Chapter 26 Liam
The kitchen looked wrong in the gray hour before dawn.
The steel shutters were retracted now, the vault-like seal that had trapped Declan for the better part of an hour finally lifted.
But the space still felt somehow violated, changed, no longer just the cheerful, oyster-and-champagne kitchen from two nights before.
My father and brothers had arrived a little after three, a convoy of headlights sweeping up the gravel drive, Niall moving through the front door with the grim, purposeful efficiency of a man handling nefarious business.
I'd watched from the porch as they'd dragged Declan out, beaten down, exhausted.
Da, Tommy, and Pat loaded him into the back of Sean's SUV without a single word passing between any of them.
Now, with Declan gone and the sound of tires on gravel finally fading into silence, the five of us sat around the kitchen table in a strange, exhausted quiet.
My brothers flanked my father on one side, still dressed in whatever they'd thrown on in the middle of the night.
Roxy sat curled in the chair beside me, a blanket someone had draped over her shoulders, her hands wrapped tight around a mug of tea she hadn't actually touched.
Shock, probably, finally catching up with her now that the adrenaline had burned off.
She'd been steady and fierce through the whole ordeal, and now, in the aftermath, I could see exactly how much that composure had cost her.
I reached over and rested my hand against her knee, and she covered it with her own without looking away from whatever middle distance she'd been staring into for the last twenty minutes.
"What happens to him now?" I asked finally, breaking the heavy silence. "Declan."
My father was quiet for a long moment, turning his coffee mug slowly between weathered hands, the weight of his age etched into every line of his face.
"He's being sent back to Ireland," Niall said. "To the family there. Cousins of my father's, still working the old business back in Belfast."
"That's it? He just goes to Ireland?"
Something moved behind my father's eyes, a flicker of the same cold, absolute finality I'd seen in the driveway the night Declan shot me.
"There's family over there who'll see to him properly.
Handle things the old way." He said it evenly, without elaboration, but the heaviness in his voice, and the way Tommy and Pat both went suddenly very still and quiet beside him, told me everything his words carefully avoided saying outright.
Whatever waited for Declan across the ocean, I understood with cold certainty that my father did not intend for it to be gentle, and some old, tired part of me couldn't bring myself to argue the point.
Roxy's hand tightened slightly around mine, and I didn't need to look at her to know she'd reached the same understanding.
Niall pushed back from the table, the scrape of his chair against the floor signaling the conversation's natural end.
"The danger's passed," he said, looking between the two of us with something almost gentle underneath the exhaustion.
"Take her home, son. Both of you rest. We'll sort out everything else in the coming days. "
He pressed a kiss to Roxy's forehead, murmured something low I didn't quite catch, and then he and my brothers filed out into the gray predawn light, leaving the cabin unnervingly quiet in their wake.
I sat there a long moment after the sound of their cars faded, watching Roxy stare down into her cooling tea, the blanket still wrapped tight around her shoulders.
"Hey." I shifted closer, tilting her chin gently up until she met my eyes. "You okay?"
"I don't know." Her voice came out smaller than I'd ever heard it, all her earlier fierce composure finally cracking at the edges now that there was no one left to be strong for. "I keep thinking about how close it was. The signal dropping. If I'd been thirty seconds slower—"
"You weren't." I pulled her carefully into my good side, mindful of my shoulder, and felt her finally sag against me, some of the rigid tension bleeding slowly out of her frame. "You did everything right, Roxy. You saved us both tonight."
She was quiet for a while, breathing slow and unsteady against my chest. "I don't want to go back to my apartment," she said finally, so soft I almost missed it. "Not tonight. Maybe not for a while."
"Okay." I pressed a kiss against her hair, some old, protective instinct settling deep and warm inside of me at the admission. "Where do you want to go, then?"
She was quiet for another moment, and when she finally looked up at me, there was something new in her expression. It was something raw and honest and a little bit frightened, like she was admitting to something far bigger than a simple preference about where to sleep tonight.
"Take me back to your place," she said quietly. "I want to go home...with you."
* * *
The drive back to Northridge passed mostly in silence, the sky slowly lightening from black to deep blue.
The first pale streaks of gold crept up along the horizon by the time I pulled into the underground garage.
Roxy dozed against the window for most of it, exhaustion finally winning out over adrenaline.
