Chapter 24
Maeve
Callum McCarthy was coming today, and the strangest part was that I'd slept through the night.
Not the shallow, twitchy sleep of the years before, when I thought every creak outside the caravan was Finn's footsteps and every shadow was my father's men ready to drag me back to Ireland to live the life he wanted me to live.
It was real sleep. The kind where you wake up and have to check the clock because your body has forgotten, temporarily, that it's supposed to be afraid.
I felt more unafraid than ever before.
Mac was in his bassinet beside the bed. Artem's hand was still resting on my hip. Ivan was sprawled across the foot of the bed, face-down.
I turned to find Gregor. He was in the armchair near the window with Fergus asleep on his lap.
As always, he was waiting. Not because he doubted I could handle myself. Because he, Artem and Ivan, were ready to catch anything I decided to throw.
“Morning,” I mouthed to him.
His eyes bore into mine as he said, “Come here.”
I pushed out of the bed, padded across the bedroom, trying not to wake my other alphas. He lifted Fergus, who grumbled in his sleep. I sat where the dog left the warm space and cuddled into Gregor while Fergus ended up on my knee.
“Not long until I deal with my past, Gregor.”
“We can deal with it for you,” he said, planting his chapped lips on my cheek.
I burrowed my head under his chin. “And that’s why I love you.”
Gregor made a sound, and whispered, “I love you, my omega.”
Later that day, I stood at the bedroom window as the iron-gray sky threatened rain and watched three black Range Rovers muscle through the gates.
They didn't glide the way Bratva vehicles did.
They chewed up the gravel, aggressive and performative, and ground to a halt in front of the house like they were daring someone to complain.
Callum McCarthy stepped out of the lead vehicle.
Even from two stories up, he looked exactly the same. Heavy wool coat. Silver hair swept back. The arrogant tilt of a man who'd never been told no in his life. He was about to hear it.
Six large, bruised enforcers spilled out behind him, their hands already drifting toward their weapons like they expected a firefight on the front steps.
Blade was standing by the doors. He didn't stop them. Didn't ask them to disarm. He simply stepped aside like a man who knew exactly how many armed Petrov soldiers were positioned in the foyer and how little six Irish bodyguards were going to matter.
Artem had made the call to let them walk in fully armed.
It was a statement. He had the gardener trimming the hedges while carrying enough bullets to take every man down.
Even the staff polishing the banisters had military training.
And the men in the shadows of the foyer outnumbered Callum's escort three to one.
My father, Callum, was marching into a fortress and didn't know about yet.
I turned away from the window.
The dress was sage green. Knee-length. Sharply tailored.
I'd chosen it over Ivan's suggestion of red.
When he'd made the case that red would raise my father's blood pressure to medically interesting levels, I wanted to look like peace, not war.
Soft enough to make him underestimate me.
Precise enough to remind him I was my own woman.
I pinned my hair back at the sides, leaving the mark visible. The mark he allowed from an alpha who wasn’t mine.
I was no longer the Maeve McCarthy who had been sold. I was now Maeve Petrov. And proudly so.
I kissed Mac on the head before I left. My father would never meet his grandson.
I'd never subject my son to a man who evaluated children like a number on his bank account. Mac made a soft sound in his sleep, one fist curling and uncurling. I patted Fergus’s head.
He moved from his position at the foot of the bassinet to let me pass.
The house seemed to know something was happening. Staff vanished from the corridors and guards straightened as I passed. They lowered their eyes which I was finding was a Bratva gesture of respect that Artem pretended didn't make him smug and definitely did.
My heels clicked on the polished wood. Each step sounded heavy, like I knew I was going into war and didn’t care.
I didn’t belong to the man downstairs. I certainly didn’t belong to Finn. I belonged to myself, and because I belonged to myself, I had chosen the three men waiting for me in the hall.
Ivan was at the bottom of the staircase in a dark suit, leaning against the banister casually. His eyes roamed up and down my body.
“Time and a place,” I said.
He grinned in that way he only did for me and then he offered me his arm without a word. I took it.
We walked toward the formal sitting room together. The double doors were slightly ajar and I could hear my father's voice before I saw him.
"I don't have time for your games, Petrov." Loud. Sharp. The voice of a man who'd spent three decades shouting at people who couldn't shout back. "You promised the McCarthy syndicate an alliance through marriage. You took my youngest daughter. I want to see Mary, and I want to see the paperwork."
The slide of parchment across polished wood.
"See for yourself. Your daughter's signature." Artem's voice was smooth and completely empty. This was the voice he used when he was giving someone enough rope to hang themselves and wanted to see if they'd take it.
Silence.
"This is forged. That's not Mary's handwriting." My father's voice had climbed. "Where the hell is my daughter? What have you done with her?"
"What does it matter? The signature is there. The certificate is legally binding. All you care about is the deal."
"Did you kill her? Because I had her sign documents before she came here and that is not—"
"The European corridor belongs to the Bratva. I've signed operational control over to my cousin Yuri. You'll deal with him going forward."
