Chapter 19
CILLIAN
Her hand catches at my sleeve, slick and weak, and I lean closer to hear her over the gunfire and shouting.
“My baby,” she whispers, lips shaking. “Save my baby.”
For a second I don’t understand the words, even though I hear every one of them. My palm is pressed hard to the blood spreading under her coat, Conall is yelling for the cars, the lobby is full of glass and bodies and noise, and all I can see is her mouth forming that word again in my head.
Baby.
I stare at her, then at the blood on my hand, then back at her face, and something tears open inside my chest so fast, it leaves me lightheaded.
“Saoirse,” I say, and my voice comes out rough. “Stay with me. Stay with me.”
Conall drops beside us and grabs my shoulder. “Shooter’s down, second man ran, lobby secured. We need to move now.”
I slide one arm under her back and the other under her knees, and she cries out when I lift her, a broken sound that hits me harder than the shots did. Her head falls against my chest and her fingers clutch weakly at my coat.
“Easy,” I tell her, and I am already moving. “I’ve got you.”
The guards clear a path through shattered glass and dropped folders, and the receptionist is crouched behind the desk sobbing into both hands while one of my men drags a bleeding municipal jacket toward the wall.
I step over a broken stanchion, keep pressure on Saoirse’s wound with my forearm, and push through the doors into the wet evening air.
“Car!” Conall shouts.
The rear door of the SUV is open before I reach it. I climb in with her across my lap, her blood soaking into my shirt and my hands, and Conall gets in front while another car peels out ahead of us. Someone slams my door, then we are moving hard enough to throw the city sideways through the glass.
“Call Fallon,” I say.
Conall is already on the phone. “He’s enroute. Byrne clinic, trauma team on site in ten.”
I look down at her and press harder when the SUV hits a turn, and fresh blood slips warmly across my wrist. Her eyes flutter, then open, unfocused at first, then finding me.
“Cillian,” she breathes.
“I’m here.”
Her lips part, and I think she is about to tell me something else, something I should have let her say in my office when she came to me pale and shaking and trying to get one minute of my time. Instead, she coughs and winces, and I feel panic rise so hard, I taste metal.
“Talk to me,” I tell her. “Stay awake.”
She blinks slowly. “I tried.”
The words land, clean and cruel, and guilt comes in behind them like a blade.
I told her to pack. I opened the door and pointed her out of my house like she was dirt tracked over a floor. I watched her standing there crying and sent her into the night, then I told myself I was being smart, I told myself betrayal had a price and I was paying mine in discipline.
She vanished, and I let her.
Now she is bleeding in my arms after stepping into a bullet meant for me, and there is a child in the middle of this that I did not know existed.
Fear and rage come together so hard, I can barely separate one from the other.
Rage at Patrick. Rage at myself. Rage at every choice that put her in this seat, in this city, in my reach, then out of it.
Fear for her. Fear for the baby. Fear that I am about to lose both before I even learn what could have been mine to protect.
My thumb brushes the side of her jaw, smearing blood there, and I wipe it away with the side of my hand.
“How far?” I ask, looking up.
“Seven minutes,” Conall says, phone still to his ear. “Fallon says keep pressure, keep her talking, no fluids by mouth.”
Saoirse stirs against me. Her hand slides to my wrist and rests there, weak but deliberate.
“I didn’t tell you,” she says, voice thin. “I was going to. I tried.”
“I know,” I say, and the truth of it hits me while I speak. I do know. I saw it in her face in the doorway, I saw she came carrying something heavy and urgent, and I chose the docks and my pride and my fury over one private conversation.
I lower my head until my forehead touches hers for one brief second. “Save your strength. You can shout at me later.”
A small breath leaves her that might have been a laugh in another life.
The city lights streak across the windows, and the convoy cuts through traffic under no sirens, just speed and calls placed ahead of us.
We do not use public emergency rooms if we can avoid it.
Too many eyes, too many records, too many men willing to sell a room number for the right cash.
Byrne Medical was built on top of an old convalescent house my grandfather funded after the dock strike riots, then expanded in stages over thirty years into a private surgical facility that serves judges, businessmen, boxers, priests with bad hearts, and every kind of man who pays for silence.
