What the fuck have I done to myself?
Bad bones, no heart, she still wanted me as is. She hated that she’d accepted me. She hated that she loved me without expectations. She loved me regardless of the things she felt I did wrong.
Her love had her hate pinned down, on its knees, making it scream out in anger before it forgave and then begged for mercy.
She loves me.
I’d stolen her heart, not truly understanding the consequences of actually claiming a heart like hers.
Love was like death in that way. We didn’t get to decide.
The realization sent a shock to my chest and jolted me out of my thoughts. I blinked, realizing how hard I’d been staring at her. I had to stop myself from doing it again, from allowing her to completely consume me.
“Kelly,” she said, snapping at me. The heat rose from her neck, staining her cheeks. “The look on your face.”
“You can’t read my face,” I said, though I knew she had. How fucking dangerous—not even my old man could read my face. My twin. He was the only one.
She narrowed her eyes, pointing at mine, moving her finger from left to right. “I did. And I don’t like what I felt after.” Then she shook the digit at me, like I was being a naughty fucker.
“Enlighten the lost.”
“You realized something.”
“If I did?”
She put a hand to her neck, probably to cool the burn. “I’m mature enough to admit that I know what this means, but I refuse to talk about it. Because this—” she motioned between us “—is what it is. I thought maybe it had a chance to go somewhere, but I was wrong. So fucking wrong.”
I pointed behind her, toward the main room. “Your room.”
“I’m not sleeping with you.”
“I’m going to take the other room.”
She stood there for a minute, staring at me, waiting, so I took her suitcase and mine, moving past her, leaving hers by the bedroom door.
“Be ready by eight,” I said. “Dinner.”
“I’m tired,” she said.
“I’ll wait.”
She was ready by eight sharp.
I doubted she was hungry, only trying to prove me wrong if I’d assumed she’d make me wait until the wee hours of the morning to eat dinner.
She stared at me and I stared at her.
She was wearing all black, and with the color of her hair, she reminded me of a fire in the middle of the night. And those heavenly blue eyes, my heaven, were tinged with red.
“No matter how much you look at me like that, I won’t be swayed on this, Kelly.” She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear, her wedding ring catching the light for a brief second. She used her pointer finger to wipe at the corner of her eye. Then she looked at me again. “Such a waste.”
“Me,” I said.
“No.” She shook her head. “What’s between us—the hope that it could grow. I accept you. This. For what it is. Because believe it or not, for a time, it felt perfect. How it was supposed to be. Even with the fucked-up circumstances that brought you to me.” She touched her neck, over her pulse point. “But when I look at CeeCee and Ryan, in good conscience, I can’t accept adding poison to any community. Not like that. Not when it hits so close to home.”
Before I could say anything, or she could see the truth on my face again, she moved past me in a whirlwind. Her usual bold scent had changed. It smelled metallic. The scent of her blood. She’d opened a vein right in front of me, not even expecting me to stitch her up, but doing it because she believed in a cause she felt I was fucking with.
I was right behind her as she made her way to the car. I knew it was going to be a quiet trip, and it was. She turned her face away, staring out of the window. We parked, and even as we walked the streets, she kept her distance, keeping herself occupied with the sights around her instead of me.
I directed her to the old pub off of Waterloo, and as I stepped inside, the noise pulsated inside of my head after being surrounded by her silence for so long. I took my wife’s coat and set it over my chair at the bar. The black sweater she swore came to her midriff, and her black pants flowed down her long legs. Her hair was a wild storm of red curls, and her blue eyes glowed under the dim lights, making the few freckles over her nose more pronounced.
She was fucking perfect, and it was attracting attention. I stared at one fucking wanker until his eyes moved from my wife to me. He turned away a second later, laughing with his bunch of pussy friends.
My wife flicked me on the hand, and when I looked at her, she had an expectant look on her face. She nodded toward the barmaid. “Bar food good for you, Kelly?”
I nodded, turning to look the barmaid in the eye. “And whiskey. Keep our glasses filled.”
The barmaid stood still for a moment, staring at me like she’d seen a ghost. Her hair was black and her eyes were blue, but they didn’t hold the same power as my wife’s. “Kelly,” she repeated.
I grinned at her, and her breathing picked up. “Not the first time you’ve seen a man who looks like me,” I said. “Tell me where he is.”
“Who?” she said, lying through her teeth. Her hands shook against the old counter. Her left hand had a gold band on it.
“Killian Kelly,” I said, flagging down the man working next to her. “Two glasses. Whiskey.” Then I looked back at her. “You can tell me now.” I shrugged. “Or I wait.”
“Fair warning,” my wife muttered, taking her glass from the barman. “He has the patience of a saint.”
“You’ll be waiting a long fucking time,” the barmaid said, suddenly venomous. Her “fucking” sounded like “fecking.”
“Doubtful. Once the live music starts.”
Her eyes widened. “He doesn’t want to see you.”
I relaxed, putting an arm behind my wife’s seat, taking a drink of my whiskey. A man came from the back room holding a guitar, and the barmaid scrambled to get out from behind the bar, pushing through the crowd.
