by L. A. Casey
It was a living person who I was more concerned about causing me more pain.
My primary focus was on the being that brought me so much emotional agony. I was cold as ice when someone brought Ryder up, but I knew it was a defence mechanism to shield my crumbled heart. It was a front because when I thought about him in the comfort of my own mind, I became devastated and constantly fought back tears.
I was heart-broken that he cheated on me, I was destroyed that we were broken up, and I was completely torn apart that I couldn’t call him mine anymore. Even when things were at there worst with us, he was still mine, but not anymore.
“I’ll come with you,” Bronagh said, cutting through my thoughts.
I firmly shook my head. “There is black ice on the roads and I don’t want you out there walkin’ on it. You could fall.”
“So could you,” Bronagh countered.
I loved her for loving me so much.
I grinned. “You’re pregnant though, I’m not.”
My sister opened her mouth to argue, but I lifted my hand and silenced her.
“I’m fine. Me leg is practically healed, and walkin’ isn’t painful anymore. I won’t go far, I just need some time to meself to think,” I explained. “I’m feelin’ all kinds of fucked up, Bee. Being trapped in here isn’t helpin’.”
“Okay,” she relented after a couple of seconds. “But please be careful, and don’t stay out long. I’ll worry otherwise.”
We had somehow switched roles over the last few weeks. She was parenting me now.
“I won’t,” I assured her. “I’ll be no more than ten minutes. I’m just goin’ for a quick walk then I’ll be back. I promise.”
I kept my promise, I took a very short walk once around the block, and then I returned home, much to the relief of my sister. I didn’t mind taking a quick walk; I just wanted some fresh air, and some space. When I assured Bronagh, again, that I was okay, I went up to the bedroom that was still my bedroom. I stripped naked, wrapped myself in a towel then went into the bathroom and took a shower. When I finished, I headed back into my room but froze when I walked through the door.
“Branna?”
My heart jumped in fear of the man who had broken it.
“I told your brothers that you weren’t to come here.” I said, gripping the towel around my body tightly.
“They told me what you said,” he said, softly, “but I decided not to listen anymore.”
I started to humourlessly laugh.
“Because everythin’ has to be on your fuckin’ terms, right?” I asked through my cold laughter.
“No,” Ryder frowned, “because I had to see you.”
I shook my head and turned from him and walked over to my wardrobe. I grabbed some knickers, a bra, a pair of black leggings and a baggy T-shirt. I looked over my shoulder and narrowed my eyes at Ryder who turned and put his back to me, giving me some privacy.
He had never turned away when I dressed, or undressed, before, but things were different because I was his then, and now I wasn’t.
Don’t think about it.
I quickly dried my body, mindful of the scabs on the stitches of closed wounds on my shoulder and thigh. The rest of me was still tender, but all of my bruises were a light mustard yellow colour now, and it wouldn’t be long until they healed and faded completely.
“I’m decent,” I said when I was dressed.
Ryder turned back to face me, and instead of giving me a once over like I expected him to, he kept his grey eyes locked on mine. I didn’t know why, but I couldn’t hold his gaze. I looked away then busied myself as I brushed my hair out then tied it up into a bun.
“You’re beautiful.”
The unexpected words slammed into my layered heart like a train.
I keep my gaze averted when I said, “Don’t, Ryder. Don’t try and butter me up. I look like shit—I know it and everyone else knows it, too. I’m still recoverin’ so me appearance isn’t on me list of priorities.”
I felt him step towards me, so I took a quick step back.
“Don’t.”
He stayed still.
“You’re beautiful no matter what you look like, darling.”
I lifted my eyes to his as I snorted. “I’m darlin’ now, am I? I’m not just Branna anymore?”
He looked hurt.
“You’ve always been my darling, and you always will be.”
My stomach roiled as sadness seeped into my bones.
“Stop it,” I pleaded, feeling my tough demeanour crack. “Stop talkin’ to me like the real you used to, just stop.”
