We fell silent, each of us lost to our own thoughts, then Aidan broke it. “I can’t believe Hoskins fucked us over like that,” he rasped, referencing the fucker who’d sided with an Italian sharpshooter, taken out Rogan, a trusted soldier, and had tried to get to our nephew and brother’s woman.
“He’s dead now,” I pointed out, my tone a tad more gleeful than was appropriate. Especially as the crew we’d shipped after him had been told to be heavy-handed. Messages had to be sent, after all, and they had to make shockwaves reverberate around the Points. “No use overthinking it.”
“Always been your trouble,” he retorted. “You knock something off your to-do list and that’s it. There’s a reason he did what he did.”
“Money, probably. You know the Famiglia pay well. It’s the only reason they have any foot soldiers on the streets right now,” Finn remarked.
“Conor’s right. The cunt is dead, and we have other shit to worry about.” Brennan sighed. “Now the threat is contained, I’ll go and get Seamus and Aela in the morning. Shit should be wrapped up with the cops by then, and the house will have been processed. If there’s a problem, I’ll get French on it and make sure everything’s tied up neatly. I’ll bring them to Declan’s, but the folks can’t find out about it.”
“Only way you can make sure that happens is if you go alone.”
Brennan shrugged at Finn’s comment. “That was my intention anyway.”
I hummed under my breath. “I’ll come along for the ride.”
It was time to meet this nephew who had the fam in chaos, and as chaos was my forte, I was excited about meeting him. I just hoped the kid wasn’t a prick, but I didn’t put out much hope because every teen boy at fourteen was one of those.
DECLAN
“Aela.”
A sharp intake of air was my first clue that she recognized my voice, and to be completely frank, I didn’t recognize my fucking voice, so how the hell she did was a miracle.
Still, I wasn’t about to question a miracle, not when this entire situation felt very miraculous.
Like I was in the middle of a very lucid dream that I wasn’t sure I wanted to wake up from.
The cardiac arrest, the feeling like death warmed over, sure, that could be a nightmare. I’d be very happy to wake up from that and not have to piss in a bag, but the stuff with Aela? With Seamus? I was glad that was happening.
Life changing, and in a way that was positive. In a way that was usually anathema of how lives changed in my world.
“Declan?”
Her voice was husky, shaky, and even though I hadn’t spoken to her in years, I was instantly transported back to the days when her voice had been husky and shaky from need, from love, and not just nerves.
I missed those days so fucking badly… more than I knew, more than I thought I did.
“Yeah. It’s me.” I cleared my throat after I fell silent, and when she didn’t say a word, Conor muttered, “My minutes aren’t for wasting.”
I scowled at him. “You gotta be shitting me. Your minutes aren’t for wasting? Get me my own goddamn phone and I’ll waste my own minutes. You cheapskate fucker.” Millions in the bank and he was whining on about minutes when he had an unlimited fucking plan!
Sniffing, Conor folded his arms across his chest. “Don’t know where your phone is.”
My eyes narrowed even further, but before I could snap at him to go and find the fucker, which was loaded down with confidential material that we didn’t need getting into the wrong hands, a wave of fatigue reminded me that my energy wasn’t without limits.
I wasn’t supposed to be awake, was supposed to still be in a drug-induced sleep, but I couldn’t relax. Something was gnawing at me, keeping me from resting fully.
Aela.
Seamus.
I’d heard my brothers talking. Hushed whispers, discussions about their safety. How the fuck was I supposed to sleep with that going down? Famiglia cunts trying to get to my boy? With cops in Seamus’s life? Even worse, Feds sniffing around like he was cow shit and Dunbar was one big fucking horsefly?
When I didn’t reply to Conor, just glared at him, Aela whispered, “Since when was Conor so thrifty?”
“Always been thrifty,” I countered gruffly. “Just on his own dime and not everyone else’s. Cheap bastard,” I muttered, before I winced as my body ached with just how fatigued I was. Conor snorted, but didn’t deny the claim, just reverted his attention to the screen he was working on. In this place, that was about as much privacy as I could hope for. “Aela, in the morning, my brothers will be coming up for you. They’ll help bring you to the city.”
