Chapter 9
I'm standing at the window in my bedroom suite facing the garage. It's almost dawn and one of the garage doors is open. Lights blazing inside like a crime scene.
Jino's in there, hitting the heavy bag.
I can hear it from up here, a rhythm so consistent it could be a metronome.
He's been at it for two hours.
The bag swings. Jino adjusts. Strikes again.
I should go down there. Talk to him. Tell him some of the details, but none of the specifics.
But I won't.
The bag takes another hit. Then another, as last night replays in my head like surveillance footage I can't shut off.
Jino and Lorcan are not friends. Lorcan has no use for peripheral people. He's a loner. So even though Jino spent a lot of time with us during school breaks when we were teenagers, he was more of an annoyance than a sidekick.
He wants to know why I'm not acting right now. Why I let Lorcan break into my home, take my woman, and have nothing, absolutely nothing, to say about it.
He wants to know why we're not already in motion. Why I won't give him the green light to mobilize every resource at our disposal and drag Lorcan back here by his perfectly groomed hair.
Because to Jino, Lorcan ó Fearghail is no one.
A high school friend from St. Augustine's.
Some Irish mob operator, not even Mafia, not even connected to our world in any meaningful way.
He hasn't been around in years. Lives six-hundred miles away in Boston now, running docks for his uncle's operation.
He is no one to us.
No one who matters.
No one who warrants hesitation.
No one to us. No one to us. Jino kept repeating this phrase last night like a fucking mantra. Like he was trying to drill the words into my skull. Like if he said it enough times, with enough conviction, he could make me believe it. Make me act on it. Make me give the order he was waiting for.
But it's not true.
It's never been true.
The last time Lorcan ó Fearghail was 'no one' to me was the exact moment before we became roommates at St. Augustine's Military Academy when we were thirteen years old.
We became friends the way all boys do at that age—thrown together by circumstance, bonded by proximity and the shared misery of dawn formation drills and inspection-ready bed corners.
Over the years it was best friends. He came to Pittsburgh five or six times for holidays.
Mostly Christmas and Easter, but one summer break as well.
I even went to Ireland once. To his family castle.
Met his entire ridiculously large family of twelve siblings.
Most of whom were still very much present on the estate back then.
Even met his parents.
His mother was somewhat of a recluse, the matriarchal duties taken over by the oldest sister whose name I couldn't spell or say if my life depended on it.
His family was so fucking Irish, it's like they were living in another era altogether.
One where druids ran the religion and the filid hoarded words in a way that would make Emmaleen Rourke weep with jealousy.
His father was a charismatic gangster called Aodhán.
The only fucking reason I can say that name is because it was printed on a plaque in the Saint Auggie's Hall of Trophies right next to my own father's name.
I can spell it too. Though how you make that little accent over the last 'a' I have no clue.
The point is, Lorcan ó Fearghail is not 'no one'.
And the reason goes much deeper than a few teenage summer breaks and holidays. The reason is in the woods beyond Saint Auggie's. The reason is frozen ground, and pick axes, and bodies that must be left buried.
That's when our friendship stopped being friendship and became something else entirely.
Something even more binding, even more powerful, even more impossible to sever.
Mutually assured destruction.
The kind of bond forged not in death, not trust.
I told none of this to Jino. Not because I was trying to piss him off, it's just… I've got nothing to give. Even if I wanted to tell him why we won't be hunting Lorcan down and slitting his throat for taking Emmaleen, I wouldn't.
It's none of his fucking business.
In fact, the conclusion I came to last night was that Emmaleen Rourke was none of his fucking business and I didn't owe him anything.
He's here because I allow it.
But she is mine.
Not his, not ours… mine.
Once Jino realized this, he lost his shit.
He didn't yell. Jino never yells. But his voice dropped into that register where every word is clipped and cold. His eyes narrowed and then he started demanding things.
What kind of leverage did Lorcan have that made retaliation impossible?
Why was Giovanni fucking Bavga suddenly impotent after his supposed 'friend' stole his collared submissive?
What the fuck was the plan?
When I didn't answer, his control cracked. He accused me of keeping secrets that endangered him, that put Emmaleen at risk, that violated the trust required for our arrangement to work.
I still said nothing.