A man who looked just like me rolled his wheelchair toward the stage, the crowd patting him on the back, letting him through, before he rolled up the incline and took his spot in front of the light.
The barmaid hadn’t been quick enough. His entrance had blocked her from reaching him in time. She stood in front of the stage, waving at him, but he only waved back. He started to sing. Instead of watching him, though, my eyes were on my wife. Her eyes were glued to the stage, and when she finally turned to me, she grabbed for her whiskey and downed it in one shot.
“He sings,” she said, her breath like straight fire that went to my lungs.
I nodded.
“He can really sing,” she said. Not, he’s in a wheelchair; he sings.
“Seems like music is a thing with Irish twins,” I said.
“Can you sing?”
“Just because I can doesn’t mean I do,” I said.
“That’s not really an answer.”
“If it has stripes and teeth like a tiger—” I shrugged “—it is one, darlin’.”
She watched my face, her shock and curiosity waning the longer she did, and then she turned back to the stage. I turned to my food, eating what the barman had brought out. Every once in a while she’d take a bite or two, but she hardly ate anything.
She was still on strike.
Letting my napkin fall to the plate, I sighed, turning toward the stage. He had moved on to the slow, tear-jerking shit. My wife’s shoulders seemed slumped. Slowly turning her stool toward me, I found tears slipping down her cheeks. She didn’t even bother wiping them.
“This song is for you,” she whispered, putting a hand to her throat. She was purposely controlling her breathing, trying not to lose her shit over his shit.
“Nothing is fucking for me,” I said, downing another glass of whiskey. “I only exist in songs, in dreams, to him.”
The song finished to applause, and after thanking the crowd, he rolled off the stage, meeting the barmaid. She leaned down, and as soon as
she did, he grabbed her face and kissed her. When he pulled away, a smile strained the corners of his mouth, and it was always fucking weird to see my face with that kind of freedom on it.
The easy smile melted as soon as her mouth came close to his ear. His eyes narrowed, and he started searching. It didn’t take him long to find me.
I lifted my hand and grinned—but it wasn’t fucking friendly. I was up against a wall, a version of me that I loved more than myself, and I had to harden my resolve toward the rejection.
The crowd parted for him as he moved toward me faster than he could have if his legs worked. He came to a stop right next to my stool.
“When did this happen?” I said before he could say anything. “Last I checked, in your profession, kissing romantically was forbidden. You did write in your ‘Dear Brother’ letter that you were moving back to Ireland to become a priest.”
“Go,” he said, pointing toward the door. His face was flushed from the performance, and sweat coated his skin. It was me after an intense workout to burn off some steam.
“After I get what I want,” I said, forcing my voice to relax. His blood ran through mine, and the rejection felt like a vital organ denying its body.
His eyes locked with mine, knowing me as well as I knew him. I wouldn’t move until he did. “What do you want?” His voice was low, shredded, full of resentment.
“The truth,” I said, standing. I grabbed Keely’s jacket, and after she stood, helped her into it. “Tomorrow. Meet me in Gweedore. Bring her with you.”
He wasn’t staring at me, though. He was staring at my wife.
She eyed him back. Then, without warning, she held her hand out to the woman with black hair and blue eyes, introducing herself. “Keely Kelly,” she said, shaking the woman’s hand, but giving my brother the side-eye.
“Fuck me,” he said, his eyes darting between her and me. “You got married, Cash. You selfish, selfish bastard.” The muscles in his arms strained against the pressure he had on the tires of his wheelchair.
“I doubt you need my name,” the woman next to Killian said, rubbing her hand on her jeans, looking at me as she did.
“No, your name doesn’t matter,” Keely said. “I just wanted you both to know who I am.” She moved closer to me, no room between her body and mine.
She’d made her choice, no matter who I was, and she was claiming me like I’d claimed her on our wedding night. The scratches, those stripes she’d made on my back, were burning in memory.
I set my hand on my wife’s lower back, about to direct her out. “Tomorrow,” I said to my brother. “Or we’ll be seeing a lot of each other until the truth is mine.”
“Still the same marauding bastard,” Killian said. “Nothing’s changed.”
“Not a fucking thing,” I said and left.
We walked next to each other in silence, through the music from the pubs spilling out onto the street, until we made it to the Peace Bridge.
I stopped in the middle of it, looking out over the water. It was dark, but the lights from the bridge lit some parts of it. The wind whistled every so often, but other than that, the night was peaceful.
Keely pulled her jacket closer, her hair lifting when a gust passed us like an old ghost. “Maybe he doesn’t like surprises.” She shrugged.
I leaned against the railing, clasping my hands together, trying to see past the surface of the water. “He doesn’t like me, darlin’.”
“Because of the wheelchair.”
“Because of life,” I said. “Who we are. We’re twins, but we were born to be different.”
“He got the man and you got the animal.”
“‘Some men are born more animal than man. It’s just who they are, what’s running through their veins,’” I quoted my old man.
We were quiet for a few minutes before she cleared her throat. “Why do you care? The truth, Kelly. Because I’m not moving until it’s mine.”
