Chapter 19
Sorcha
The bedroom door closes behind me with a soft click.
Cillian’s room is as bare as the rest of his house. I sit on the edge of the bed, my thumb hovering over Cian’s name before I press call.
He answers on the second ring, his voice clipped. “I’m busy.”
“Yeah, about that,” I say, cutting straight to it. “You need to stand down on Robert.”
The silence on the other end is heavy, hostile. “Oh?”
“He’s a pawn, Cian. He’s engaged to Reginald Kavanagh’s daughter, Camille. She’s not even eighteen yet. Kavanagh is the one pulling the strings. He’s the one who blew up the house. Robert is just the fucking Gannon who gives him what he wants.”
“Yeah, I know. Robert’s here now, blubbering it all out.”
My mouth opens, then closes again. Of course, he’s already there. Cian doesn’t fuck around.
“So you know?” I ask, my voice flat.
“I know he’s a spineless little shit who got in over his head with a man who could swallow him whole,” Cian spits. “Kavanagh promised him a seat at the table. He didn’t mention it would be the fucking kids’ table.”
I snort but stifle it badly into a cough. “Okay, so what now?”
“He’s my brother, Sorcha,” he says, and the words are a steel trap closing. “He’s family. You let me handle my family. You handle yours.”
The line goes dead.
I stare at the phone, a strange mix of relief and annoyance washing over me. Robert is neutralised. One less ‘enemy’ on the board. But Cian’s words echo in my head. You handle yours. Reginald Kavanagh threatened my guys, my home, my life. He’s mine to deal with.
I push myself off the bed and walk back into the living room, my steps sure, my resolve hardened into something sharp and cold. The three of them look up, their faces a mixture of questions and violent intent.
“Robert’s with Cian,” I announce. “He figured out Kavanagh was playing him and ran for cover. Cian’s handling it.”
My gaze sweeps over the three of them, my guys, my kings. They tried to blow us up. They tried to take everything. “Cian’s right. Robert is his to handle. Kavanagh is ours.”
Axl leans forward, his casual air gone, replaced by a cold, calculating focus. “We wait for the paperwork to clear. Tomorrow, you’ll own St. Bart’s. Then… we go in all guns blazing.”
“Do you mean that literally?” I ask, “because I’m fresh out.”
“Yes, I mean that literally,” he says. “One way to ensure the cockroaches scatter is to shoot at them.”
“We will desert the entire campus. That isn’t the endgame,” I point out with a frown.
“No, but it will show us Kavanagh’s allies. The rest might be collateral damage, but we will lure them back with promises of some kind,” Axl states. “Either way, St Bart’s just became a killing field, and we are the ones doing the killing.”
“What do we do with Kavanagh? He hasn’t even shown his face yet. His daughter is off the table. She is being used. She can run, but we don’t touch her.”
“Agreed. She is irrelevant. The target is Reginald,” Cillian says.
“So how do we get to him?” I ask, my gaze sweeping over the three of them. “He’s a ghost.”
“He won’t be for long,” Axl says. “Tomorrow, you become the legal owner of his prize. My guess is he will attempt to take us out, hoping it triggers a clause whereby he can still take it. But he doesn’t know Ben.
That man will have this tied up in so many legal loopholes, it will be impossible to untie. ”
“So we wait,” I say. I hate waiting. It feels like letting them win, even for a few hours.
“We don’t just wait,” Cillian says, his gaze still fixed outside. “We rearm.”
It’s a practical thought, and a necessary one. “We have nothing. Just the soot-stained clothes we escaped in and this one spare t-shirt.”
“The dads won’t let us down,” Axl says, leaning back in the chair and closing his eyes. “Someone wake me when the pizza arrives.”
“What pizza?”
“The pizza one of you fools has to order. Chef Rhodes is out.”
I exchange a glance with Ciar, and he picks up his phone with a look that could wither a Viscount. I shrug and head back to the bedroom. Might as well try and get some rest before the manure hits the propeller and covers us all in a monumental amount of shit.
The bed is a small double, the mattress firm beneath my back. I stare at the plain white ceiling, my mind a fucking racetrack of explosions and whispered threats. Sleep isn’t coming. Every time I close my eyes, I see the townhouse erupting in a ball of orange flame.
The door creaks open. Cillian slips in, a silent shadow in the dim light. He doesn’t speak, just lies down beside me, his solid warmth a barrier against the cold dread seeping into my bones.
I turn into him and close my eyes, feeling safe in his arms. His fingers tangle in my hair, an anchor in the storm.
No platitudes fall from his lips, no sugar-coated reassurances.
Just his body curved around mine, a silent promise etched into the space between heartbeats.
His thumb draws lazy patterns against my scalp, hypnotic enough to drown out the chaos ricocheting through my mind.
Beyond the door, Axl and Ciar rest. Our battered, feral little family crammed into this blank-slate hideaway.
Fatigue crashes over me like a wave, dragging me under.
Since the townhouse erupted in flames, I haven’t allowed myself to feel how utterly drained I am.
Now I surrender to it. I let Cillian’s warmth be the tether that keeps me from drifting away completely as consciousness slips from my grasp, delivering me to a merciful void where there are no explosions, no threats, no watching eyes.
Nothing but this moment. Nothing but him.