The blood oath between Lorcan and me is absolute—a pact forged in frozen dirt and sealed with our own blood on a winter night that neither of us will ever speak of again.
The terms were explicit. Not one word. Not to priests seeking confession, not to family demanding explanations, not to lovers whispering in the dark, not to brothers-in-arms who've bled beside you in other wars.
This is an absolute rule with no exceptions under any circumstances, no matter how dire, no matter how much tactical advantage disclosure might provide.
One slip—one careless word spoken in anger, or fear, or whiskey-soaked weakness—and the other gets to retaliate.
And by 'retaliate' I mean kill, obviously.
Not just permission to kill—obligation to kill.
Because that's how blood oaths work in our world.
They're not symbolic gestures or dramatic promises made by boys playing at being men. They're binding contracts written in the only currency that matters.
You fuck with me, I fuck with you.
Mutually assured destruction.
We are equally damned, equally armed, equally bound.
Because what we did that freezing winter night at Saint Augustine's is an entirely sicker act than me blowing Rico LaRiccia's head off.
Much. Sicker.
I move away from the window as the bag downstairs takes another hit. The chain rattles. Jino doesn't stop.
I cross to the closet, shrugging out of yesterday's suit jacket. The shirt comes next. Slacks. Belt. Socks.
Everything peeled away until I'm standing in my boxer briefs, surrounded by the evidence of a man who had control twenty-four hours ago.
Had it. Past tense.
I catch my reflection in the mirror mounted on the closet door. Lean frame. Broad shoulders. The kind of body that looks good in tailored wool and better out of it. Women have told me this. Multiple women. In multiple languages.
I look exactly the same as I did yesterday.
But something fundamental has shifted beneath the surface, like tectonic plates grinding against each other in the dark.
I don't do helpless.
I've never done helpless. Helpless is not a setting I come equipped with.
And yet.
Here I am.
Unable to act because the wrong person kidnapped my woman.
Or maybe he was the right person?
The only person, for sure, who could get away with it.
I head into the bathroom, turn on the shower, and stand there, waiting until the steam begins curling over the glass door, fogging the mirrors, turning the space into something soft and shapeless.
I step under the spray.
The water is scalding. Hot enough to remind me I'm still fucking alive even when every other signal suggests otherwise.
I brace one hand against the tile and let the water hammer down on my shoulders, my neck, the muscles that have been locked tight since I watched that footage last night.
This is usually when I take care of things.
Years of routine. Built into the architecture of my day like coffee or checking my phone. I get hard, I handle it, I move on. Efficient. Methodical. No different than shaving or brushing my teeth.
Before Emmaleen, the fantasies were generic. Faceless women bent over desks, kneeling on expensive rugs, spread across hotel beds in cities I can't remember visiting. The details didn't matter. Just the control. The power. The moment when resistance broke and surrender took its place.
The monster always provided the script.
But since she walked into my life six weeks ago it's only been her.
Emmaleen on her knees in the dungeon, eyes downcast, waiting for permission to breathe.
Emmaleen bent over the punishment bench, ass raised, counting strikes in that breathless voice that cracks on seven every single time.
Emmaleen straddling me on the throne, straddling my lap, whispering yours, my King against my neck while I fill her so full she can't remember her own name.
I reach down.
I'm not even hard.
I wrap my hand around my dick anyway. Try to summon something. Anything. A flicker of heat, a ghost of arousal, the beginning of that familiar tightening that leads to release.
Nothing.
I close my eyes. Try to reconstruct last week—Emmaleen on the dais, wrists cuffed to the leather restraints, nipple clamps connected to her collar by a chain that forced her head down.
The way she looked up at me when I told her to count.
The way her pussy glistened when I dripped wax across her stomach.
Still nothing.
This has never happened.
Not once in twenty years of jerking off in the shower have I ever failed to perform for myself.
The water beats down. Steam rises. My hand moves mechanically, trying to force a response my body refuses to give.
I think about her mouth. The way she takes my fingers past her lips when I feed her, the way her tongue flicks against the pad of my thumb like she's tasting something sacred.
I think about the sounds she makes when she comes—that hitched gasp followed by a broken moan, like pleasure is something she has to apologize for.
I think about the look on her face when she handed Jino the key instead of taking it. The moment she signed the Doctrine. The moment she chose me.