Stepping up to my side, he gently grasped my chin in his fingers and lifted my head so I would look at him.
His eyes were now etched with worry, but I could see the warrior in him slowly taking over. I knew it wouldn’t be long until the moment where I’d thought I was breaking through to him would just be a memory.
His fingers slipped from my chin as he turned and left the room, ripping the knife out of the doorframe as he did.
No words.
No assurances.
No empty promises.
No murmurs of love.
Less than a minute later, I was stumbling from the bed to the bathroom when Beck walked back in with wide eyes and an apology already on his lips.
“I didn’t know what I was walking in on. I’m so—” His brow pinched when he saw the wetness gathering in my eyes. “Lil . . .?”
Unable to hold them back any longer, a sob tore from somewhere deep within me and the tears fell free.
“Lily, what happened?” Beck rushed toward me, his hands moving to my shoulders to keep me in place when I tried to wave him off. His eyes were wild and panicked as he took in my tear-streaked face. “Did—did he—fuck, did he hurt you?” he finally asked between gritted teeth.
I shook my head as another sob broke free, and pressed my hand to my chest in an attempt to ease the aching there.
“Jesus fuck, Lil. Give me something before I go get myself killed. Because I know I’ll at least get one good hit in before he comes after me with a—”
“No. Beck, no!” I choked out as I tried to force the tears back. “I’m fine, it’s just—it’s this day, you know? This stupid day.” My chin trembled, but I forced myself to continue on. “I’m emotional, and it’s all just getting to me. I need a shower, and I need to sleep, or something.” I forced out a strained laugh. “I’m being such a girl.”
Beck looked lost. He looked like he didn’t know if he should still risk his life by going up against Kieran or believe me.
After a few moments of staring at me with a dumbfounded expression, he hesitantly asked, “Is this one of those times when I need to send someone out for chocolate?”
A real laugh tumbled from my lips, soggy from my tears. And despite being so wrong, I nodded. “Yes, this is one of those times.”
“Okay. Okay, I’ll send Conor.” He released me and took a step back, but paused as he searched my face. He was trying to force himself to believe me, and I knew he was worried about getting this wrong. “Okay, yeah. Chocolate.”
“You’re the best.”
I waited until the door was shut behind him before heading into the bathroom and stripping out of the shirt I’d pulled back on. Once the shower water was on and steaming up the bathroom, I stepped in and let the hot water mix with the tears that were slowly falling again.
I rubbed at my chest as I felt the growing distance between Kieran and me become a living thing inside me, and grieved what had become of us.
Every one of our firsts had been together. And knowing him the way I did, they had gone as expected.
He was ruthless in everything, with moments of tenderness reserved for me. Making him lethal with his knives and on my heart.
The touches, the kisses . . . they all came from the same place. They all came from the dreamer who knew how to be soft and melt me with words. They’d come from Kieran.
Sex with him had always been rough and intense and full of power. It had been exhilarating, unrestrained passion. I’d craved it. Craved him. Every dark fantasy came to life, prompted by the monster inside. Pure Nightshade.
But there was never anything more. There were only those nights I could remember in flashes of slick skin, the sweetest kind of pain, and body-numbing tremors as he’d push me to the edge. There was never intimacy, there was never the tender love I knew he felt for me. And as the years went on, the more had been necessary. I’d wanted and needed Kieran in my bed too, not just Nightshade.
But that force between us that threatened to push until we couldn’t find our way back to each other? It had been born from broken promises, and fueled by every rough and disheartening sexual encounter over the last years.
Because when Aric died, I’d needed Kieran. Only Kieran. And each time I was met with Nightshade, it broke something inside me, hardening me to the man I loved.
Maybe it was my fault for believing he could be someone I knew he couldn’t. For believing one of those times, he would see what he was doing to me . . . how he was breaking me. Us.
Maybe it was my fault for forgetting the complexity of the man I loved. For forgetting why I’d fallen in love with him in the first place.
Maybe it was . . .
But those glimpses of his heart would always make me foolishly hope for things he couldn’t give me.
Would always make me foolishly hope he could save us. That he wanted to save us. But that hope was dwindling every day.
Everyone at the table was talking loudly, trying to be heard over the others as they all reacted to the news that Johnny and I had been given just hours before.
Lily O’Sullivan was alive.
Motherfucking alive.
I gripped my head in my hands as I stared at the table, trying to block out their voices.
Because she couldn’t be. I knew in my gut that she wasn’t.
But if she was—I would stop at nothing to steal Lily’s last breath the way he had stolen hers.
“Dare!”
I glanced up when my older sister shouted my name, my eyes already narrowed on her.
“I’ve been calling your name for, like, a minute,” Libby said, her eyes full of concern. “What are we going to do?”
“Nothing.”
Everyone except Johnny erupted in shouts of displeasure.
He didn’t have to say a word for me to know he didn’t agree with my decision. If someone had asked him—I had no doubt he’d leave right now and go massacre everyone on the Holloway property.
