Fractured Vows, page 15
The time gives me the space to think while we wait on my would-be ally. It seems my life has been all action until recently, until I met Willow. Before her, Dom and I ran our own show here while trying to avoid my father. If I couldn’t, we worked at his bidding, proactive in our own territory, while holding up the family bargaining chip and Rhode Island seat of power.
Once I met Willow, she stole my attention in the best of ways, and I stopped working forward for a period and reacted. To everything. My world changed, hell, everything has changed. I have a pregnant sister, my healer has a baby, I’ve got enemies pushing their way into my every orifice, and I’m about to use my blood brother as a bargaining chip.
What the hell would my father say?
Do I care?
The answer to the latter is probably yes, and the words that flow through my head give me the solution to the former as though the Don himself stands at my shoulder.
Protect your own.
The ones I love. The people in this godforsaken warehouse, prepared to fight and die alongside me.
I meet Roman’s eyes where he watches every entrance to the place, turning his back to a new blind spot constantly, while seeking his sister with every alternate breath. The boy has grown, developed into a man sometime when we weren’t looking. Or maybe the truth had always been there, staring us in the face. All because he portrayed the mute, damaged boy, and that was what we all chose to see.
Clearly, Roman Hernandez has plenty to offer. Willow’s family is in capable hands.
He tilts his chin up, indicating the arrival of my friendly foe and his entourage—not too many, judging by the number of cars that drift silently along past the open door. Black sedans, an SUV, and a silver–I fucking kid you not–DeLorean that looks like it came from a future about forty years past.
Fucking Irish. I grin ruefully at Roman and he returns the gesture, flicking his knife at Enzo’s throat, sometimes leaving tiny nicks that create rivulets of blood to flow down my brother’s neck and sometimes not. The boy—or not so boy but younger man—doesn’t appear to be bothered by the blood trickling over his fingers where he slowly strangles my brother. At least, no more bothered than his sister, who edges her way closer to me with every minute.
Though we hold all the cards, the situation feels fraught, like any sudden movements will spring a trap that could end us all.
Everyone I love.
Protect my own.
With a silent nod to my father’s shade, I wind an arm around Willow’s waist and pull her into my body, pressing my lips to my temple. “I’m proud of him.”
She snorts. “Who, my brother? Or yours that I’ve never heard about? What other family members are you hiding? A love child?” She glares up at me, though I don’t have to look hard to see the fraying edges of her peace silently stolen by the ongoing threat to her family.
To us.
I comb my fingers through her hair and tug her head sharply back. If I can’t give her utter proof that we will be alive in the next hours then I’ll do the damndest to distract her in the best ways I know how.
“Do you know how beautiful you are?” I tug her hair until her back arches and she gasps with the pinprick of pain I provide that is overlaid with a heady dose of submission intended just for her.
“You’re an asshole,” she grumps prettily, whining a little as she twists in my grasp. “Let me up.”
“Not yet.” I stare straight into her eyes. Know who owns you, little wife. An unspoken promise of who we are together, and what will come if we survive the next few hours passes between us. All that in the fraction of a second before I slam my mouth over hers in a brutal kiss that does its job, distracting us both as heavy, sure footsteps fill the warehouse, followed by the small army I expected.
“Can’t keep your shit in your pants for longer than thirty minutes, Rafe?” Konnor’s voice drips with disdain.
I straighten, pulling Willow to my chest and shielding her recovery from our harsh kiss. That moment is for her, and her alone. No one, especially not Konnor fucking Hennie, gets to share that space. Not now. Not until I’m sure.
Because ever since she ran from me and straight to him, I’ve harbored a doubt.
“Guess we’ll find out if this goes on much longer. I got you a gift.”
“So thoughtful.” Konnor’s eyebrows rise above his hardened, coal-black eyes. His thick hair is pulled back into a ponytail that hangs halfway down his back over his black, long-sleeved tee. Ink crawls from beneath the neckline and at his wrists.
