In Too Deep

16. Epilogue

~Cara~

Three months later

My stomach had been in knots for the entire flight, which thankfully didn’t take much over an hour. The grey skies and rain streaking down the plane window offered little in the way of a warm welcome, but Kian squeezed my hand supportively as the wheels touched the ground.

“Stop worrying, Cara. If you get into any trouble, just remind them your own brother went missing and you were the last one to see him. They’ll get the hint.”

I shook my head at him in disapproval. “You really think threatening your brothers is the way to win them over?”

“I know it is. They like anyone who can give as good as they get, but honestly, they just like to tease. Inside, they’re all big softies, just like me. They’re going to love you, and Mam will too.”

Kian got in touch with his family shortly after getting out of police custody, letting them know that his undercover mission had ended, but he hadn’t been to see them yet. We’d been waiting until the official reports had been filed around David Park’s death and all the other men who died that night. From the information I’d given them, plus what they could recover from Thomas’ phone and Park’s phone, they were able to confirm that Thomas had been working for Park for more than a year. Bank records confirmed payments he’d been sent, including a ‘bonus’ after Matt’s death. Kian almost punched a hole through the wall of our temporary flat when he read that.

There were texts confirming that Park’s aim had been to kill Marco and take over his business, Park had always intended to get rid of Thomas as soon as that had been accomplished. Thomas would have never received the payout he’d been willing to kill Kian over. The betrayer would have been betrayed, the web of lies and payments and double-crossing stretching throughout Park’s whole operation.

I kept working while we waited for the results of the investigation, and Kian kept up his volunteering commitments but made no move to return to his job as a police officer until he knew if he’d been completely cleared. He took me to meet Matt’s widow, and she wanted to hear the whole story about how we’d met. Saying it all out loud made it sound even more unbelievable that we should have survived and ended up together, but nothing had ever felt so right.

Once the officers confirmed the case was closed and no charges would be coming against either of us, we were free to leave the country, and Dublin was our first stop.

It would have been impossible to miss the O’Donnell family when we walked out of the baggage claim after picking up our bags. The whole clan had turned out: a loud, lively group of men who all looked similar to Kian, their wives and partners, too many children to count, and at the centre of it all, a petite woman with grey-streaked brown hair and a warm smile. Kian’s smile.

“Welcome to your new home, love,” she said as she wrapped her strong arms around me, and tears unexpectedly came to my eyes. It had been a long time since I”d had a mother”s hug.

Dinner at Kian’s family’s house must have been what eating in a madhouse would be like. People rarely stayed in one place, conversations were shouted across the room, and children came and went, disappearing beneath the table to squeeze out of the narrow dining room. I gave up trying to keep track of everything going on and focused on simply speaking to the person next to me instead. Kian’s brother, Sean, kept me laughing with stories about Kian growing up, and soon the whole table was joining in while the man in question sat across from me, soaking it in and only occasionally throwing me an embarrassed shrug.

We’d booked a hotel to stay at, but when we went to leave for the night, Kian’s mom pulled out an envelope. “This came for Cara the other day. I held onto it since I knew you’d be coming soon.”

Kian took it from her with a thank you and we headed out into the night air. “What is it?” I asked curiously.

“There’s no return address but the postmark is from Italy,” he told me, which only made me more curious. I didn’t know anyone in Italy besides my brother. He knew we were planning to be in Dublin for a visit but I hadn’t given him Kian’s mother’s address. He must have found it all on his own.

Kian handed the envelope to me and inside, I found a key and a piece of paper with an address on it. Nothing else; no signature, no note, nothing.

“That’s not far from here,” Kian said, reading the address over my shoulder. “Do you have any idea what it might be?”

“None at all, but we could go check it out.” Hand-in-hand, we walked the few blocks in the quiet Dublin night until we reached a pretty, detached house behind a stone wall. No lights were on inside.

Kian knocked on the door anyway. When no one answered, he took the key from me and unlocked it, pushing the door open. “Hello?” he called out into the dark entry, but no one replied.

We both stepped inside and flipped the light on to find a clean, modern interior, tastefully decorated. A sitting room branched off to the right while the kitchen was straight ahead, past the staircase. Curiously, we peered around the rooms until I noticed the bouquet of flowers on the kitchen table with a note stuck in them. Giving Kian a shrug, I pulled the paper out and read it aloud to him.

A new house for a new start, for as long as you want it. Love, Marco

“He bought us a house?” Kian asked in disbelief, looking around again at the well-appointed interior. “What if we decide not to stay here?”

That was still up in the air. We’d come to Dublin to see Kian’s family with no set return date. I’d taken an indefinite leave of absence from my job, and Mr Mitchell must have shared that with Marco. Maybe that explained why he thought we might stay.

“He says for as long as we want it,” I pointed out. “I think he still wants us to come to Italy, but we need to decide for ourselves what we want. I guess this is as good a place as any to take some time to think?”

“And you’d be okay with that?” He wrapped his arms around me, pulling me close to him.

“As long as we’re together, it doesn’t matter where we are.”

Our lips connected, softly at first, but quickly growing hungrier.

“What do you think the bed’s like in this place?” Kian whispered.

“Only one way to find out.” With a wink, I grabbed his hand and led him up the stairs.

