Chapter 48
The headlights slice through the dark as we tear across the outskirts of Liverpool. The old mental facility rises ahead of us—rotting brick, blown-out windows, its silhouette crouched against the night like something waiting to strike.
“She’s here,” I rasp. It isn’t logic or evidence that make me say it. It’s a bone deep instinct—violent and undeniable. “She’s here.”
Liam kills the engine. The sudden quiet presses in, thick and wrong.
Jonathan leans in close, whispering, “Stay sharp. If they hear us coming—”
But the wind answers for him.
A sound slips through the broken building, thin at first, almost swallowed by the night. As it trickles in through Owen’s rolled-down window, I freeze.
Liam’s head snaps up. Jonathan lets out a curse. Owen goes still beside me, as if we can pretend we didn’t just hear it by staying perfectly still.
And then it comes again—clearer, sharper. Shattering the last threads of my patience.
A scream.
Her scream.
High. Terrified. Ripped straight from her throat.
It cuts through the dark and straight through me, detonating something savage in my chest. Every plan evaporates. Every warning disappears. There is no strategy anymore only Lily, only that sound, and only the need to end whoever caused it.
“Go,” I snarl, already moving, boots pounding toward the entrance as the world narrows to blood and fire.
“Matt—” Jonathan roars behind me.
But it’s too late.
Nothing on earth could stop me now.
I’m coming for her.
And God help the man who made Lily scream.
I run. My boots hit the gravel and asphalt like drums, a relentless rhythm of fury and fear.
Jonathan calls something behind me, Liam yells, cars are pulling up, men jumping out with shouts, but the noise is all meaningless, swallowed by the sound of my heartbeat hammering in my ears.
I am a storm, a force of nature, moving toward her.
Nothing else exists except that scream and the knowledge that I am the only one who can stop it.
The seemingly abandoned building looms before me, jagged shadows stretching across broken windows and rusting metal. Every instinct screams to slow down, to assess, to wait, but I can’t. I won’t.
Bolting straight for the front door, I don’t hesitate. Instead, I crash into it, one hand on the handle and another on my knife. The second the door opens, I’m sprinting past the walls with their cracked cream paint and the thick layers of grime and dust on bulletin boards and bolted-down tables.
Footsteps echo behind me—guards trying to intercept—but I barely see them.
One reaches for a baton. I shove, and his body hits the wall with a sickening thud.
Another draws a gun, only to grunt in pain as someone behind me shoots him.
But I barely register the action. There is only her, and the need threaded into my very DNA to reach her before it’s too late.
The scream comes again, closer now, sharper, lacerating my chest. I follow it blindly, turning corners, crashing through doors, ignoring the chaos behind me. And then I see her and, for a split second, the world freezes.
Not because of Lily—though she’s there, chest heaving with panicked breaths, clutching a terrified redhead's hand even as her own fear bleeds from her every pore—but because the woman cornering her isn’t just some random enemy.
It’s my mother. Standing in the middle of this slaughterhouse like she belongs here.
The sight of her here hits wrong. Deep. Like a bone that never healed properly, suddenly snapping all over again.
Of course, she’s dressed perfectly. Of course, she looks untouched by the chaos, the violence, the screaming. She always did know how to stand in the wreckage and pretend her hands were clean.
For half a heartbeat, my mind refuses to catch up. Glitches as it tries to insist this is some trick, some warped coincidence. That she shouldn’t be here. That she wouldn’t be here.
Then her eyes meet mine.
And there’s no mistaking it.
There’s no guilt or remorse in Una’s eyes, only calculation, like she’s weighing me up and determining what way to play this. Trying to decide how best to twist this to her advantage.
And with that look comes the betrayal—cold and brutal—spreading through my chest like frostbite. This isn’t just her choosing power over people. This isn’t just her manipulating from the shadows.
This is her standing shoulder to shoulder with the man who took Lily.
Working with the man behind the ring that stole years from Helen, tried to take Cora and Abbie from us, robbed Logan of his mother and any chance of closure.
The ring that’s trafficked God knows how many girls, that caused Cole’s death and has been haunting us for longer than we even knew.
Something inside me goes eerily still as I throw myself into the space between them and Lily, dragging her behind me instinctively.
The move pins Una and Antonio between us and the door but that’s the least of my concerns.
My hands grip her wrists, pulling her tight against me, my body a solid, immovable barrier.
