“Cormac—”
“Get off me!”
“Cormac, you’ll tear open your stitches—”
“I don’t care. Get the fuck off me, Cian!”
“No!” Cian snaps, increasing the strength of his grip on my arm. “Not until you calm the fuck down!”
“I am fucking calm,” I snarl, attempting to wrench my arm free. “What part of this doesn’t exude fucking calmness!”
“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe declaring an all-out war on the Italians? Trying to turn the streets into a bloodbath without talking about it first?”
“What’s to talk about?” I finally wrench my arm free from Cian’s grasp and haul myself out of the hospital bed. “The order is given.”
“Cormac—”
“What would you have me do, Cian?” I spin to face him. Anger dulls the pain from my surgery to repair the internal injuries from the crash, and it’s more effective than any of the painkillers. “They killed Brenden! And then rather than handing over that fucking rat, Noah, they tried to act like I am unreasonable. And then that son of a bitch strode in here, shot our sister, and kidnapped the woman I love. So tell me, Cian, what the fuck else would you have me do? What kind of talking would fix this, hmm?”
“I don’t know!” Cian yells back, situating himself between me and the door. “I just—” He pants softly, seemingly deflating before my eyes. “I just want you to stop and think before—”
“Before what?”
“Before I lose you too!” His voice breaks. “Brenden is dead, okay? Saoirse nearly bled to death in that room because all the fucking cops here are on the Italian payroll. You nearly died in that crash, and I… I was just me, okay? Watching as my family crumbles around me, and I couldn’t do anything to help anyone!” He drags his hands through his hair and then points at me. “So if I have to fight you to keep you in here for at least another day, I will. I don’t care. I’ll fight you for the full twenty-four hours if I have to.”
My anger bubbles down to a simmer as my brother looks at me with tears in his eyes, and then it hits me like a bulldozer. Waking up from surgery to learn that two days ago, Noah had swept into this hospital, shot my sister, and kidnapped Evelyn was rage-inducing. Nothing else mattered and I immediately gave the order declaring that no Italian in this city was safe from my wrath.
It didn’t cross my mind that for those two days, Cian was suddenly in charge of everything. I know that fear. I felt it when Brenden died and suddenly, I was thrust to the head of the family with no warning. I hadn’t thought of Cian feeling the same thing. The urge to punch him fades and I slowly, very slowly, ease back down onto the bed.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “Sitting around doing nothing is killing me.”
“Running out there,” comes Saoirse’s voice from the doorway. “That’s what will kill you.”
“Fuck’s sake!” Cian darts forward to grab his twin. “Why can’t you fuckers just stay in your beds!”
“Because there’s shit to do,” Saoirse says, patting Cian’s cheek as she braces heavily on a crutch and limps into the room. “I can’t stay down either.”
“You’re both going to be the death of me,” Cian groans as he helps Saoirse to a nearby chair.
“Least we’ll all go together,” I murmur. I rub at my face, trying to ease the tension in my brow and jaw. “Have we heard anything? Anything at all?”
“No,” Cian mutters, slumping back against the wall. “Between keeping you two in your beds, calming Ma, trying to keep business running and the Italians away from here, I haven’t heard shit.”
“What about the fucker that crashed into me?” I ask.
“Pulled a Houdini,” Cian grunts. “Vanished.”
“Think he ran?” Saoirse asks.
Cian shrugs. “I had too much shit to do, but he’s on my list.”
“Oh, speaking of. Ma did call with a warning, though,” Saoirse says, pulling my attention to her.
“A warning?” I ask.
“She says the deal we have with the Italians is the foundation of where we stand today and that you should retract the call to arms.” Saoirse rubs gingerly at her leg. “She also says you’ve got to call her, or she’ll fly out here.”
“No. She stays on that ranch. And send some more men out there,” I snap.
“Already done,” Cian replies. “I wasn’t just wailing by your bedside for those two days.”
I send him a thankful glance. “I don’t give a shit about the deal. Our foundations are our own but they’re destroying this family. I don’t care about some fucking weapons deal. There’s no bridge I won’t destroy to get Evelyn back, you hear me?”
“I hear you,” Saoirse says, watching me intently. “You really do love her.”
“I—” The thought catches in my mind. I’d blurted it out earlier without thinking, but now that thought sits heavily with me. It’s a comforting weight, like the warmth of a cat sitting in your lap or the first warm drink after a day spent in the cold. “I do,” I say tightly. “I really do.”
“Shit,” Cian murmurs. “Brenden always said we’d be screwed when you finally fell in love. I thought he meant we’d have to deal with your becoming a sappy bastard.”
“No,” Saoirse says, her eyes on me. “He knew the world would burn the second Cormac found love. We just hoped it would burn in our favor.”
I roll my eyes, curling my hand into a fist against my leg. Sitting around unable to go looking for Evelyn is killing me. Waking to learn that my kidney ruptured in the crash was one thing, but nothing hurt as much as learning Evelyn handed herself over to save Saoirse. I don’t know what prompted such a thing, but I’ll never be able to repay her for her selflessness.