“I’m still me, Bran.”
I furiously shook my head. “No, the real you would have never put me through what you did.”
Ryder audibly swallowed. “You’re right, I wouldn’t have, but I took the coward’s way out because I was too scared to rope you into things.”
Rope me into things? I silently repeated. What the hell is he talking about?
“Just leave,” I asked. “I can’t listen to this.”
“You have to.”
“No,” I snapped, looking at him. “I don’t have to do a fuckin’ thing. I did nothin’ wrong, you did!”
“I know,” he agreed, “and I’m trying to fix it.”
I wanted to scream.
“You can’t!” I bellowed. “You broke what we had.”
“Don’t say that, Bran,” he pleaded. “Please.”
I hated that his obvious pain was hurting me, too.
I balled my hands into fists. “I’m so angry at you… you’ve hurt me so much.”
Ryder nodded in defeat. “I know, sweetheart, and I wish with all of my heart that I could take it back.”
“You can never take it back. You don’t understand the magnitude of what you did to me,” I whispered. “I wanted ‘im to kill me. When Big Phil had me, I was at the lowest point in me life, and death looked like the best possible outcome for me.”
Pure horror overtook Ryder’s expression.
“It was shortly after I woke up in his apartment that I wondered why I was so scared of ‘im, and why I was so scared to die, when in reality, I died the moment you pulled away from me.”
“Darling—”
“It was a moment of weakness,” I cut Ryder off. “It was one moment of many over the last year and a half. I’ve been so focused on you changin’, that it has changed me, too, and I hate it. I stepped on eggshells around you, I just accepted your refusal to tell me what you were up to, I fuckin’ saw you with another woman and—”
“That wasn’t what happened.” Ryder cut across me as he reached for me.
I angrily pushed his hands away and shouted, “Let me finish! I saw you with another woman and I walked away. All because I wasn’t strong enough to face you or me reality of how things were with you. I turned into a doormat, a coward, and for what? Fuckin’ nothin’!”
I shook my head in disgust at myself.
“The moment I asked you where you were goin’, and you blocked me out, I should have left you. No—I should have given you a chance or two to redeem yourself, but after that, I should have packed up and left you. I shouldn’t have put up with it; I should have walked away and never looked back. I keep thinkin’ about how different me life would be now if I had done that. Big Phil still would have probably kidnapped me because I’m tied to your family, but I wouldn’t have been as weak as I was when I was alone with ‘im. I would have fought for me life, not silently pleaded with ‘im to take it.”
“Branna, I hate myself.”
Out of all the things I expected Ryder to say—that was not it.
“What?” I asked, not sure if I heard him correctly.
“I hate myself,” he repeated, louder. “I knew that I was ruining us, but I kept telling myself that it’d be okay, and when the time came for me to be done with the bullshit that distracted me, I’d fix everything and we’d go back to normal.” He shook his head and shoved his hands into the front pockets of his je
ans. “I was naive to think that you would always stick by me when I was treating you so poorly.”
“You aren’t makin’ any sense,” I said, annoyed. “The ‘bullshit that distracted you’ was another woman. You can’t fix us. The moment you decided to give yourself to another, we were doomed.”
Ryder looked me dead in the eye and said, “I have never cheated on you. I have never considered cheating on you, and I have never, in all our time together, wanted to cheat on you.”
“Don’t treat me like I’m stupid, I’m not fuckin’ stupid.” I set my jaw. “I saw you. I followed you the night he took me, and I saw you with a woman in a white Range Rover.”
Ryder nodded. “That was Lucy, she’s my contact, not my mistress.”
His contact?
I stared at him. “Are you hearin’ yourself right now?”
“I know, none of this makes sense but if you let me explain, it will.”
“No,” I replied instantly. “I don’t want to hear it, I wanted to hear it the first thousand times I asked, but not anymore. I am done with this conversation, and with you.”
