulled, and more valuable to me than every pristine object in this house.
“You kept looking.” Her voice is quiet. “Even after the witness-protection documents.”
“I searched less openly.” I close my hand over hers around the lighter. “Never less desperately.”
Maeve lifts her eyes to mine. The anger is still there, but desire has moved beside it, no longer willing to hide. She steps between my knees and places the lighter in my shirt pocket. Her fingers remain against my chest. I wait because this choice must be hers.
“If I stay tonight, it does not mean I forgive you.” She slides her hand to my collar. “It does not mean you own me, and it does not repair what happened.”
“It means you stay tonight.” I grip the table instead of her. “I am capable of understanding limited agreements.”
“You have invaded countries over limited agreements.”
“Only poorly worded ones.” My gaze drops to her lips. “Be precise.”
She kisses me before I can say anything more.
There is no hesitation in it, only anger given a mouth and hunger finally released from its cage.
My restraint lasts until her fingers enter my hair and pull.
Then I seize her waist and bring her against me, taking the kiss deeper while she meets every demand with one of her own.
She tastes the same, though neither of us is the person who first learned this pleasure.
Seven years live in the desperation of her hands, in the sharp breath she takes when I lift her onto the edge of the table, and in the way my entire body recognises the weight of her before thought can interfere.
I press my mouth along her jaw, finding the place beneath her ear that once made her lose every clever answer.
Her head tips back, granting access, but when I tighten my hold, she catches my chin and forces me to meet her eyes.
The command in her touch stops me. This is not the woman I lost. She survived me, carried our son, and built a life beyond my reach.
If she gives herself now, it will not be because I am stronger.
“Do not treat me like something you have reclaimed.” Her breathing is uneven, but her gaze does not falter. “I came back for Cillian. I am here because I choose to be here tonight.”
“Then choose every touch.” I place her hand against my chest and release her waist. “Tell me no, and I stop.”
Maeve studies me as if searching for the trap.
Then she pushes my shirt from my shoulders, runs her palms over the scars time has added, and drags her nails down my chest with enough force to make pain blur into pleasure.
She kisses the scar beneath my ribs, the one she stitched years ago while calling me a reckless bastard.
Memory and sensation become impossible to separate.
When she pulls my belt free, she does it with the same imperious impatience she once used to strip weapons from me before bed.
“This is not surrender.” She opens my shirt and presses her mouth to my throat. “If anyone is surrendering, it will be you.”
“I have spent seven years losing to you.” I grip the edge of the table as her teeth graze my skin. “I am accustomed to humiliation.”
“You disguise it well.”
“I have excellent tailoring.”
Her laughter breaks against my mouth, soft and startled, and the sound nearly undoes me more completely than desire.
It’s a ghost of a sound, something I haven’t heard since before the raid, before the world we built was reduced to ash and warrants.
For one heartbeat, the seven years of silence between us evaporate.
Maeve is in my arms, alive, furious, and her mouth is soft against mine, her body pressed against me with a force that feels like both accusation and surrender.
The scent of her, something clean and floral, undercut with the metallic tang of her own anger, fills my lungs.
My hands, which have been clenched into fists at my sides for most of this conversation, finally move.
I slide one into the thick silk of her hair, the other around the small of her back, pulling her flush against me. She fits. She always fucking fit.
Then she kisses me again, and the past stops being a refuge and becomes fuel.
This isn’t the tentative, exploring kiss of two strangers.
This is a war. Her teeth nip at my lower lip, a sharp, punishing sting that makes my cock throb against the confines of my trousers.
I taste her fury, her grief, the bitter residue of years spent thinking I was a monster.
I kiss her back with equal violence, my tongue invading her mouth, claiming the space I’ve been starved of.
My grip in her hair tightens, tilting her head to the angle I want, and she lets out a low sound, half-growl, half-moan, that vibrates straight through my skull.
We are not Declan and Maeve in this moment.
We are two halves of a broken thing, trying to smash themselves back together with enough force to make the pieces stick.