Chapter 12 #2
“Do you remember the Christmas you tried to cook breakfast for everyone?” Maeve presses on, lightening the mood again. “You nearly burned the kitchen down.”
“I improved,” Cillian replies.
“You set the toast on fire.”
“It was a learning curve.”
They laugh again, and I find myself laughing too, though there’s something tight beneath it that I don’t fully understand.
This is not the man I was raised to believe in.
In my father’s stories, Cillian Byrne is a ruthless opportunist who blocks corridors and ruins alliances, a man who destabilizes networks and inserts himself where he isn’t invited.
I’ve seen him cold and decisive, seen the way men shift when he enters a room, heard the quiet fear threaded into his name.
Here, he reaches across the table to wipe mashed potato off his nephew’s cheek with a napkin. He listens when his mother speaks. He tolerates his sister’s teasing with something close to affection.
He was a boy once.
The thought unsettles me more than it should.
He was a boy who packed a bag and dreamed about shipping routes, a boy who stood at the pier and imagined building something of his own. He lost a father. He took on a war. He hardened.
But this house remembers him before that.
I tear another piece of bread and let the butter soften against it, and for a moment I’m not calculating angles or anticipating leverage.
I’m just sitting at a table that feels lived in, listening to stories about scraped knees and schoolyard fights and the time he refused to apologize to a teacher for correcting her math.
“He’s always been stubborn,” Siobhán says fondly.
“Disciplined,” Cillian counters.
“Stubborn,” Maeve repeats.
“And protective,” Declan adds, glancing at me with something knowing in his gaze.
Cillian doesn’t respond to that one. He just lifts his glass and takes a slow drink.
I swallow another bite of lamb and feel something unfamiliar settle low in my chest. It isn’t desire or practicality.
It’s grief.
Not for what I’ve lost.
For what I never had.
My childhood home never held this kind of noise, never carried stories that softened sharp edges.
My father commanded respect and silence.
My mother floated through rooms like a fragile ornament until she disappeared entirely.
There were no arguments about toy boats or burned toast. No photographs of crooked braids taped to walls.
I look at Cillian again, really look at him, and for the first time I don’t see a rival’s son or a strategic target.
I see a man who grew up at this table.
A man who could have walked away from it and didn’t.
Siobhán reaches for my plate. “More?” she asks gently.
I hesitate.
“Yes,” I say and hand it over.
Dinner stretches longer than I expect, and it ends the way real dinners do, with plates half scraped clean and everyone talking over one another as chairs shift and dishes are gathered without ceremony.
Siobhán refuses help at first, then accepts it anyway, pressing containers into Cillian’s hands while scolding him for not eating enough greens.
“You’ll take this,” she says, snapping a lid onto a tin of leftover lamb. “And the bread. And don’t pretend you won’t eat it later.”
“I won’t pretend,” he replies, kissing her cheek.
She turns to me with a warmth that catches me off guard. “You too. There’s more than enough.”
“Thank you,” I say, and I mean it.
Declan claps Cillian on the shoulder on the way out, Maeve hugs him without hesitation, and the baby waves a sticky hand in our direction like we’re heading off to war instead of a short drive back. It’s ordinary. It’s disarming.
The air outside is cooler now, the sky stretched wide and bruised with early evening light. Cillian walks beside me without touching me at first, then his hand finds the small of my back in a quiet claim as we reach the car.
“You survived,” he says lightly as he opens the door for me.
“I wasn’t under attack.”
He smirks. “They can be ruthless.”
I slide into the passenger seat, and he sets the containers carefully in the back before taking his place behind the wheel. The engine turns over smoothly, and we pull away from the house without hurry.
We don’t head back toward the city.
I notice it a few minutes in when the houses thin and the road begins to curve upward, winding along hills that open toward the sea. The harbor falls behind us, replaced by open water that catches the last of the light and throws it back in long silver lines.
“Where are we going?” I ask.
“Somewhere quiet,” he answers.
The drive climbs higher, and the city becomes a distant suggestion behind us.
The hills are green and rolling, broken by stone walls and narrow lanes that look older than the roads they border.
The sea stretches wide on our left, restless but calm from this height, and for a moment I forget everything else.
It’s beautiful.
The kind of beauty that doesn’t need spectacle. Just space.
He pulls off onto a narrow stretch of gravel that overlooks the water, the car settling with a soft crunch as he kills the engine. The wind carries faint salt through the cracked window, and the world feels stripped down to us and the horizon.
For a moment, neither of us speaks.
“You liked it,” he says finally, glancing at me.
“Yes,” I admit. “More than I expected.”
“My mother liked you,” he replies.
That lands somewhere deeper than it should.
I turn toward him in the dim light. “You didn’t warn them.”
“No,” he says simply.
“Why?”
He studies me for a second, then shrugs slightly. “I don’t introduce women to my family unless I’m serious about something.”
My pulse shifts.
“And what are you serious about?” I ask.
He leans back in his seat, one arm draped loosely over the wheel. “I’m serious about seeing where this goes.”
My father’s voice flickers faintly at the edge of my mind. Don’t get distracted. Don’t forget the objective. Don’t mistake proximity for loyalty.
But the image of that table, of Siobhán pressing bread into my hands, of Cillian wiping mashed potato from his nephew’s cheek, pushes back harder.
“I shouldn’t want this,” I say quietly.
He tilts his head. “Want what?”
“This.” I gesture vaguely between us, then toward the hills and the sea. “The normal parts.”
He reaches across the center console and hooks a finger under my chin, turning my face fully toward him. “You’re allowed to want normal parts.”
“I don’t live in a normal world,” I remind him.
“Neither do I.”
The wind shifts outside, and I feel the quiet press in closer. He slides his hand from my chin to the side of my neck, thumb brushing just beneath my ear. It’s not rough. It’s deliberate.
“You were different in there,” he says.
“How?”
“You let your guard down.”
I laugh softly. “Did I?”
“Yes.”
“And that’s dangerous?”
“Everything is.”
His thumb drifts lower, tracing the curve where my neck meets my collarbone. My breath changes before I can stop it, and he notices.
“You’re thinking,” he murmurs.
“I’m always thinking.”
“Not right now.”
He leans closer, the space between us narrowing until I can feel the heat of him even in the cooling car. My father’s warnings recede further, blurred by the memory of laughter and the steady weight of Cillian’s hand.
Belonging.
That’s what this feels like.
Not strategy. Not leverage.
Belonging.
His fingers slide into my hair at the nape of my neck, guiding rather than forcing, and I don’t resist. I lean toward him on my own, closing the last inch.
“Tell me to stop,” he says softly.
I don’t.
Instead, I lift my hand to his jaw and run my thumb along the edge of his mouth, feeling the faint scrape of stubble against my skin. His lips part slightly under the touch, and the look in his eyes darkens.
“I don’t want to stop,” I admit.
He exhales once through his nose, controlled but not distant. “Good.”
He pulls me across the console with surprising ease, one hand at my waist, the other steady in my hair. I shift onto his lap without thinking, knees braced against the seat, hands gripping his shoulders for balance. The world outside narrows to glass and dark water.
His mouth brushes mine first, slow and testing, and I open for him without being asked.
His hand slides up my back, fingers pressing into the fabric of my dress, holding me close. I kiss him harder, deeper, tasting salt and wine and something that feels dangerously close to trust.
He breaks the kiss only long enough to look at me, his gaze searching, then his hand cups the back of my head and he claims my mouth fully, decisively, as the car rocks slightly under the shift of our weight and the sea rolls on below us, indifferent and endless.