“Excuse me?” she replied.
I sniffed. “Excuse you? I don’t. Excuse you, I mean.”
“I have business here,” she retorted, her tone snooty. So fucking snooty that, back in the day, I’d have hauled her over my knee and spanked her for it.
Gritting my teeth, I told her, “Business? More important than our kid’s safety?”
At my words, she immediately gulped.
“I know about him. Brennan told me.”
More silence.
I got it. I couldn’t blame her. If I was her and I had to tell me the truth? I’d shit a brick too.
“I did what I thought was best for him.”
Her words hit me harder than the bullets had. When they’d sliced into me, tearing through flesh and organs with no regard for what they destroyed, that hurt less than her remark.
But it was also pure Aela.
Pure, ‘I won’t cower before you’ Aela.
She’d been softer back when she was younger. More pliable. But stubborn. So fucking stubborn. I swore, she got my cock harder than three lap dances back to back just with her sass.
Pliable just meant she’d bend and wouldn’t break if I put her in a corner, and sometimes, on rare occasions, she’d even come out fighting.
I wondered what a pissed off Aela looked like at thirty-two. I wondered if she looked hotter than she had been back when we were kids.
Closing my eyes at the thought, wanting to savor the memory, I had to admit that I was rocking a boner my heart probably couldn’t withstand right about now. Still, her lack of apology, though it gutted me, made me respect her.
She was standing by her decision. I couldn’t blame her. Not when a handful of hours after she became a part of my world again, there were some fuckers trying to take her and my kid out.
“Best for him now is to know me, right?”
“Before you die?” she countered, her words filled with a fire that was undeniable.
Just shove a ton of kindling in front of her and she’d be razed to the ground in the flames that were born in that spark of anger.
“I ain’t dying.”
“No? Almost did last night. Twice.”
“All the more reason to get to know me then, isn’t it?” I heaved a breath. “Only God knows how long I’ve got left.”
Conor grumbled, “Talk about asking for bad karma.”
I ignored him. “I don’t have much energy, Aela. But what little I’ve got, I’m focusing on you. If I could kill the Famiglia fucker for you, I would have. I’d slice my own throat before I’d let you and Seamus be in harm’s way, and that’s exactly why my brothers are coming to get you.
“Since I’m in enough trouble healthwise, the last thing I need is a Cheshire cat grin around my Adam’s apple.”
I could almost hear her mind ticking away, but the key to breaking her obstinacy?
Logic.
Truth.
Cold reason.
For a creative woman, she was surprisingly rational, but then, if she hadn’t been, she’d have driven me crazy—and not in a good way. Back when I was younger, she’d had my cock in a knot. If she’d been illogical and stupid, she’d have just made me want to strangle her.
“Okay,” she muttered, even though I knew she wasn’t happy about it.
Nerves hit me. “Does he know anything about me?”
&
nbsp; She swallowed loud enough for me to hear it. “I never hid you from him.”
“Then why did you hide him from me?” I rasped, my voice low, even though I knew the answer.
“I thought you hated me. Thought you’d hate him. And you forget, Declan, I knew you back then. I was well aware how you’d work, how your family still works if the photos I saw in the tabloids are anything to go by.”
My brow puckered. “Huh?”
I knew I was slurring, even though Conor tapped his watch, telling me to hurry up with it because if Ma caught me on the cellphone, she’d slap me. Bullet wounds to the chest or not.
“I saw Eoghan and Inessa’s big day. Nice fancy arrangement, all prettied up for the cameras, but only someone in the life would see a contract behind it.”
My jaw ached from how hard I clenched it. “Sometimes, ties have to be cemented.”
“And I had no desire to be a tie or to be ‘cemented’ when I was a kid. Not to a man I thought loved me but looked at me like he thought I was a tramp, not to a man who might have believed I trapped him into marriage.”