“The day my old man was killed, my brother took the bullet that saved my life but permanently changed his.”
“No. The truth about why you do what you do. Why you fight for a community just to turn around and ruin it. I’m not stupid. I know the game and how it’s played. Things that make the most profit are the most powerful, because they bring in the most money. Drugs are high on that list. But you’re not trying to run the world, Kelly. You’re running one small area of it. A rebel with a cause is stronger than a rebel without one. A rebel with a cause not only has something to kill for, but something to die for.”
A thick breath left my mouth, and the fire from the whiskey lingering on my tongue burned the air around me. “I steal them and then destroy them. I lace the trucks with explosives and blow them up. Ruling Hell’s Kitchen is not about only ruling it. It’s about keeping the bad shit away from the people. Giving them a better way, if possible. It’s what my old man did. What he died for.”
“What that—”
“Fucking liar said?”
“Yeah,” she breathed out. “He wanted—”
“He wanted them back for Grady, but unless he was able to lick them off the ground, he wasn’t getting them back.”
“That’s how you crippled them. Why they want you dead—yesterday.”
I tapped my temple. “You’re catching on.”
She became quiet for a while. “The vegetables. The trucks. Why you didn’t come with me to Italy. You—”
“Boom,” I said, bringing my hands together in what was meant to be an explosion, but it was quiet. “The biggest load. The most money.”
“Your Da,” she said and then hesitated.
I turned my head toward her. Her eyes were narrowed in thought.
“Did he teach you how to make those explosives? The ones that blew up the vegetable trucks?”
“Every one of ’em,” I said, and then turned back to the water.
“The news…” she started, and then her voice drifted. “You do it because of her. Why?”
Her. The woman I thought was dead. My mother.
“I was told she died of an overdose.”
I remembered my father driving her to the hospital, and then I never saw her again. My memories were fucking faulty, though, because I remembered little else about her. And I should’ve. I was ten. Killian and I lived with our father’s parents for a while after we were told we’d never see her again, first in Derry and then in Gweedore, and then our old man brought us to Hell’s Kitchen.
Keely said something, but it took me a minute to look at her.
“I was wrong.” She hesitated. “And maybe a little scared. No.” She shook her head. “Really. I was really scared. Am terrified now.”
“Of what, darlin’?”
She took a deep breath, released it, and then took a step, another, until she closed the gap between us. I stood, turning to face her, and her arms came under mine and her head came to my chest.
Three words left her mouth that I’d never heard before.
“Of losing you.”
She might as well have said I love you. If she did, I was in so much fucking trouble—because Keely Kelly was the most dangerous job I’d ever done, and her heart was the most valuable thing I’d ever stolen.
27
Keely
He’d never looked at me like that.
Not even the first time we’d met, at the cemetery.
Not even when he watched me walk down the aisle.
Not even after he fucked me the first time.
Or the time after.
Or anytime since then.
Not even when he found me in a dress the color of his eyes—a brilliant green—before the first political event.
Not even when I called a truce at Sullivan’s.
He looked at me with no pretense, no guise, no holding back. He looked at me with eyes full of truth. It was how he’d looked at me back at the flat in Derry, but he wasn’t closing his eyes again.
If Cash Kelly didn’t have a heart, like he claimed, he consumed
and claimed me with something even greater—his soul.
I never minded the darkness. I’d be his fire until he found his way home. To me.
His hand came underneath my chin, and he lifted it up with his fingers so that I’d look at him. He whispered something in Gaelic, his voice rough, and then he said clearly, “Keely Kelly, you proved me wrong, my darlin’. So fuckin’ wrong. I ripped my heart out at the roots and placed it at your feet long before I even knew I did—a heart that has always known and protected your name.”
He leaned down, putting his lips against mine, and our tongues moved in a kiss that intertwined our souls in a way that felt irrevocable. He pulled back first, staring at me, before he took my hand and led me off the Peace Bridge.
We made it back to the flat in Derry in no time, and he instructed me to pack.
“We just got here,” I said, but doing it.
“We weren’t staying here the entire trip,” he said, grabbing for my suitcase after I’d shoved everything inside. I hadn’t taken much out, and neither had he, it seemed, since he made it back to the master bedroom in no less than a minute.
He waved a hand toward the kitchen and told me to pack whatever I could from the cabinets. Someone had stocked them before we got here—Kelly said he had someone who took care of the place for him. I found reusable bags and stuffed them with as much nonperishable foods as I could.
Then we left.
He leaned over the seat of the Land Rover, his arm brushing my thigh, and an ache of longing hit me straight between the legs. I had to control the breath that left my mouth in a slow release. He’d worn a flat cap, and his strong bone structure was on perfect display the entire night. I’d refused to touch him then, but my resolve had melted on the bridge, and all that had been caged up had been set free.
When he came back with a map, his hand lingered, and I knew he was doing it on purpose. I ran my hand up his arm until I found his hand—flesh against flesh—and took the map from him.
“Where are we headed, darlin’?” I whispered.
“To heaven,” he said.
Marauder (Gangsters of New York Book 2) Page 26