I waited until the table quieted before saying, “Nothing until we know for sure. I can’t be sure that piece of shit wasn’t lying to me today. He said her name and I forgot where I was and what we were doing. All I knew was what he’d said and what I wanted to do to a goddamn name.”
“But you said he’d been looking right at you. You said he had no tells,” Maverick, one of the twins, said.
I shrugged.
“It doesn’t matter. I wanted him to be telling the truth because I want a chance to take from them what they took from me. But when I look back on it, I can’t be sure that he wasn’t forcing that stare. We need to make sure.”
I looked every member of my team in the eye to make sure they understood it wasn’t just a suggestion—it was an order.
The twins, my sister, Einstein, Johnny.
Once I received nods from all of them, I looked at Johnny.
“Aric and Lily’s funeral,” I began, bringing up that day we’d sat in the shadows, watching to see if it was true. If Johnny’s cousin Joseph had really killed them both before Kieran had gotten him. “Kieran lost it. He wouldn’t have if she hadn’t—”
“He could’ve faked it,” Johnny said, cutting me off. “Or it could’ve been because of Aric. Everyone knew they were like brothers.”
I lifted a brow. “You gonna lose your shit the way he did if someone kills me, Johnny?”
The bastard smirked. “I might consider shedding a tear.”
“But you can’t know that until it happens,” Einstein said, giving Johnny a meaningful look.
Einstein was a genius. If she didn’t know something, she had ways of finding it out that Google couldn’t dream of. She was my hacker.
She was also the only person who had ever touched Johnny’s cold, dead heart.
And from the way Johnny’s face was suddenly an unreadable mask again, I knew he wasn’t considering what she’d just said—he was considering what would happen if he had to watch Einstein be lowered into the ground.
I knocked my knuckles
on the table to get his attention. “That’s what I mean. No ruthless killer like Kieran Hayes is going to do what he did that day over his best friend. You’re made of stone, Johnny? That guy is made of fucking steel. And you watched him break that day. Lily was in that casket. You know it. I know it.”
Of anyone at the table, I knew it.
That rage from earlier threatened to consume me again, but I forced it down.
It had been nearly four years—and about half that since I’d wanted to make every member of the Holloway Gang pay for what they’d done. But in that moment, it was as if no time had passed.
I couldn’t trust myself to walk away from the table and not go unleash hell on all of them.
But if I did that?
Well . . . retaliation was a very real thing in our world, and I wasn’t willing to lose another person from this table. I wasn’t willing to lose another member of my family—blood or not.
“I’m with Johnny.”
I glanced up, my eyebrows raised at the other twin’s words. “Come again?”
“I think Nightshade could’ve been faking it.”
My head was already shaking. “No. N—”
“No, wait a second,” Diggs began. “You’re gonna hear me out, man.”
The room fell silent as they waited for my response to his demand.
Demands weren’t allowed from people in the twins’ positions, especially at the table. But this was my team, and I’d been trying to lead the entire family in a different direction for years . . . starting with this generation.
So instead of throwing around a title I didn’t want—instead of staining the wood floor and adding to the blood from years past—I sat back and pushed out a heavy sigh.
“Listening.”
“Nightshade killed Joseph. Right?” Diggs’s gaze darted between Johnny and me as he waited for a response.
Johnny’s head dipped in acknowledgment, but I answered, “He came in as we jumped out the window.”
“And you heard one more shot after you jumped out,” he recalled from our stories. “That shot could’ve been aimed at Nightshade. It didn’t have to be for Lily. And you know it didn’t take more than a few seconds for him to figure out who Joseph was once he was dead—just like you know they’d expected you to be watching and waiting for them to hand over his body. It isn’t hard to think they’d expect you to follow them to the funeral the way you two did, to see who actually died. It could’ve been one big setup to pin us with their deaths so we wouldn’t try to retaliate for Joseph.”
I slanted my eyes at him. “That’s reaching. And whether or not Lily O’Sullivan died that night, I didn’t need to check Aric’s pulse to know that he did. There’s no way he survived that.”
Johnny nodded.
“Joseph got what was coming to him for it.”
“What the fuck, man, come on,” Diggs grumbled. “Four years ago he was at this damn table.”
“Dare’s right,” Johnny muttered.
“A lot of people would still be alive if he hadn’t come with us that night. Have you forgotten he wasn’t even supposed to be there? And he not only fucked everything up, he killed one—maybe two—O’Sullivans, and they retaliated for it. They took everything from me because he couldn’t keep his hands to himself, or follow the goddamn rules.” My voice dropped to a dangerous level when I repeated, “He got what was coming to him.”
You could’ve heard a pin drop once I finished talking, and I couldn’t take it. I couldn’t take the silence or the sympathetic looks at the reminder of what else happened nearly four years ago.
As much as I was afraid of what I would do if left alone—I knew I would chance it rather than staying in that room.
I stood but didn’t turn to leave. “If she’s ali—” The word choked me, picturing her alive and well. Living in the world when mine was gone. “If it’s true,” I began again, working my jaw, “then we aren’t taking it at the word of a pathetic excuse of a man who knew he was about to die and would’ve said anything not to.” I looked to Einstein. “Search for proof. Can’t find it? Then find someone who can give it to me. Until then, we go on like nothing’s changed.”
