CHAPTER 37
Declan
The world feels too quiet without her voice in it.
The convoy is long gone. The bodies have been moved. The blood on the asphalt has dried into a ruined map of everything I didn’t reach in time.
I stand where the vans disappeared hours ago, fists clenched so tightly my knuckles ache, and all I can hear is the faint echo of her scream trapped somewhere inside my skull. It repeats every time I blink. It sharpens each breath until breathing becomes a punishment.
Liam’s men fan out behind me, talking into radios, checking tire tracks, logging weapon casings. It’s too orderly for what this moment deserves. My insides are chaos, torn and violent and ready to rip the world apart from the foundation up.
One of the men drags a prisoner toward us—one of the Russians who survived the ambush only because he’d been knocked unconscious at the edge of the road. His face is swollen, lip split, hands zip-tied behind his back. A coward trying to look defiant. A liar already rehearsing his denials.
He’s breathing too easily. He hasn’t begun to understand what comes next.
Liam turns to me as the prisoner is shoved onto his knees. “You’re not going in alone,” he says quietly. “Not this time.”
“I’m not asking permission,” I answer, and my voice is flat enough to make two of the guards shift uneasily.
Liam doesn’t push. He knows better. He studies me for a long second, then gives a sharp nod toward the prisoner. “We need location. Numbers. Security grid. Names.”
“I’ll get them.”
He hesitates. “Declan—don’t lose yourself.” That’s the first foolish thing he’s said tonight. I already have.
We drag the Russian into the back of a cargo truck, metal walls cold and echoing. It smells like diesel, gun oil, and fear. The door slams shut behind us with a finality that feels like dropping a guillotine blade.
I don’t touch him at first. I sit on a crate opposite him, elbows on my knees, head down, letting the silence stretch until it’s unbearable. Silence tells more truth than screaming ever could. He flinches every time I move, and that tells me he already knows I’m not bluffing.
Good.
When I finally lift my head, his gaze skitters away from mine. “Where is she?”
He mutters something in Russian, a curse, then spits blood on the floor. Brave, but not smart.
I don’t hit him. That’s what he expects.
Instead, I lean forward, slow, controlled, calm in the way a knife is calm right before it opens skin.
“You took a pregnant woman,” I say, voice low enough the metal walls vibrate with the words.
“You took what belongs to me. Now I’m going to give you one chance to walk out of this truck with bones intact. ”
He says nothing.
I smile without warmth. “Wrong answer.”
The next minutes unfold with the precision of something I’ve done too many times to pretend I’m civilized. He tries to keep quiet, but pain loosens the truth the way steam loosens rust. By the time he screams, he’s already breaking.
Liam’s voice filters in from outside the truck—steady, composed, directing teams, forming a perimeter. A leader trying to hold a kingdom together while its pieces threaten to fracture. I know he hears the prisoner screaming. I know he hates this. But he lets it happen because he knows I won’t fail.
Not when she’s on the line.
Finally, the Russian chokes out the first piece of real information. “Estate… border route… guarded, always guarded—”
“Location,” I demand.
He gives it. A rural estate near the border, disguised as a shipping checkpoint for freight transport. High walls. Fenced courtyard. Surveillance out the ass. Used for trafficking routes when things go dark and they need to move people who won’t be missed.
Not Ailish. Ailish will be missed by everyone who’s ever breathed the same air as her.
I get more—shifts, guard rotations, the name of the man in charge, the layout of the loading bay, where the vans can enter, how shipments are disguised. Not all of it is perfect intel, but enough to stitch a plan together.
I stand, breath heavy, pulse like a hammer beneath my jaw. The prisoner sobs into his shoulder, a broken heap. I consider putting him out of his misery, but Liam steps into the truck doorway at the exact moment the thought crosses my mind. “That’s enough,” he says quietly.
I meet his eyes. His expression is firm but not condemning. He knows why I would. He also knows we’ll need the prisoner alive—for legitimacy, for proof, for negotiation leverage if it comes to that.
