by M. O’Keefe
Was it because I’d forced this issue?
Was it, in the end, that none of this was anything he wanted? “Ronan,” I breathed, wanting to tell him I was sorry. But I wasn’t. I wasn’t sorry at all. I would do it all again to be right here. He put his thumb against my clit and that was all it took. The pain was gone, the orgasm was back, and he was fucking me. Hard thrusts that pushed me back against the bed. We were sweat and skin and moans and gasps and I was coming. I was coming again. And Ronan kept fucking me like he had no intention of stopping, like he could do it forever.
“Ronan,” I breathed. “Ronan. Come. Please. Come.”
I could not come again. I could only slip my bound hands over his head and try as hard as I could not to count my mistakes while they were still happening. I could only try to hold on to my heart, forcing it to stay inside me and not go winging off to settle itself on him. I opened up my body and I opened up my soul and I prayed with everything in me that there would be something of me at the end of this. Some part of myself I hadn’t given him.
“It’s okay,” I breathed into his ear. “You can let yourself go. It’s okay. It’s safe.”
It was the opposite of safe, but I knew what was holding him back. Finally, he pushed his arms under my body, holding me as tight as he could as he shook and roared in my ear, thrusting into me so hard and so high it was like I could feel him in the back of my throat. He shook in my arms, almost like he was crying. The muscles of his back twitching. His face, sweaty and damp against mine, and I held him tight. Hard. Memorizing every single detail because I knew it would be a fight to get him back in my arms.
“Poppy,” he breathed, trying to lift himself away from me.
“Stay,” I said, holding him as hard as I could, but in the end my strength was nothing compared to his. My love was nothing compared to his will. He ducked out from under my bound arms and rolled off of me, letting me go, and the cold air of the cabin was freezing on my wet and bruised body. I shook once, like a flinch, and he made a noise in his throat, finding the edge of a blanket on the foot of the bed and covering me with it. His fingers traced the edge of the fabric that bound my hands. He touched the splatters of blood one by one.
Something about finally having sex with him felt…violent. We’d changed everything between us, and change that profound only came by way of brutality. Finally, he pulled the knot loose and unbound me, the fabric tossed onto the floor. I immediately felt the lack, my wrists colder than the rest of my body.
“Are you all right?” he asked, quietly.
“Fine,” I croaked, my voice ruined. “You?”
He laughed once low in his throat and I looked at his profile, so sharp in the dark. You were inside me. You came inside me. I might at this very moment be pregnant. Almost unconsciously I tipped my hips, curled my knees up like I could hold his sperm inside of me. He looked over at me like he knew what I was doing.
A baby. We might have made a baby when we were hardly a couple. What kind of disaster was this? He will not love me. I knew that. He would never allow himself to love me and so I had to stop myself, right now, from loving him.
“That won’t happen again,” he said. “It can’t.”
I wrapped the blanket around me, shifting to stand up despite the sting and ache in my body. Between my legs I was wet and sore and I needed a shower. And a good long cry. I needed my sister and a change of clothes and some goddamned underwear.
“Poppy,” he murmured.
“I’m going to take a shower.”
“Are you all right?”
I turned and looked at him, my heart straining out of my grip. He was so beautiful. So tortured and still. “Why wouldn’t I be?” I asked. “I’m your wife.”
CHAPTER FOUR
Ronan
The first man I killed, I only knew his name. David Allen. And I knew he owed the wrong people—in this case, my boss—money. And there were rumors he’d been talking to the PSNI to get out of some trouble. And rumors like that were a death sentence. Enter me. I was seventeen years old and the gun I’d been handed by Ronald McMurphy was huge in my hand. A cartoon gun, like.
And I’d felt like a right proper mobster.
Like a terrible cliché, I broke into David Allen’s kitchen in the dead of the night.
But climbing the stairs past all those pictures of his parents and the wife who’d just left him, I thought about my da’s head bent in the rain and how the fireplace in our old house smelled like cedar and wet socks. And I had to pee so bad I thought I wouldn’t be able to control it.
That I’d put a bullet in David Allen’s head and one in his hand (a little calling card from my boss as warning to any other scumbag thinking of talking to the PSNI—something about the hand that feeds you) and I’d piss myself.
