26. Chapter 26
Chapter twenty-six
The coolness of morning had burned away beneath the trees, and the mountain seemed determined to stretch downhill forever. We had been walking for hours, sometimes following narrow paths and sometimes cutting across rougher ground when a trail left us too exposed or seemed likely to draw searchers.
My ankle had held up better than I expected. The strip of towel he’d wrapped around it gave the joint enough support to keep me moving, although the ache had steadily worsened.
Neither of us mentioned it.
We found a cluster of ripe bananas near the edge of an untended plot and took a bunch before settling beneath the shade of a broad tree.
Under ordinary circumstances, stealing someone’s fruit might have bothered me.
After escaping a cartel compound with armed men somewhere behind us, my standards had become considerably more flexible.
The ripe bananas tasted ridiculously good—sweet, soft, and filling after everything we’d survived on since leaving the compound.
Lachlan sat beside me with his back against the trunk, one knee bent and the other stretched out. The bruises across his chest and ribs had darkened since morning, but he still moved as though pain were nothing more than an inconvenience.
After a few minutes, he glanced through the trees toward the lower slopes. “We should keep moving. We’re getting into more open farmland, and I’d rather find somewhere to disappear before dark than be caught out where anyone can spot us.”
I nodded. “Probably wise.”
Lachlan pushed himself to his feet, then held out a hand to me.
“Come on, Mouse.”
I slipped my hand into his, and he pulled me up.
The moment I put weight on my right foot, a sharper pain bit through my ankle. I shifted instinctively onto the other leg.
Of course he noticed.
“Ankle hurting?”
“It stiffened while we were sitting. I just need to walk it out, but I’m fine.”
His gaze stayed on me for another second, but he let it go, and we started downhill again.
We’d gone perhaps twenty yards, and despite my best effort to walk normally, the limp was getting harder to hide.
“You’re limping worse.”
“I’m aware.” I all but groaned.
“At least you admit it.”
Lachlan tipped his head slightly to one side, his mouth curving as his eyes moved over my face.
It was such a strangely sweet expression on him that warmth spread through my chest before I could stop it.
He reached up and brushed his thumb once over my cheekbone, the touch unexpectedly tender from a man who so rarely let anything he felt show.
“I know you can walk, Mouse. You’ve been doing it all day. That doesn’t mean I’m going to pretend I can’t see that every step is hurting you.”
His hand dropped from my face to one of the pistols tucked into his waistband. “Give me the pack for a second.”
I shrugged out of it and handed it to him.
Lachlan pulled both pistols free. He slipped one into the outer pocket, where it would be easy to reach once he put me down, then tucked the other inside the main compartment on top of our supplies.
He handed the pack back to me and waited while I pulled the straps over my shoulders. Then he moved in front of me, turned his back, and crouched.
“Up.” He patted one shoulder.
I stared at him. “No. You’re too injured to carry me.”
“Keep your legs around my hips and away from my ribs, and I’ll be fine. You’re small enough that the extra weight won’t bother me much.”
I hesitated.
He looked back over his shoulder. “I heard what you said earlier. This isn’t me deciding you can’t walk. You can. I’m saying your ankle is getting worse, I can carry you for a while, and there’s no prize waiting at the bottom of this mountain for whichever one of us suffers most.”
“And if I say no?”
“I’ll think it’s a stupid decision, but it’ll still be yours.”
Well, he had been listening.
I stepped closer and rested my hands on his shoulders. “All right. But only for a little while.”
“Whatever you say, Mouse.”
I climbed onto his back, and Lachlan caught me beneath the thighs before straightening.
My arms settled around his neck, my chest against his bare back, and I wrapped my legs snugly around his hips.
My ankles crossed low in front of him, dangerously close to his family jewels, but as long as I kept my feet still, they were safe.
For the first few steps, I was grateful to have the weight off my ankle. Then I became increasingly aware of everything else.
Lachlan’s hands were spread beneath my thighs, holding me securely against him. Every step shifted my body against the hard muscles of his bare back, and the position kept my thighs spread around him in a way that made it impossible not to think about the way he’d kissed me.
I tightened my arms around his neck and rested my cheek against the curve of his shoulder.
For a while, neither of us spoke. The steady rhythm of his steps and the warmth of his body beneath mine made the silence comfortable.