I step back and wipe my hands on a rag someone left near the crates. Liam watches me closely, the way one watches someone balancing on the edge of a blade. His voice is steady when he finally speaks.
“What did he give us?”
“A fortified estate. Border corridor. Classic trafficking post. They’re holding her there, probably underground.” My jaw flexes. “They’re planning to move her.”
Liam stiffens. “When?”
“Soon. Hours. Maybe less.”
The words feel like a blade sliding beneath my ribs and twisting. The thought of them relocating her—drugging her, moving her, selling her as leverage—makes the room tilt. I steady myself on the wall.
Liam takes a slow breath. “Then we plan fast.”
The metal door opens behind him, and cold night air spills in. I step out into the darkness. Men stand ready, tense, watching us with the quiet dread reserved for wars you know you might not return from.
Liam joins my side, his tone all leadership again. “I want a map of the property on the screens. Every civilian house within three miles flagged. I want the Italians looped in but not leading. This is our hit.”
Men scatter to complete the orders.
I stay frozen in place, staring into the distance where the vans fled, trying to imagine her somewhere beyond that black horizon.
I hate that I can’t hear her voice. I hate that I wasn’t there when she needed me.
But most of all, I hate the certainty building in my chest: that the Russians didn’t take her as leverage against the Irish.
They took her as leverage against me.
Liam touches my shoulder, his voice pitched low. “Declan. You lead the rescue. I won’t take that from you. But you’ll do it with a structured team, and you’ll do it smart. ”
I breathe once, hard. “I’m getting her back.”
“You will,” he says. “But not alone.”
His certainty steadies something in me I didn’t realize had started to shake.
We walk toward the temporary strategy tent where screens are lighting up with satellite views and border maps. But under it all, a single truth pulses steady and sharp as a heartbeat: Ailish is alive. And I am coming.
Inside the strategy tent, the hum of generators competes with the low murmur of men assembling gear.
Folding tables are covered with blueprints, maps, and equipment manifests.
The overhead lights cast a sterile glow over everything, the kind that makes even polished metal look like bone.
Screens flicker with satellite overlays of a stretch along the state border—wooded land, sparse buildings, a road that barely qualifies as such.
One of Liam’s tech analysts zooms in, stabilizing the aerial view.
My jaw locks as the estate comes into focus.
A long main building, two outlying sheds, and a fenced perimeter that gleams faintly with coils of barbed wire.
The place is built for containment, not comfort.
They didn’t choose it at random. They chose it because no one escapes without leaving pieces behind.
I force that thought back into the dark place it crawled from.
Liam steps up beside me. His posture is the same one he wears before high-stakes meetings with the Italians—back straight, arms relaxed, but eyes scanning for any sign of weakness around him.
He’s steady, and that steadiness creates a pocket of stability in the chaos.
It’s why men follow him without question.
It’s why I do, even when I pretend otherwise.
The analyst points to the northern quadrant. “This is the access road the trucks likely used. There’s a gate here. We think it’s padlocked chains, not electrified. Two guard towers, but they’re unmanned in the older photos.”
I shake my head. “They’re manned now. They know we’ll come.”
Liam nods. “They have Ailish. They’re preparing for leverage.” His voice tightens. “Or for a message.”
A sharp ache pulses behind my sternum—fear, rage, something poisonous. “We’re not giving them time to send it.”
I lean over the table, studying the layout, tracing the outer fence with my fingertip.
It feels too open in some ways, too exposed in others.
They chose the estate well; I’ll give them that.
No easy angles. No blind spots worth using.
But everything fragile in this world has a crack somewhere.
You just have to think sideways to find it.
Liam gestures toward the map’s southern edge. “Woods here provide cover, but terrain is uneven. Hard to move fast.”
“We’re not going fast,” I counter. “We’re going quiet.”
He raises a brow. “And when the quiet fails?”
“Then we go loud.”