I let her sleep, grateful for a few quiet miles to simply process everything that had happened in the last twelve hours.
She stirred as I parked, blinking groggily in the dim light. "We're here?"
"We're here."
I helped her up to the apartment, one arm around her waist more out of habit than necessity at this point, though she leaned into the support anyway, apparently as depleted as I felt.
The apartment was exactly as we'd left it days ago, sun now beginning to spill gold and pink across the river outside the windows, the whole world outside utterly indifferent to everything that had happened while we were gone.
I walked her to the bedroom, pushed back the covers, and settled her in, pulling the covers up over her shoulders.
"Get some sleep," I said, brushing a strand of hair back from her face. "I'll take the couch."
"Liam."
I paused at the door, turning back.
"Stay," she said quietly, patting the empty space beside her. "Please. I don't want to be alone right now."
I didn't need to be asked twice. I crossed back to the bed, easing myself down beside her with more care than usual for my healing shoulder. She immediately curled into my good side, her head finding the familiar space against my chest like she'd never actually left it.
We lay there a long while in comfortable silence, watching the sunrise slowly gild the ceiling above us, both of us too wired from the night's events to actually fall asleep despite the exhaustion weighing heavy in every limb.
"Liam," she said eventually, her voice soft in the quiet room. "Can I ask you something?"
"Anything."
She was quiet for a few seconds, gathering whatever courage she needed for the question, and when she finally spoke, her voice carried a vulnerability I rarely heard from her.
"Do you think we could have made it? If none of this had happened.
If we'd just... stayed married, worked through the hard parts like normal people. "
I thought about the question seriously, turning it over in my mind rather than rushing to whatever easy answer might comfort her most.
"I don't know," I admitted honestly. "I think we were young, and stupid, and neither of us knew how to actually talk to each other about the things that mattered.
I think I was so busy trying to protect you from everything that I forgot to just...
be honest with you. Trust you with the truth instead of deciding what you could handle. "
"And I ran instead of staying to fight for it."
"Yeah. You did."
She huffed a small, humorless laugh against my chest. "We really were terrible at this, weren't we?"
"Spectacularly."
The quiet stretched between us again, softer this time, less heavy. I found myself staring up at the ceiling, at the golden morning light slowly filling the room, and felt something I'd been circling around for days finally crystallize into words I could no longer keep to myself.
"What if we try again?"
Roxy went very still against me. "Because it went so well the first time?"
"We're older now," I said, undeterred, propping myself up slightly to look down at her.
"More mature. I'm financially secure now.
My own accounts, my own decisions. My family still loves you, obviously, if tonight didn't make that clear enough.
" I brushed my thumb gently along her jaw, watching her carefully, needing her to understand I meant every word.
"Why not, Roxy? Why not actually try, this time, instead of just surviving alone? "
She fell silent, something timid and afraid moving behind her eyes, all her usual sharp deflections nowhere in sight.
"I'm scared," she admitted finally, so softly I almost missed it.
"Of what?"
"Of all of it. Of trying again and it just...falling apart the same way. Of losing myself in this family, in you, the way I did before. Of finding out that the fear was right all along, that we're just destined to keep hurting each other no matter how hard we try not to."
I pulled her closer, pressing a slow kiss to her forehead.
"That's what therapy is for," I said quietly.
She let out a startled, watery laugh, half sob, muffled against my shirt. "That's such a stupid answer."
"It's a true one, though." I tilted her chin up gently, meeting her eyes in the golden morning light.
"I'm not asking you to just trust that everything magically works out this time, Roxy.
I'm asking you to try, with me, actually try.
Try therapy, honesty, whatever hard work it takes.
I don't want to survive anymore. I want to actually build something real, this time. If you're willing."
She studied me for a long, searching moment, the fear in her eyes giving way, gradually, to something softer, more hopeful, more terrifyingly honest than either of us had allowed ourselves to be in years.
"Okay," she whispered finally.
"Okay?"
"Okay. Let's try." A small, tremulous smile broke across her face, achingly familiar, achingly hopeful. "Therapy and everything."
I kissed her then, slow and soft and infinitely relieved, the golden morning light spilling warm across the bed. Three years and a lifetime of complicated history finally settled into something that felt like home.