When I turned to go, Johnny mumbled under his breath, “What’s the point? I say we go in there now and kill as many Holloways as we can. It’s not like they don’t all need to go to ground.”
I leveled him with a glare when I faced him again, but forced a low laugh.
Because this was Johnny—and I knew him just as well as he knew me.
Johnny was old school.
Illegal games and ways to make ends meet, and taking out the enemy with a bullet to their head.
And if I took him seriously, or even seemed to, there’d be no containing him.
Johnny unleashed would be complete devastation, but he was the closest thing I’d ever had to a brother. I would do whatever it took to keep him alive—even if that meant saving him from his own rage and darkness.
“Why?” I asked him with a teasing hint to my tone. “So the rest of them will come to our homes and do the same? Don’t forget this isn’t a kill or be killed world we live in, Johnny. It’s a kill and be killed world. And I’m fucking tired of burying my family.”
He waited until I was at the door to speak again. When he did, anticipation laced his words—because he knew he had me. “You gonna worry about a little retaliation if Lily O’Sullivan is alive?”
I paused with my hand on the doorknob, sure that the metal would give beneath my grasp as I embraced every dark thought when it came to that girl.
Every dark want.
Every dark need.
“If she’s alive, I’m going there in the dead of night, and I’m ripping Kieran’s world out from under his feet the way mine was from me. And then I’m declaring war on every person connected to Holloway until there’s nothing left of them.”
I pulled my arms through a kimono as I walked from the bedroom to the kitchen half an hour later. My hair was still wet from the shower, but after how long and exhausting the day had been, I needed coffee just to get through drying it.
My pace slowed when I rounded the corner out of the hallway into the main area of the house and found Beck and Kieran talking in low tones.
There was no point in turning around and pretending I hadn’t noticed them. Kieran would’ve already known I was on my way out there long before I’d ever seen or heard them.
Wrapping the material of the short kimono around my waist so it would cover my bare thighs, I stepped closer to the guys but didn’t interrupt them, and they didn’t say a word to me even when they glanced at me.
Their hushed conversation didn’t stop until Kieran finished giving Beck his orders. Everything was said quickly, words and sentences clipped, names in code.
Codes I knew, of course. Words I could’ve caught if I’d actually tried to pay attention.
But there at Kieran’s feet, taking all of my focus, was his dad’s old military backpack. The bag that had been stashed in our closet for years, waiting for the day we ran from this life.
After what had just happened between us, I wasn’t sure how much more pain my heart could take before I finally started tearing at my chest.
I’d known that something irreparable had happened before Kieran had left to meet with Mickey. But that didn’t mean I was ready to finally accept that the future we’d planned would never happen.
“You’re leaving,” I said as soon as they finished talking, and forced my gaze away from the faded green pack to his piercing eyes. Kieran reached for me but I took a step away. “You’re leaving?”
Kieran loosely encircled my wrist with his long fingers, and waited to make sure I wouldn’t pull away from him. “I’ll be back after I sort things out in Texas.”
The pain in my chest eased as his words sank in. “Texas?” I shook my head as I wracked my brain for any mention of the state before then. “What’s going on in Texas?”
For the first time ever, Kieran hesita
ted in telling me something about the business. His brow pulled low and his mouth tightened in a hard line as he stared at me, indecision clear as day in those eyes.
And it hurt.
All I could think of in that moment were the times Kieran and I had told each other our darkest secrets—things we’d never shared with anyone—and now he was keeping something from me. He’d been keeping something from me.
I wondered what else I didn’t know, but couldn’t ask because I was keeping a world of things from him . . .
The nightmares and an old friend.
Disguises, cherished notes, and an intoxicating bond I tried not to make sense of.
Guilt sat low in my stomach like acid.
“Our contact didn’t pick up a shipment, and no one has been able to get in touch with him for a week. I’m gonna check on him.”
There wasn’t a need to ask why Kieran was the one going to Texas even though it wasn’t his job to check on contacts. If he was going, he was going to make sure the contact wouldn’t have a way of talking. “I didn’t know we had a contact in Texas.”
“Well, we might not anymore.” Beck’s wry grin abruptly fell when Kieran set his cold glare on him.
“Why didn’t I know about this?”
Again, that hesitation from Kieran before he finally said, “There isn’t a need for you to know.”
“Since when isn’t there—” I began, but stopped when he picked up his bag and turned toward the front door. “Kier—”
“I’ll be back when I’m done.”
“Kieran.”
He paused and ran a hand through his shoulder-length, dirty-blond hair. A heavy sigh left him when he turned to look at me again. “I’ll be back when I’m done, Lily.” His tone was softer, his eyes now pleading with me to drop the issue.
As much as I wanted to stand my ground and demand to know why there was a contact in another state that Kieran would hesitate to tell me about, I knew if I mentioned it again, he would do what he’d been about to.
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