Ronald would fucking kill himself laughing if I came back with that gun and smelling of piss.
David Allen had heard me on the steps and he’d woken up. When I came in he had the lamp on and he was reaching for something on his bedside table and I was sure it was a gun and so I didn’t give him the tough-guy speech I’d had all worked up in my head. I just put a bullet in him. Cold as ice. And I thought I was something. Killing this man. Doing the job.
Wasn’t I something?
When I stepped forward to put the bullet through his hand, I saw that he’d been reaching for a pair of glasses on the nightstand and I ran to the bathroom to throw up. That night I went home to my shitty apartment with all the locks and I did something I’d never done before. I prayed. I prayed for someone to come at that moment and do the same thing to me that I’d done to David Allen.
The regret that night was like the stones the priests put under our knees during mass at St. Brigid’s. And I promised never again. I wouldn’t be a killer.
There was wrong and then there was wrong, and my da was never proud of me, but now I was some kind of monster.
Ronald came over with a bottle of the good stuff and he ignored the tears on my face and the puke on my collar and told me it would get better. The regrets didn’t last forever and after a few more jobs I’d have callouses built up so I didn’t feel a thing, like.
And then he handed me an envelope with a thousand pounds in it.
More money than I’d ever seen in one place. The kind of money that changed a stupid fucking kid’s life. And so I built up callouses. I did the job, I made the money and I moved on, allowing myself only one thing: the comfort that the men I killed were monsters. And you needed a monster to put down monsters. There was a logic to that and, I can admit it, a nobility to it that I liked. That allowed me to sleep at night.
Sort of.
But Poppy…sweet, innocent, reckless Poppy…my wife. My wife. I regretted her. From the second I met her and understood her fate.
From the moment I realized how Caroline used her and would keep using her.
I regretted tonight.
Even as I was getting hard again at the memory of her laid open for me in Eden’s arms. Even as I thought about how she felt around my cock and wanted with every single breath in my body to get back inside of her, I regretted having been inside of her.
She had some perception that I was a good man. Worth saving. Worth loving.
Daft fucking princess.
All I have ever wanted, since she stepped out into that side yard, was to keep her safe. To keep her away from the worst of Caroline. The Morellis. Me. And now we were married.
She was in the shower and it was impossible not to imagine her body under the hot spray. Impossible not to imagine how I could go in there, strip off my clothes and climb into the shower with her. And she would fight.
Fuck, I hoped she would fight.
She might smack me and shove me. Call me something vicious and true and I would pin her back against the tiled shower and put my hand between her legs and find her wet and swollen and so fucking ready for me I could make her come just by saying her name.
I stood and pulled on my clothes, disgusted w
ith myself.
She might be pregnant. Right now. A baby. The shame was nearly as profound as my pleasure.
Not so high and mighty now, are ya, eejit? My father’s voice could be counted on to keep track of my mistakes as I made them. I stood still in the quiet of the cabin, the hum of the engines all around me, listening for Poppy.
To hear if she was crying. Another wedding night for her that ended in tears. My plan had been to get her out of this marriage clean. And six hours in I’d already fucked her and possibly gotten her pregnant. When it came to Poppy, I was miles past regret. She was a whole different kind of torture.
In the cabin Poppy’s clothes were folded and stacked on the edge of the banquette and Eden looked put back together. Red lipstick, tight black dress, fur coat, and a glass of champagne in her long-fingered hand—all of it armor. I met her eyes, and if Poppy were here, she would apologize for the way we left her, but I was not a man for apologies. She made her bed and she could manage herself just fine. “Is she okay?” she asked.
I laughed and poured myself a scotch, resisting the urge to drink it straight from the bottle where it was clipped in the bar. “Something about your concern doesn’t feel genuine, Eden.”
“She’s a sweet girl,” Eden said, and I found myself shaking my head. She had been a sweet girl. Years ago. Now…she was something else. Too reckless to be sweet. Too angry. She was dangerous. And I’d liked that sweet Poppy. The malleable Poppy, with her wide, blinking eyes and her shit self-esteem. I’d liked the way she looked at me out of the corner of her eye, the way she weighed a situation before deciding what to do or how to act.
But this woman? Who charged in blazing, demanding her due and fuck anyone in her way?