Her exhausted sigh resonated, because I was equally as tired. Still, I remembered the last time I’d set eyes on her and guilt hit me. “I didn’t hate you,” I muttered. “I was under a lot of pressure.”
“Yeah, because your girlfriend had just been slaughtered,” she returned. “Tell me why I’d want to raise a kid in that world, Declan?”
A sweet kind of despair hit me then. Landed straight in my solar plexus.
How was I supposed to answer that?
Because she was right. What woman, in their ever-loving mind, would want to raise a child in this world? It tilted everything on its head. Made me respect her and, crazily, lose some respect for my ma.
“You still there?” she asked warily.
“Yeah. I am.” I reached up to rub tired eyes. I wanted to tell her she was right, but I couldn’t. There was no escaping the life, merely procrastinating while you were away from it because once you were in it, you never got out.
So because I couldn’t tell her she was right, I compounded her words by admitting, “The guy who betrayed Rogan’s been handled. You don’t have to worry about him.”
Conor arched a brow at that, and I knew why too. That wasn’t something we shared with the womenfolk.
Certainly not over the phone.
But I needed her to know she was safe.
“That’s good to know.” She didn’t sound like it was, and I guessed, in this situation, ‘good’ was relative. “Look, you must be tired, and I have to go. If your brothers are coming for me tomorrow, there are things I need to wrap up. Even though the lawyer Brennan sent over has been working miracles, I’m still at the house and they’re only just letting us leave.”
“What things?” I couldn’t stop myself from asking that question, even though I knew she might not answer.
Just the thought of her heading off to a lover’s house to say goodbye sent white-hot jealousy roaring through me.
I had no right, and yet every right to feel that way.
Sure, that made no sense, but I was doped up, for fuck’s sake. Cut me some goddamn slack.
“Things with work. I need to hand in my resignation.” She sighed, and it was poignant enough to tell me she’d miss her job, which made me feel guilty again. “Things with the police. I killed a man, Declan. Christ. That comes with repercussions in the real world.”
“You don’t live in the real world anymore, Aela. I’ll sort it out. Now, you get yourself checked into the Grande. Brennan will pay the tab in the morning—”
“I can pay my own way,” she ground out.
“I heard you’re a wealthy woman, but that means shit to me. I pay for my woman and my kid.”
“Who the hell said I was your woman?” she snarled at me, all fire and venom. “I’m only coming because of the danger—danger your family put us in—”
“Me. I said it. You’re mine. Always fucking have been, and always fucking will be.”
And because I didn’t have the energy to go to war, not with a woman who couldn’t apologize for keeping my son away from me for fourteen years, with a woman who made me accept she’d been justified in doing that, I put the phone down.
Conor, eying me warily, muttered, “That’s one way to get the last word in.”
My lips twitched. “Watch and learn, C, watch and learn.”
“How did you know about Hoskins?” he asked carefully.
“Heard you all talking. You should have told me. Shouldn’t have to eavesdrop in on that conversation.”
“You were at death’s door, bro. Not the kind of stuff you need to be hearing right now. Not when we got it covered.”
“I needed to know they’re safe.”
“And they are. You should have trusted us. We’d never put them in danger.”
“They don’t matter to you like they do to me.”
“I respectfully disagree. Either way, you shouldn’t have told her about Hoskins,” he chided. “The phone might be tapped.”
“As if you’d ever let that happen. Anyway, you’ll understand the rest when you get a woman.”
“Already have plenty. All of them dying to get with me.”
I snorted, but as the cell tumbled from my hand, before it collided with the bed, I was asleep.
I could rest easy now, knowing she and Seamus were safe. I could sleep.
Heal.
Because something told me that when I was back on my feet, she’d give me a run for my money, and hell if that wasn’t something to look forward to.
Eight
Aela
After Declan’s call in the early hours of the morning, where he’d laid down the law, it wasn’t a surprise to open the door and find Conor and Brennan there. But welcoming them in felt odd.