~Kian~

Six months later

The sun shone brightly as the car Marco sent drove us out of Rome, into the countryside. He had refused to send his address, not trusting that it couldn’t be hacked, so when we got to the airport, we simply got in the car with no idea where we were heading.

Eventually, the car turned off onto a single-lane road that led up to a tall wall, so tall we couldn’t see what was on the other side. The driver pressed a button on the intercom at the gate, speaking to someone in Italian before the gate swung open for us.

“Are you surprised by any of this?” I asked Cara, who was busy peering out the window on the other side.

“I’m only surprised there’s not more security,” she said with a laugh. “We haven’t been through the body scanners yet.”

She spoke too soon. Before long, we reached another gate, and there, both we and our luggage were thoroughly checked before we were let into a courtyard that led up to the villa itself.

“Wow.” Cara’s mouth dropped open as she got her first look at her brother’s new home. A swimming pool surrounded by a stone patio and pergola stretched to our left while a modern house, more glass than stone, rose to our right, with sliding patio doors leading to a sitting room on the ground level. “This is quite a change from London.”

I offered her my arm as we walked over to the house, and Marco appeared at the door just as we reached it, obviously having been informed of our arrival. He looked more tan than the last time we’d seen him, and he walked with a bit of a limp, but his face broke into a genuine grin at the sight of his sister, and Cara let go of me to throw her arms around him while I stood back, enjoying their reunion.

“Kian.” Marco held out his hand to me when he and Cara had finished embracing. “Welcome.”

“Thanks for having us. This place is really something.”

“It’s a bit out of the way, but it’s private.” The twitch of his lips betrayed his pride even as he tried to downplay it. “It has a 13th century chapel on the grounds behind the house, which is a nice feature.”

“Really?” Cara’s head craned to see it, though the house was far too wide.

“Yes. It’ll be the perfect venue for your wedding.”

“Excuse me?” Neither of us had told Marco yet about me asking Cara to marry me. We hadn’t told anyone, not even my family. It only happened two days earlier.

My surprise didn’t concern Marco. “Now that Cara’s pregnant, you’ll be getting married, I assume.”

“How… how do you know that?” Cara crossed her arms over her chest suspiciously. We had planned to tell him both things, about the pregnancy and the wedding, during our visit, but again, no one else knew about the baby yet other than Cara’s doctor.

“You hacked her medical records?” I couldn’t see any other explanation.

Marco shrugged, not denying it. “I’m just keeping an eye on things. I haven’t interfered, have I?”

He hadn’t. We’d barely heard a word from him over the nine months since he left London, until he sent the plane tickets that brought us here. We hadn’t been sure if there was a particular reason he wanted us to visit, but Cara had been itching to go anyway, so it seemed like good timing. Now, we knew why.

“I can’t travel to Ireland for the wedding,” he told us bluntly. “So you’ll have to get married here. You can have another wedding there for everyone else, but I get to give the bride away. It’s only right.”

I glanced over at Cara to see her reaction. I thought she might tell him off for making decisions for her again, but she didn’t argue. “Since we were already planning on getting married, that’s fine. We can have a wedding here and one in Ireland too.”

“Good.” Marco’s expression relaxed, as if he’d been anticipating an argument and was pleasantly surprised not to get one. “In that case, come and get settled and we can talk about the arrangements.”

Over a beautiful outdoor meal, Marco filled us in on what he’d been doing. His London business continued to operate remotely, with a few of his associates handling things in person on his behalf. He’d also taken the opportunity to expand his business in Italy and was finding it equally lucrative.

“David Park has essentially doubled my profits,” he told us with satisfaction. “Not at all what he set out to do, but if he were still with us, I’d send him a card. Now, how is your program going?”

When Cara and I decided to stay in Dublin, we needed something to do, and so we’d started a small charity in the heart of the city, built on the Little Hands model. Beatrice gave us plenty of guidance, and we found tons of volunteers to come and help with lessons. Cara worked with the kids every day, helping them find the right instruments for them, and she did outreach work, using her own story of losing her ability to play to help garner donations of money and instruments for the program.

“It makes me feel a little better that something good can come out of it,” she told me when I asked if she was sure she felt comfortable speaking about it.

She kept composing too, and we were planning on putting on a concert of some of her compositions with some of my songs, a mixture of classical and modern music performed by some of our volunteers, to help bring in even more money. Our little house suited us perfectly. Life felt just about perfect, and that was even before we’d got the wonderful news of Cara’s pregnancy. We hadn’t been trying but we hadn’t been doing anything to actively prevent it either, and when she told me the news, it felt right.

Everything about us felt right.

“Do you miss your police work?” Marco asked as we poured me another glass of the local wine beneath the setting sun, with sparkling water for Cara.

“I miss parts of it,” I told him honestly. “But for me, the point was always to help people. I’m still doing that now, just in a different way. A way that’s a lot less likely to get me killed, which I think Cara appreciates.”

She nodded, taking my hand and gave me her beautiful smile that filled my whole body with warmth. People had warned me about the dangers of getting in too deep when going undercover, and if anyone had told me a year earlier that I’d be sitting outside an Italian villa with Marco Russo, making plans to marry his sister, I would have laughed in their face.

Life had a way of surprising us, though, and in the end, there was nowhere else in the world I’d rather be.

~~THE END~~