Somewhere along the way, it struck me how very little I knew about the man carrying me.
Lachlan knew pieces of my life I had never expected to tell anyone. He knew about Mamá and Papá, Ciro, Marcela, the dungeon, the men I had been with, and the nightmare I’d spent years keeping to myself.
I knew he was Irish, that he and his brother ran a club, and that he belonged to The Syndicate. I also knew he would let someone torture him half to death before he betrayed the men he called brothers. But I knew almost nothing about the life that had made him that man.
“Tell me something about you.”
His head turned slightly. “Something about me?”
“Before Xyst. Before The Syndicate. Before any of this.” I rested my chin near his shoulder. “Where did you grow up?”
“Ireland.”
“I had managed to work that part out.”
A quiet laugh rumbled in his chest.
“On a farm,” he added.
I lifted my head. “A farm?”
“Aye.”
“What kind of farm?”
“A small place. We had sheep, some cattle, and fields that always needed work. Mam ran the house, and Da could fix damn near anything.”
“And Lucian?”
“Spent most of our childhood convincing me to do stupid things so he could see what happened. He once told me an old bedsheet would work as a parachute if I jumped from the hayloft.”
I leaned slightly to the side, trying to catch a glimpse of his face. “You did not.”
“I was seven.”
“That is not a defense.”
“No, but it explains the broken arm.”
I laughed into his shoulder. “Did Lucian feel guilty?”
“Not remotely. He spent the next month insisting the problem was my technique.”
For the first time, I could picture him as a blond little boy on an Irish farm with his brother, long before either of them knew where their family had come from.
It made me want to know how that reckless little boy had become the man carrying me now—the one Ciro couldn’t break, Marcela couldn’t own, and I couldn’t seem to stop wanting.
Every answer seemed to leave me with another question.
“When did you leave Ireland?”
“Ten years ago. Lucian was twenty, and I was eighteen.”
“That young?”
“Aye. Mam begged us not to go. Da didn’t say much, but looking back, I think he understood better than any of us where two stubborn young men might end up once they left that farm.”
“So you came to New York together.”
“Aye. Just the two of us.”
“And what did you do when you got here?”
“We worked wherever anyone would pay us. Construction during the day, clubs and security at night. We saved everything we could until Lucian found an old building in the Meatpacking District, not far from the Hudson, and decided we could turn it into something of our own.”
“Xyst?”
“Aye.”
“You actually built part of it yourself?”
“A fair amount.” I could hear the pride in his voice. “Lucian walked through that old place and saw velvet ropes, private rooms, expensive liquor, and people willing to pay ridiculous amounts of money for privacy. I saw bad wiring, rotten drywall, and half the walls needing to come down.”
The difference between them made me smile. “So Lucian saw what the place could become, and you saw what it would take to get it there.”
“Aye. There was one thing we both saw the same way from the start, though—the basement.”
“Why the basement?”
“We knew we wanted a private casino down there. High stakes, invitation only. Wealthy men, politicians, businessmen—people who wanted somewhere to gamble without their names ending up in the Times or on social media.”
That explained considerably more about Xyst than the words nightclub in Manhattan ever had.
I wanted to see him there. Not beaten, shirtless, or running for his life, but healed and dressed in black, walking through the world he had built.
And I wanted to know what it would feel like to walk in beside him and have every woman in the room realize Lachlan Byrnes wasn’t looking at any of them.
I shook my head, forcing reality back. That thought had gotten ahead of me.
I adjusted my legs and dragged my attention back to the man beneath me instead of the one I was already imagining in Manhattan.
“So, was that how you got pulled into the underworld?”
“It helped.” Lachlan adjusted his grip as he stepped around a gully in the path.
“Once men start trusting you with the things they don’t want anyone else knowing, you learn who actually has power and what they’re willing to do to keep it.
Xyst became neutral ground for people who wouldn’t normally sit in the same room without somebody getting shot. ”
“Is that how you met Nikolai Volkov?”
“Nik came later. Anastasia started working with us before we knew who the hell she really was. We thought she was a librarian with bookkeeping skills who needed a job. Turned out she was Nikolai Volkov’s twin sister and connected to Luca Genovese through family.”
“That seems like a fairly significant detail for her to leave out,” I said, trying to imagine their reaction.