“You don’t owe me anything, but darling, I owe you this explanation. Please let me give it to you.”
I wanted to shut him down again, but I couldn’t, it was like my body physically refused me to say the word ‘no’ again. I wanted to know what he had to say; I wanted to know the truth. He was right. I deserved that much.
“You’ll tell me where you went every night if it wasn’t to this Lucy?”
He sighed. “Yes, but it doesn’t start there, I have to start from the beginning—”
“No, answer that first then start from the beginnin’.”
“I can’t, it won’t make sense,” he said and looked down.
“Look at me,” I demanded.
He did. Ryder looked up at me, and when I saw unshed tears in his eyes; it broke through some of the protective ice that had layered itself around my heart.
“Branna,” he whispered, his body trembling. “Please. I know how hard this is, but trust me.”
No, I told myself. He wasn’t using that against me.
I shook my head. “I can’t do this anymore, Ryder. I can’t handle the lies. The deceit has broken me, you have broken me more than Big Phil ever could.”
Ryder visibly paled as he took a hesitant step towards me, but I held my ground.
“I don’t give a shite if it confuses me, tell me where you went every night right now, or I swear I will never even look at you again. This is your last fuckin’ chance to ever tell me the truth. The whole truth.”
There it was—the ultimatum I should have given him a long fucking time ago.
“Every night I had to meet with my contact Lucy from the FBI, get wired up, and go to Darkness where I was a mole for information against Brandon Daley.”
I stared at Ryder when he finished speaking; I stared at him for a long time before I said, “Get out.”
“No, Branna—”
“Get fuckin’ out!” I screamed. “Do you think this is funny? Do you think tearin’ me apart then tryin’ this bullshit on with me is fuckin’ funny?”
“It’s the truth!” Ryder shouted over me. “Just listen.”
“No—”
“Branna?”
I looked to my doorway when my sister called my name. My eyes instantly dropped to her round belly, and I said, “Are you okay?”
She nodded. “I’m fine… I just… you have to listen to ‘im.”
I stared at Bronagh and couldn’t believe what I was hearing, but before I had a chance to say anything, she pressed on.
“You have refused to be around Ryder since you got home from the hospital, but do you remember when I said Dominic agreed to a family meetin’ so we could get all this shit out into the open?”
I managed a small nod.
“We had that meetin’ last night when you were sleepin’, and trust me, you have got to listen to what Ryder has to say. I know what pulled ‘im from you, and it’s not what you think. I promise.”
My eyes pooled with tears as she closed my bedroom door.
“If you don’t trust me, Bran, trust your sister. Listen to what I have to say. Please.”
I looked back at Ryder and before I broke down I said, “Start from the beginnin’, and don’t leave anythin’ out.”
I couldn’t even begin to form a clue as to what he said before Bronagh came in.
The FBI?
Wired up?
A mole?
Brandon Daley?
The only thing I could think of was, what the fuck?
Instead of speaking, Ryder removed his jacket and jumper then gripped the hem of his t-shirt and pulled it up to his chin. I raised my eyebrows at what I saw.
He… was wearing a wire.
I stared at the black cable that was stuck—with what looked like surgical tape—to his chest, then to the tiny black box that was taped at his lower abdomen. I flicked my eyes between the two then looked up to Ryder to find his eyes were drilled onto me watching him.
“You’re wearin’ a wire,” I murmured.
“Yes,” Ryder swallowed. “I am, this one is not active. I broke it, but I just wanted to show it to you so you know what it looked like.”
“Why’re you wearin’ a wire?” I asked when he lowered his t-shirt.
“Sit down and I’ll tell you everything.”
An emotion I couldn’t explain surged through me when I realised that he was, in fact, finally going to tell me the reason for our life together ending.
“Sit down,” he prompted once more.