But I’ll try the moment I get her back.
If I get her back.
Because I love her, and I’ll tear down the entire city to find her if I have to.
Saoirse and Cian remain in my room for a few hours, quietly discussing our next course of action. Cian’s pretty set on making sure we both stay in hospital, but when Saoirse gets up to leave, we exchange a look. She knows I won’t stay here, and she won’t stop me. She plays up her injury and gets Cian to escort her back to her room, giving me the window I need.
Slipping into the bathroom, I tear off the paper gown and dig my clothes out of the bag. The bloodstains don’t faze me. I’d walk out of here stark naked if I needed to. I have no idea where to start looking, but breaking some Italian skulls feels like a good place to begin. Dressed, I quickly wash my face, scarcely feeling the pain of the minor bruises and scratches from the crash. As I walk back into my room, the entrance door closes softly as if someone just left. I’m about to follow when I spot a folder sitting on the tray table with a Post-It note attached.
This is better in your hands than mine.
Opening the file, I’m met with the medical and personal information of a man I don’t recognize. It’s not until I read further down at the listed injuries that I realize this is the driver from the car crash, the man who vanished from the hospital. According to the report, his injuries are minimal, and he signed himself out against medical advice concerning his dislocated shoulder.
That fucker.
If he were still here, I’d be inclined to think the crash was an accident, but he ran like a fucking rat.
I’ve found my first face to break.
“Please!” the man gasps under the weight of my fist around his throat. “Please!”
He squawks like a gull as I haul him off the wall and lift him in the air, then I throw him down onto the nearby table in his shitty living room. Wood splinters and breaks under the force. I don’t release my grip. His squawks turn to agonized yells when I press my other hand down onto his injured shoulder—it was easy to tell which one he was favoring due to the way he defended himself when I kicked down his front door.
“Please isn’t what I want to hear,” I snarl, bringing my face close to his. Tracking him down from the hospital was easy, and finding a gun in his hand answered my questions about whether the driver who hit me was a regular pedestrian or not.
This fucker has some skill. I know a contract killer when I see one.
“Please, I—” The man gargles and chokes around my fist, drowning in the blood streaming from his smashed-in face. The moment he tried to run, my anger overcame me and I poured all my rage into attacking him until he was ready to talk.
He caved disappointingly quickly.
“I want a name,” I snarl. “I want to know who the fuck hired you to hit me!”
“I… don’t… have a—name!”
“Why the fuck not?”
“No names,” he squeaks out, clawing at my arm. “Part–Part of the deal!”
“What was the deal?”
He tries and fails to talk, and it’s not until his face turns purple that I realize I’m strangling him a bit too well. Forcing myself to relax my grip around his throat, I glare down as he gasps desperately for air.
“What. Deal.”
“It was anonymous,” he chokes out through bloodied teeth. “A simple hit. I met with the guy, he gave me a picture and told me to kill her. I failed the first time. She had protection, so I bolted.”
“The girl, did you get her name?” I know the answer but I need to hear him say it.
“Evel—Evelyn Morris!”
“And the crash?”
“She vanished and I told him she had protection, so the cost was going up. He agreed, so I tracked down her mother and camped the place. Fucked with the electrics and shit to try and draw her out. And when she did, I tried to run her off the road. Simple accident!”
I tighten my grip once more, and the man squeaks like air escaping a balloon. “Who hired you?”
“No… names!”
Fuck.
Releasing his shoulder, I fish out my phone and quickly scroll until I find a picture of the Italian Don, Matteo Barati. “This guy?”
The assassin shakes his head.
Figures. It wouldn’t be Matteo’s style to hire an out-of-family assassin. But if he didn’t want to be caught, maybe it’s precisely the thing he would do. “This guy?” I flash him a photo of Rocky, Matteo’s son.
“No!”
“You’d better not be lying to me!”
“I’m not! I swear!”
The last picture I show him is the sketch of Noah.
“That’s him! That’s the guy! I don’t know his name, though, I swear. I swear—” I render him unconscious with a final punch, then straighten up with a wince. Pulling out my gun, a clean shot to the skull ends the assassin’s life.
The world tips slightly and my legs feel weak as I pick my way through the destroyed apartment and head for the door.
Noah.
The fucker is at the root of everything.
He hired an assassin to kill Evelyn but failed each time because of me. And now he has her. Once outside, the setting sun burns my eyes. I dial Cian’s number.
There’s nowhere Noah can hide. The moment he snatched Evelyn is the moment he signed his slow, painful death warrant.
“Where the fuck are you?” Cian screams in my ear. “Do you have any fucking idea how scared I was to find your room empty?”
“Cian.” I calmly walk down the street, ignoring the pull of hot pain across my abdomen. “Call Matteo. Tell him I know Italian money paid for an assassin who nearly killed me.”
“You fucking… fine,” Cian groans. “Fine. I’ll tell him. Then what?”
“Then we find Evie, that’s what.”
This city is hiding my woman. No one rests until she’s back by my side.