She leans her forehead against my back, fingers digging into my jacket like anchors, grounding herself.
The feel of her—warm, alive, trembling—courses through me even as she clings to the terrified girl at her side, protecting her as fiercely as I protect Lily.
Relief crashes through me so hard it almost brings me to my knees.
I found her.
I fucking found her.
But it doesn’t soften what I feel when I look at Una. It only sharpens it.
“Don’t touch her,” I growl, voice low, vibrating with something darker than anger, as I stare down my own mother. It’s a warning, a threat, a promise all at once. Mother or not I will kill her if she takes so much as half a step in Lily’s direction.
“Matthew,” she sighs, like this is a boardroom and not a crime scene. “You’re making this far more dramatic than it needs to be.”
That does it.
Years of distance, of resentment, of knowing she loved herself more than she ever loved me, all of it condenses into a single, blinding certainty.
“You knew,” I spit, each word landing like an accusation. “You planned this. You stood back and let him take her.”
Antonio shifts, sensing the shift in the room, but I don’t even look at him. He’s a secondary concern right now. Jonathan and the others are handling his men and this—this—is the real betrayal now.
Una’s lips curve, faint and indulgent, like she’s indulging a tantrum. “I did what was necessary.”
Necessary.
The word detonates in my skull.
I laugh once—short, humourless, broken. “You don’t get to decide what’s necessary anymore.”
Her eyes harden then, the mask slipping just enough to show the steel underneath.
“You had a future,” she says coolly. “A bride and a place in the Cosa Nostra that would have made you untouchable.” Her gaze flicks, briefly, dismissively, to Lily. “And she made you weak. I couldn’t allow that.”
I feel Lily flinch.
That’s the last mistake Una will ever make.
My grip tightens around my knife. “She is not a thing you move around a board,” I snarl, hearing the approaching footsteps and knowing backup is seconds away. “She’s not leverage, she’s not expendable. And if you think being my mother gives you any protection here—”
Jonathan and Liam enter first, weapons already up, bodies angling left of the table without a word exchanged. It’s instinctive. Muscle memory. The kind of movement you only learn when you’ve cleared rooms before and know hesitation gets people killed.
Aidan’s right behind them, jaw locked, eyes never leaving Antonio as he takes up space near the door, Da hot on his heels and placing himself halfway between Aidan and me.
The air shifts the moment they’re all inside, pressure building, the room suddenly too small to hold this much restrained violence.
I don’t know where Owen, Declan, Brennan, Seamus, and Jack went after I bolted, only that they’re not here, and that absence feels deliberate. Like teeth closing somewhere out of sight.
Ten of us.
All moving with the same purpose.
All of us here because someone touched Lily, and whatever happens next, this place isn’t surviving it.
I step forward.
The room seems to recoil.
“You’re wrong.”
The temperature shifts. Even Una feels it—her shoulders stiffen, her smile tightening by a fraction as she takes in the full weight of the Points and every ounce of fury we all carry.
Her days of being a backstabbing bitch are over, and she’d be a damn fool to think she’s making it out of this one alive.
She might have been able to leverage being my mother as her claim to this family for the past twenty-five years, but no more.
The balance has shifted. She knows it, Antonio knows it.
And Lily—pressed against me, trembling, breathing sharp and uneven—feels it too.
Antonio clears his throat, a forced attempt at reclaiming the room. “This is unnecessary,” he says, voice smooth but betraying a tiny crack. “We can discuss—”
“Shut your mouth.”
The words tear out of me before he finishes, low and dark, shaking with a fury I can barely contain. I tighten my grip on my knife, grounding myself so I don’t lunge across the room.
Jonathan’s jaw flexes, his gun steady as stone. “The fucked-up ink—it’s yours. You branded them. Planted rats in my ranks, you son of a bitch, didn’t you?”
His gaze cuts briefly to Una, sharp and unforgiving.
“And you”—his lip curls—“played the long game. Whispered poison into Ciaran’s ear before he cast you aside.
Pushed him toward Salvatore. Made it sound like aligning with the Cosa Nostra was best for the family, when really it was just a way to pull Matt away from his own blood, so you could get your hooks into him and rot him from the inside. ”
Una doesn’t deny it.
That silence is louder than any confession.
Antonio’s smile wanes, finally cracking under the weight of it all. “This was business,” he says tightly. “If you just—”