For a moment, the smallest flicker of brotherly acknowledgment crosses his face. It’s the same look he used to give me when we were younger and planning stupid things together, the kind that required lying to our father, bribing a door guard, and probably dodging bullets by dawn.
Only this time, the stakes are Ailish. And the life she carries.
He clears his throat. “We’ll need two teams. One at the perimeter to draw attention. One inside to extract.”
“I’ll lead the inside team.”
He doesn’t argue. “I’ll lead the outer.”
We’re united in purpose, for once not arguing about direction or authority.
It’s a strange, almost fragile feeling. War has made both of us too hard, too sharp at the edges, too accustomed to losing pieces of ourselves to stay alive.
But this mission demands something else—cohesion.
And maybe, for the first time in a long time, trust.
I push the thought aside and point to a structure near the back of the estate. “There. That shed. It’s not on any of the supply manifests, and it’s newer than the rest. They’ll hide her there or underground beneath it.”
Liam nods slowly, weighing the idea. “We’ll move your team through the tree line. Use thermal to confirm body heat. Blow the lock if needed.”
My voice cuts in before the analyst can speak. “No explosives. They’ll hear it, and they’ll use her as a shield.”
The room goes quiet. Not a single man looks away from the screens.
Someone finally asks, “Then what do we use?”
“Bolt cutters,” I say. “And silence.”
Silence agrees with me. It feeds my focus, gives shape to the fear without letting it spill over. If I speak too much, if I let the wrong words out, the edges of me might crack. So I stay quiet and let the planning continue.
Weapons are chosen—compact rifles outfitted with suppressors, two sidearms each, comm units wired for secure channels.
The analyst briefs us on rotations, motion sensors, possible escape routes.
Liam issues commands without raising his voice, and I watch as the men absorb his orders, reorganize, and prepare.
But the longer I stand there, the more the tension beneath my ribs sharpens. It’s not impatience. It’s the feeling of being too far away from her. Every second spent planning is a second she’s in that estate. Blindfolded. Alone. Listening to footsteps that don’t belong to me.
The thought nearly sends me out the door before the plan is finished.
Liam notices. He steps close, his voice lowered. “Declan. You need a clear head. She needs you sharp, not desperate.”
“I’m not desperate,” I say, though my pulse betrays me.
He gives me a look that says he knows better. “I’ve seen you on the edge. You’re standing there now.”
“You think I don’t know that?” My voice is low but rough. “You think I haven’t been trying to crawl back for hours? Every second she’s gone—”
“I know,” he interrupts, and something in his eyes softens. “Believe me. I know.”
It’s rare for him to say it out loud. Rarer still to say it like it hurts him too. He continues, voice quiet enough only I can hear. “You love her.”
The air goes still. Not because he’s wrong. Because I’m too tired to lie about it anymore.
I don’t answer. I don’t have to.
Liam nods. “Then focus. Love is useful only if it sharpens you, not if it blinds you.”
Before I can respond, someone calls out from across the room. “We’ve identified vehicle signatures. Three vans. All confirmed Russian.”
Liam turns. “Show us.”
The screen zooms in, highlighting timestamps. The vans reached the estate thirty minutes after the ambush. They didn’t circle back. They didn’t stall. They drove straight in through a rear gate that wasn’t on the satellite maps from last year.
“They’ve modified the grounds,” the analyst mutters. “This is a newer access point.”
My jaw tightens. “Means they’re expecting trouble.”
“Which means,” Liam says, “we’re already behind schedule.”
I step forward, eyes locked on the glowing map, committing every line, every shadow, every structure to memory. My voice is steady when I speak next. “Gear up. We head out in less than two hours.”
Liam doesn’t correct me. He just repeats the order louder.
Men disperse. Weapons are checked. Radios tested. Kevlar strapped. The tent fills with the sound of steel meeting purpose. It should reassure me. It doesn’t.
Nothing will until Ailish is back where she belongs.