I looked at my bed and moved over to the end of it where I climbed up and sat down, letting my legs hang over the edge. Ryder grabbed the chair in front of my vanity desk and placed it in front of me. He sat down and leaned his elbows onto his knees leaving only a little bit of space between his knees knocking against mine.
I had to tense my entire body when his scent surrounded me and the familiarity of it caused my insides to flutter and come to life. The urge to reach out and touch him consumed me so I shoved my hands under my thighs to keep from doing so.
I focused on him when he began speaking.
“About a year and half ago I fell into a rut where I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life, and I didn’t want to talk to you about it because I was embarrassed to admit I didn’t have the skills to do anything.”
I frowned, but didn’t interrupt.
“Kane had his landlord and property developer thing going on, Dominic had his personal trainer thing, and Alec was always helping out at the animal shelter nearby. I wasn’t qualified for anything.” He scrubbed his face with both of his hands. “All I’ve ever known is drugs and weapons, and I felt like a failure because I wasn’t made for working in your world. I still have no qualifications for anything… I didn’t even finish high-school, Branna.”
“I know that about you,” I said, “and if you think I give a damn whether you’re educated or not then you don’t know me at all.”
“I know you don’t care, and to you it doesn’t matter, but to me, it matters. I want to be the one taking care of you even though you’re more than capable of doing it yourself. I just didn’t feel like a man, and I’m not looking for sympathy, I’m just trying to explain where my head was at.”
I nodded. “I get that, but I still don’t know how everythin’ else comes into play. I mean, the FBI, Ryder?”
“That is actually the easy part,” he grunted. “It’s unbelievable that it happened, but it wasn’t like their heat wasn’t warranted.”
My head hurt. “Explain.”
“I still haven’t figured out the best way to explain it, but here goes nothing,” he said and blew out a deep breath. “Pretty soon after I started to feel like shit, I wanted to do my part around the house to feel like I wasn’t completely pathetic so I went down to B&Q to get some materials so I could paint the rooms, patch up any dents or holes in the walls… shit like that. I wa
s leaving the store when two men in black tailored suits approached me at my car. At first I thought it was funny, they looked like the Men in Black, so they had to have the wrong person, but when they told me who they were and what they wanted from me, I honestly nearly fainted.”
Fear gripped me.
“What did they want from you?”
“They told me a construction site up on the mountain side that was levelling out land discovered a mass grave site.”
I felt the blood drain from my face.
“Trent?” I questioned. “Marco’s men from that night in Darkness when he took Damien and hurt Bronagh?”
Five years ago, Marco Miles, Ryder’s old boss, attacked my little sister and tried to use her life, and Damien’s, as a bargaining chip to keep Ryder and his three other brothers under this thumb. It blew up in his face, and he paid for it with his life, his nephew’s life, and a few of his thugs’ lives.
Ryder nodded once. “They can’t identify the bodies, but mine and Dominic’s finger prints were on one of the plastic bags we used to wrap them up inside. We didn’t clean them as well as we thought.”
My heart was beating so fast I could hear it.
“There hasn’t been a single mention of it in the news though, how could—”
“They’re the Feds, Bran, they aren’t your regular cops. These are the people that hunt you down and find out everything about you know matter where you are on the planet. They have a small team here and only that team and the commissioner of your police knows about this operation. If they want something kept under wraps, you won’t know about it unless they want you to.”
What operation?
“I can’t believe this,” I breathed and lifted my hand from under my leg so I could place it on my chest.
“This is as real as it gets, Branna.” Ryder said, trepidation in his tone. “We were all arrested one time in the States… we did nothing wrong, but the cops arrested us one day just so they could get our finger prints and DNA on record. They knew who we ran with and I guess they didn’t want to take any chances with us. When the cops here ran the prints, they found us through the system, and the FBI was flagged and immediately flew over here. Marco was well known to them, but they could never pin shit on him because his crew was so good at what they did. They wanted to know where he disappeared to, and they also knew we had something to do with it because a source told them Marco came to Ireland after us and that he never left.”