“Thank you. I tried.” I smile at him, more a baring of teeth than anything else. “An exchange.”
His lips twitch beneath the half beard he’s growing. “For what?”
“Nothing at all. I give you something you lost. A replacement, as it were. To do with what you wish.” I close my mouth and let him think on it.
Konnor does his best to constrain his curiosity. Our business dealings never take much time—usually we spend the aftermath drinking ourselves into a stupor. Not this time. No, this time, too many things have changed. I’m praying I can rectify one wrong by giving him the thing that will calm our waters.
The funny thing is I know he’ll accept my offer. Hell, he’ll even be surprised and perhaps grateful.
No matter what I do today, it won’t change a damn thing between us when all is said and done.
We might walk from this place as friends. Drinking buddies. But at the end of the day he will still take something from me, when I least expect it.
A veritable thief in the night.
But Konnor Hennie doesn’t walk on fucking water, and the waters around Rhode Island are mine.
“An eye for an eye. Have you met my brother?” I offer Enzo a genial nod.
The front of his shirt is strained in a growing pool of blood while Roman flays him one nick of a thousand owed at a time.
Konnor does a masterful job of keeping his expression blank. “You never said,” he murmurs.
I shrug. “Family bastard. Keeping it all under the rug. He’s yours,” I add my offer almost as the afterthought that it’s not.
“Mine.” Konnor stares at me hard. His throat works.
“For the brother you lost.” I keep my tone soft, reverent. “I am sorry, Konnor. Willow is too. We offer you repayment. He was the one who ordered the hit after all.”
I let out a short breath and manage to take the next though my heart thumps painfully hard in my chest. Willow shifts against me but I dig my fingers into her waist, willing her still. Despite knowing I’m marking her skin beneath her clothing, that I’m hurting her, I don’t let up. She stills in the circle of my arms, and gives into my pain, leaning her sweet weight against me.
Utter perfection.
Konnor watches the subtle interaction with a careful eye, missing nothing. We’ve been friends, known each other far too long for our interactions not to be layered with subtext several decades in the making.
“We’re becoming the old men we hate,” he says. He offers me a smile that transforms his face from the dangerous psychopath he is to the charming family Irishman who could be misconstrued as cheeky at best. “I’ll take the asshole you don’t want off your hands,” he says softly, but his eyes harden and fix on me. And you still owe me a debt.
The scene plays out as I expect, and I give him a single nod, recognizing the payment isn’t complete. Nor did I expect it to be.
“Then this is done.” My clear voice echoes around the warehouse. “We’re even.”
Konnor’s mouth tips up slightly at one side, knowing my lies are for the benefit of my gathered family.
“Fuck you.” My brother spits blood on the floor between us and I’m not sure who he’s addressing.
I watch him dispassionately, noting the whitening pallor of his already pale skin beneath dark hair that matches mine, though he lacks the laugh lines Willow has etched single-handedly onto my face these last months.
“A pity we can’t stay.” I hold Enzo’s gaze a second longer, while my stomach churns.
Death will come for one of my people eventually in the form of a dark Irish archangel at a time of his choosing, and short of starting a turf war with my best ally on the Island, I won’t be able to stop him. I don’t know if I’ve just given away the best bargaining chip in my hand, or removed a thorn from my side only to gain a new one.
“Sure,” Konnor drawls.
He nods to one of his men at his back, standing in a semicircle. A shot goes off and Enzo’s head half shatters all over the place like an overripe melon. Blood and gray matter sprays in a hundred directions at once, and for a second even I’m stunned.
Roman breaks the silence with a raspy laugh that bounces off every surface.
It’s my turn for my eyebrows to rise sky high as my protégé—baby brother, perhaps?—prods Enzo’s remains into Konnor’s man’s waiting arms.
One brother in exchange for another.
I smile at the dichotomy of it all, releasing Willow. I’m bereft the moment I let her go—God, please not her. Don’t let him take her—and take a step toward Roman who reaches out as if to grasp my shoulder in a familiar gesture. That I might have broken that barrier with Willow’s approval leaves my chest aching.