Like I was conceding defeat on a battle that had yet to be fought.
Of course, I had enough battles going down around me, so I needed to pick which ones to fight.
My house was a crime scene. There was yellow tape around it, and my bedroom was being processed by forensics, so I’d grabbed all the stuff Seamus and I had been packing with the intention of taking it to New York with us, and had checked us into a hotel instead.
How they’d known about it when I’d specifically gone to a different hotel than the one Declan had named—
Of course.
Conor.
I scowled at him. “Have you hacked into my bank account?”
Even when I was a kid, Declan had regaled me with tales of all the crap Conor pulled with his hacks. I knew, once, he’d almost gotten into NASA, because he was on the hunt for information about Area 51, but before he could get to the good stuff, he’d nearly been caught.
When Aidan Sr. had found out, unlike any other parent in the world, he hadn’t chastised Conor. Instead, he’d given him a to-do list of government databases to break into.
I sighed at the thought, inwardly wincing at the bad influences I was introducing into my son’s life, but there was nothing to be done about it.
Nothing at all.
I knew I could fight. I knew I could run.
But you couldn’t fight the O’Donnellys. And once they knew about you, there was no running either.
Not if I didn’t want to die. And I really didn’t.
Death was the last thing I wanted, because I totally intended on watching my son grow up and becoming a man. On becoming the person he wanted to be.
I knew what the O’Donnellys were capable of. I knew they were bloodthirsty psychopaths, and I knew they’d come after me with every ounce of their firepower just because of Seamus. So I could fight and almost die, and lose out on a future with him, or I could give in, stay on the inside, make sure I was there for Seamus, and ensure that I had his back to give him some semblance of normalcy.
Maybe I should resent all of this, and I guessed I did—I was only human. But, I’d known this day was coming the second I’d taken off. It had alway
s been there in my future. A kind of D-Day that, with each passing year, hovered in the distance, looming over me like a harbinger of doom.
You couldn’t resent the inevitable.
“Of course I did,” Conor said, shoving past me to head straight into my hotel room.
Brennan grimaced at me, and muttered, “Conor, you’re supposed to ask if you’re allowed inside—”
“I’m hungry, and I need a bathroom,” Conor grumbled. “I’m not asking for shit.”
I rolled my eyes. “Bathroom’s on the left,” I told him as he moved around the room, evidently scoping the place out.
When he headed for the door I pointed to, a grin of thanks on his face, I moved back to let Brennan inside. He cleared his throat, peered around, cast a look at the unmade bed before making sure that he didn’t look me up and down, and stared me straight in the eyes.
He was cute, I’d admit it. Cute in a ‘killer’ kind of way. I was under no illusion that was what he was, after all.
But my lady boners were all for Declan. Unfortunately for me. Because Brennan didn’t look at me like he hated me, and that was so nice. Damn, nice was an understatement.
Of course, Conor hadn’t looked like he hated me either.
I frowned at that. Frowned at the lack of disapproval that was coming off them in waves.
“Why the scowl?”
I shrugged at Brennan’s question, then muttered, “Just thought you guys would give me a hard time is all.”
“No point,” he said briskly. “But I’ll admit, I want to meet him.”
“I can’t say the same for him.”
“No?” He winced. “Damn.”
“You ready to be an uncle?” I teased, surprising myself because nothing was funny about this situation. It was simply that his reaction was pretty sweet.
This hardened criminal really wanted to get to know my kid.
Okay, sweet was definitely relative. But better Brennan wanting to get to know Seamus than giving me crap.
Of course, I’d be monitoring how the next few hours would go. If they dissed him, disrespected him in anyway, made a move to belittle him, I didn’t give a fuck—I’d find a way to get us out, away from the O’Donnellys. Seamus was cheeky and could backtalk like a pro… if they slapped him, then we were gone.
Filthy Dark: A SECOND CHANCE/SECRET BABY, MAFIA ROMANCE (THE FIVE POINTS' MOB COLLECTION Book 3) Page 10