"You had no right!" A heavy fist hit the table and sent a reflexive chill down my spine. Old wiring. I let it pass. "You think a piece of paper satisfies me? You took my youngest daughter and I want to see her immediately!"
"You want to see your daughter?" Artem's voice sharpened into something dangerous. “Why? You don’t care about her. Have you got another deal in place?”
“I want my daughter.”
That was my cue.
I pushed the doors open. “I’m here.”
My father froze with his mouth still half-open, his fist still resting on the table, his six men arrayed behind him like props in a play about masculine insecurity.
He stared at me. At the dress. The diamonds in my ears.
The way I held my head. He was looking for the terrified girl he'd sold and she wasn't there to be found.
"Maeve." He breathed the name like it belonged to him. Like he'd invented it. "What have they done to you?"
"Loved me."
My voice was steady. I walked further into the room and stopped beside Artem's chair. He started to rise. The plan had been for my alphas to leave, to give me the room, but I put a hand on his shoulder and pressed down. Stay.
Callum's eyes tracked the gesture the way a hawk tracks movement. Then they landed on my neck..
"You think this is love?"
"I know it's confusing," I said. "You always did mistake obedience for affection. Easy error. Men in bad suits make it all the time."
Ivan made a small sound behind me that might have been a laugh and might have been a growl and was probably both.
My father's face went dark. "Watch your mouth."
For the first time in my entire life, those words did not make me small. They made me defiant.
"No," I said. "I don't think I will."
Gregor moved behind me. The storm in his scent was so barely contained I could feel it rolling off him in waves, but he didn't make a sound.
He just stood there, an immovable wall at my back, while Ivan took his place on my other side.
Both of them were looking at Callum's throat the way a man looks at a door he's considering removing.
"You're coming with me," Callum demanded. His finger came up, pointing at me, and I watched it tremble slightly. "You belong to Finn. Do you have any idea of the mess you've caused? The Belfast settlement—"
"The Belfast settlement." I let the words hang.
"That's what you want to discuss. Not the beatings.
Not the humiliation. Not the fact that the man you sold me to brought other women into my bed while I was locked in a room upstairs.
" My pack made a low, synchronized rumble that vibrated through the floorboards. "You want to talk about the mess."
"He's an alpha! You're an omega who ruined a territory deal! Do you understand what you cost this family?"
"I'm not part of your family, Callum." I dropped the word father like it had burned me, which it had, a long time ago. "And I don't belong to Finn. He's a monster, and you handed me to him like I was a closing fee."
"You're an omega!" He stepped closer. Behind him, his six men shuffled nervously, suddenly very aware of the three massive Russian alphas whose eyes had stopped looking at Callum's throat and started looking at each other's, which was somehow worse.
"You are currency! You do what you're told for the good of the syndicate! "
I looked at him with pity because he was a man who couldn’t be fixed.
"I'm not currency," I said. The room had gone so quiet I could hear the rain starting against the windows. "I'm a Petrov now. Mary has escaped you. You have nothing left to sell."
"You ungrateful little—"
"Careful."
The word cut through the room like a blade through silk. Not loud. Not dramatic. Just mine.
Callum stopped.
I smiled. It wasn't a warm smile. It was the smile I'd learned from watching Artem negotiate with men who'd tried to kill him. "You're standing in a house full of people who think I hung the moon. I wouldn't finish that sentence unless you're emotionally prepared to become a cautionary tale."
Artem's fingers brushed the inside of my wrist. Once. He approved.
Callum's jaw worked. He looked between the four of us. At Artem who was still seated like a king, at Gregor whose stillness was more threatening than movement, and at Ivan who was smiling with absolutely no warmth, the plot twist finally landed.
"If you ever contact me again," I said, tilting my chin and letting my voice drop into the quiet register Artem used when he was promising something permanent, "or if you try to find Mary, I will let my pack dismantle your syndicate piece by piece until there's nothing left but ash and paperwork."
The threat settled into the room like something solid.
Callum McCarthy looked at the daughter he'd thrown away, and for one satisfying second, I watched him understand that he had created his own destruction.
He didn't say another word. He turned and walked out. His men scrambled after him like ducklings in tactical gear.
The front doors slammed. Tires screeched on gravel. The sound faded into the rain.
And I was still standing in the same spot. I didn't collapse. I didn't cry. The silence that followed wasn't heavy or oppressive. It was light. It was the sound of a door closing. The sound of my life finally beginning.
I turned around and looked at the three men who'd given me enough room to find my own armor.
"Well," I said. The lightness in my chest was soaring and strange and wonderful. "That went rather well."
Artem stood and pulled me into his arms. "You were magnificent."
Gregor's hand settled on my shoulder. Ivan kissed the side of my head like it was the most natural thing in the world, which for him it probably was.
"So," Ivan said, the smirk tugging at the corner of his mouth. "Are we dismantling his syndicate now, or after lunch?"
I laughed into Artem's neck, surrounded by the scent of my pack, the three of them pressing close enough that I couldn't tell where I ended and they began.
"After lunch," I said. "I'm starving."