A pity, because we never get to embrace.
Blood flecks my cheek, the splatter warm then cooling, and Roman falls to the fractured music of Willow’s screams.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Never Broken
Rafe
The boy I’ve grown to love drops out of my grasp, blood spraying from his shoulder. He cups the wound in slow motion, his mouth open in a silent groan I know is a remnant of the years he remained quiet in a screaming world.
Or perhaps he simply learned that in his silence, others talk and he learned to listen.
There is so much I don’t yet know about him. If my people don’t stop getting shot at I’ll never get a chance to fucking find out.
If.
My gun is back in my hands, the weight telling me I have two, maybe three bullets left, damning myself to hell and back for not reloading earlier.
“Put it away, Rafe,” a voice I don’t expect breaks through the warehouse.
Even Konnor has the grace to look surprised as the man who fired walks out from within his own ranks, taking nearly two-thirds of his entourage with him.
“Seamus,” Willow breathes somewhere behind me. “What the fuck is wrong with you?”
Seamus smiles, a dead, rotting thing, like a corpse that’s been left under a bridge too long and came floating to the surface, bloated and ghostly.
“Yes. Please do tell us.” Konnor rocks back on his heels, his hands sliding behind his back in a relaxed posture, but Seamus shakes his head.
“Oh, no, my friend. Or should I call you brother? Perhaps you’d trade me in for Mister Hernandez here.”
“Don,” I hiss through clenched teeth. “If you address the man you just shot correctly, you address him as your Don, Cunningham.” Not that Seamus pledged his allegiance to anyone, but I need to make a point.
Blessedly, Konnor says nothing, watching the man who lived in his house and ate at his table walk across the space like he was the only one in it, and not one of near twenty men and two women spread out in a large circle, with the five of us in the center.
Three women. I didn’t search for Sonja, and I didn’t need to. She was nowhere to be seen.
I’ll find out if you are loyal before I die.
“It’s not our day, Rafe,” Willow murmurs, her voice almost inaudible.
Her comment falls in one of those rare, still moments, and Seamus laughs.
“You don’t know how lucky you are that my bastard isn’t planted in her belly right now.” He shakes his head, his eyes glinting manically. “Or maybe it is, and you are as naive as ever.”
“Perhaps,” I murmur, not giving him an inch of my fury, widening myself in and shifting slightly to one side to shield Willow while her brother bleeds out in utter silence at my feet.
Guns point at us from every direction. Not just us, but Konnor too.
The Irishman rocks once more on his heels, his head canting slightly to one stride while he watches Seamus’s little coup play out while letting me know which entrance his reinforcements will come through.
Someone doesn’t trust you, little man.
Seamus gloats, while I pray he won’t take the second shot at Roman. I’m not sure anyone will survive the carnage if he does, including myself.
“Are you truly stupid enough to believe you can threaten my family?” I draw Seamus’s wandering attention as Konnor rocks back on his heels twice.
Two minutes.
It might as well be an eternity.
“I thought he was your boss,” Seamus sneers. “The one you’re all bowing to now.”
Willow creeps forward, pressing her warmth to my back and dropping to her knees beside her brother.
“Perhaps that’s a good idea,” Konnor speaks up, and my attention shifts to him.
I narrow my eyes. “What’s that?” Perhaps I read him wrong and he was in on whatever Seamus concocted all along.
Konnor eyes me. “Do you remember what I said to you the day you left my office, looking for your wife? She was in the other room.”
I stare at him as my mind clicks in.
The waft of night jasmine. The day I knew she was there but I didn’t hunt her down.
Jesus, had she been hurt and hadn’t told me? My gaze drops but one word lifts my attention back to the man before me, the only one in this place who I respected enough to fear, if only for an instant.
“Kneel. Will you kneel for her?”
Seamus gins and gestures with his gun while the men around him shift.