Officially, it is a rehabilitation and specialist center.
In practice, it is where my family takes its blood.
I think of my mother in the sitting room, hand on Saoirse’s wrist, ordering soup and rest in that calm voice that makes grown men obey.
I think of Maeve throwing a blanket over her legs and pretending jokes would soften the edges.
I think of the way Saoirse looked at me in the lobby two months ago, in my office, in my bed, and I hate the part of me that believed betrayal erased all of it.
Patrick raised her to be useful. I know that kind of training.
I know what men like him build in children and call loyalty.
He taught her to watch, to lie, to survive, to make herself small until needed and sharp when called.
He sent her into my house as a weapon and expected a blade back in his hand.
She still came to warn me.
She stayed gone when I threw her out, which means she heard the order and obeyed it even then, even carrying my child, even hunted by the man who made her.
She found a way to disappear from Patrick while pregnant and alone, then she walked back into my lobby knowing I could have had her dragged out before she got three words out.
And when the shots started, she moved toward me.
I look at her again and feel grief rise up so fast, it makes my vision blur for a second. I blink it clear and keep pressure on the wound.
“Stay with me,” I say, lower this time. “You hear me? Stay.”
The lead car turns sharply and the gates open ahead.
Concrete walls. Security lights. The old stone facade still visible behind the newer glass wing.
Men are waiting under the covered entrance before we stop, Dr. Fallon in dark scrubs, two nurses, a trauma trolley, one orderly I know by name from a knife fight eight years ago.
The SUV brakes hard. My door is open at once.
“Gunshot left upper chest,” I say as I climb out, still holding her. “Conscious on and off. She’s pregnant.”
Fallon’s face changes, all business, no surprise. “How many weeks?”
“I don’t know.”
He swears once under his breath and points. “Inside. Move.”
They take her from my arms, and she cries out again when they transfer her to the trolley.
Her hand catches my shirt and slips free, leaving a streak of blood across my chest. I move with them through the doors, wet shoes on polished tile, nurses cutting her coat open while Fallon checks her pupils and barks orders for imaging, trauma, obstetrics, blood, ultrasound, security lock on the floor.
“Cillian,” she says, eyes barely open now.
“I’m here,” I answer, walking beside the trolley as long as they let me.
The corridor lights are too bright, and the smell of antiseptic hits the back of my throat while they push her toward the double doors at the end of trauma. Fallon turns, plants a hand on my chest, and stops me there.
“You wait.”
I look past him at her, blood on the sheet, her face pale, one arm hanging as a nurse lifts it back onto the bed, and the doors swing shut between us before I can speak.
The corridor goes quiet in a way that feels wrong after so much noise, and I stand there with blood drying on my hands while Fallon’s staff move around me like they’ve done this a hundred times and cannot afford to care who I am while they work.
A nurse guides me toward a private waiting room off trauma, another brings towels and a basin, and I let them push me through the motions only when Conall steps in and says my name twice.
“Boss.”
I sit. Barely.
The room is small and built for wealthy panic, soft chairs, muted lamps, a locked cabinet of bottled water, framed prints chosen to offend no one.
My shirt sticks to my side, my knuckles ache, and there is blood on my cuff that is hers and blood on the seam near my ribs that is mine.
I strip off the jacket and hand it to Conall.
“Get rid of it.”
He takes it and sets a phone on the table in front of me. “Recorder file is backed up. Patrol team sent over the lobby pulls. We’ve got stills on the shooter and partial on the outer vehicle.”
I scrub both hands over my face and force my thoughts into order. Fear wants the whole room. It does not get it.
“Talk.”
Conall opens the tablet and starts laying it out piece by piece while Nikolas joins us from the hall with another folder and a coffee I do not touch.
The shooter in the lobby came in under municipal cover with forged work papers that would pass at a glance.
The dead man at the door had no prints in the system under the name on his license.
One of the cars seen two blocks off the Byrne office had cloned plates, then was dumped near the river.
The bike unit she warned about was spotted fifteen minutes later near the bridge works after our convoy route changed. Empty. Riders gone.
So she was right.
Not partly right. Not close enough. Right.