I try not to smile, all too aware that while they would let him kill one of the family heads, humiliating us might be that one step too far on men who’ve had loyalty reared into them by my father and Konnor’s.
Keeping my back straight, and my eyes on Konnor alone, I lower myself until my thigh screams and first one knee hits the concrete, then the other.
Months ago I failed Willow by letting her be taken by her uncle while I was distracted, and it cost my father his life. Guilt still claws at my gut but I understand now why he didn’t fight, why he accepted his fate, knowing it gave me the moment I needed to save my wife and the boy who has become my brother.
Now, I have that same opportunity, if from a different perspective.
Konnor nods, some of the tension leaving his face, apparently satisfied by my unspoken reason, so I address my next words to Seamus.
“We are one family. Two sides, but joined. We can have more than one seat of power, though I don’t expect you to understand that.” I count the seconds off in my head, working my knee slightly forward to press to Roman’s back.
In my periphery, he shifts, exposing the mat-black butt of a pistol I didn’t think he’s used today so far. My chest expands with the bubble of hope and I fight for control of myself. Like before, the air in the room holds, pensive like the moment before a thunderhead rolls through.
But that’s the thing about storms—they can be deadly, or armless, all noise and washing away too fast to be replaced by the searing heat of a world washed fresh.
We are about to find out what sort of storm Seamus Cunningham has wrought.
“Fuck, you’re wordy. I always liked that about Konnor, you know. He says what he thinks and shuts up.”
“Unless he’s had whiskey.” I grin at the memory of crawling through Konnor’s house on a break from the same boarding school Roman attended, seeking more of the golden ambrosia when I couldn’t put two feet beneath me.
“Cheap drunk,” Konnor mutters under his breath, shooting me an amused glance.
“I aim to please.” I wiggle my toes in my shoes, seeking circulation. If I have to move, from here at least I can arch my body over Roman, but I need working limbs to be able to achieve it before he’s killed.
Mind, with this many weapons in the room, we’ll all look like Swiss cheese before the showstopper is over.
“Shut up!” Seamus lowers his gun, focusing it straight at Willow. “Both of you have had her—could have had her.” He glances across at Konnor who says nothing. “And neither of you know what a fucking lying bitch she is. Teasing and taunting with that body and her pouts,” the man pants, spittle foaming at the corner of his lips. “Whore,” he whispers, as though his adrenaline rush of utter contempt is spent, glaring at her through glazed, mad eyes.
I have no doubt at this distance that he won’t miss, and I curse myself for not holding her back.
“She can be a royal pain in the ass,” I agree.
Willow snorts and mutters something I can’t make out.
Still fighting, still so beautiful.
No matter what Cunningham says, he can never steal the memories I have of her from me. Can never tarnish them. And that assurance is all I need as my countdown hits the last twenty seconds of the promised two-minute window.
Seamus raises his chin, a deadly defiance in his eyes though he seems calmer. “I pushed her to stay, though I told her she shouldn’t. It always worked, you see,” he begins conversationally. “I want to say she loves you enough to stay, but then I’d be lying.” His grin and disjointed thoughts grate on my nerves.
“You’re a big boy, Cunningham. You know how to play with the big boys. What is it you want?” I yawn into the back of my hand, and Seamus raises the gun, pointing it straight at my head.
I smile broadly. Mission achieved.
Outside, vehicles pull up, their tires crunching on gravel. I need a distraction.
“How long have you been screwing with my family from the inside?” Konnor asks, not actually looking at Seamus, but at some point over his head.
Seamus swings around, pointing his gun at Konnor’s head and walking straight into his space. “You never looked at me! But you will. Now that I—"
Roman’s underhand toss with his good hand lodges a knife into the back of Seamus’s neck at the same time Willow fires.
Konnor doesn’t take a step back as the dead man hits the concrete floor in a splatter of flesh and blood. Around us, weapons jolt, and I wince, waiting for the next shot that will end my existence while the echo of my wife’s ripples around us all.