I would die for her.
And she could never fucking know or she would tie herself to me as I sank to the bottom of the world.
“Bryant received the photographs I sent him,” Eden said, tapping on her phone.
“He’s calling off his dogs?”
“For the moment.”
“You going to crawl back to the Morellis with your tail between your legs?” I asked her, finishing what was left of Poppy’s champagne.
“It’s not that bad,” Eden said, and I laughed. All her power was gone. All her leverage. All she had left was her life and she needed to figure that out quick. She was fucked and she knew it. She swallowed and glanced out the window at the dark night. “Will there be twenty Morellis waiting for me?”
“You’re asking me if I called them?”
“Payback, maybe. For making you do this.”
“I’m not interested in Poppy watching you get gunned down in front of her.”
“Well, if that isn’t a love song, I don’t know what is.”
“No one knows we’re coming in,” I said. “Not Caroline. Not the Morellis. You’ll have time to plot your escape.”
“Or my revenge,” she said, attempting to be coy and cheeky.
“The best thing you can do is get the fuck out of town, Eden, before they even know you’re here.”
She shook her head at me. “You’re so sure all the time, Ronan. One of these days you’re going to be wrong.”
It was, in fact, only a matter of fucking time. I’d spent the last ten years of my life waiting for the bullet in the back of my skull and I’d grown numb to fear or even anticipation. But now…with Poppy, the clock counting down the minutes I had left in my life was loud in my head.
“You’re wrong about Poppy,” she said.
“What the fuck do you know about it?”
“She thinks you’re mad at her and you can punish her with your silences and broody Irish grunts. But I see the truth.” She grinned up at me, baring her teeth in order to score back some of her pride. “You’re terrified of her.”
Frothy Poppy?
With her indignation and brattiness and her heart so big it swallowed me whole?
Yeah. I was fucking terrified.
Terrified that she was telling herself some fairy tale about who I was and what we could be. Terrified that she was pregnant.
I ignored Eden and made a promise to myself. To Poppy. I would get her out of this. Out of this marriage. This fucking city, if that’s what it took. I would get her far, far away from me.
“You want me to take them a message?” Eden said, looking to be useful until the very end in the hopes it would keep her alive.
“Tell them I’ll come to them. They send one guy to my door and this whole thing goes to shit.”
“It doesn’t really work that way with the Morellis,” she said with a wince.
“It does with me. They want the missing Morelli, they get him on my terms.”
I set down my glass and walked over to her, close enough that she leaned back in her seat, and I put my arm on the back of the banquette like I had less than an hour ago when I was fucking Poppy like I might die without her.
“And if any Morelli, including you, comes near Poppy, I’ll kill them.”
* * *
Poppy
“Poppy?” Ronan’s voice pulled me from sleep and my eyes blinked open. A headache pounded and my mouth was dry and sticky.
For a second, one blissful quiet second, I didn’t remember anything. I looked around the dark and quiet cabin and wasn’t sure where I was.
“We’ve landed,” Ronan said. He stood in the doorway, the brightly lit main cabin of the jet behind him. Eden was there in her fur and red lipstick, packing up her purse. And it all came back to me. The Morellis and the Constantines. The strange uncertain future.
My husband.
My porn-worthy wedding night.
A blush incinerated my entire body. Whatever courage desperation and booze had given me, it was long gone. And I felt foolish.
“Are you all right?” he asked with concern that, a few hours ago, I would have begged to have thrown my way. Right now, slightly hungover and scared, I was over it.
“Fine,” I said and stood up. I wore one of his dress shirts with a pair of women’s yoga pants I found in a drawer and refused to think about who they belonged to and how they might have arrived in Ronan’s jet. I shoved my feet into the boots I’d been wearing and pushed my hair, snarled from sleeping on it wet, out of my eyes.
“Let’s do this,” I said. I followed Ronan out into the early dawn of NYC. The city behind us was just waking up, pink-cheeked and fresh. There were two black town cars waiting on the tarmac, back doors open. The air was cool and I shivered in my husband’s dress shirt. He slipped his jacket over my shoulders and I wanted to reject the gesture and the comfort but it was warm and smelled like him. I pulled it over my chest. A cocoon of Ronan.
“Well,” Eden said to Ronan. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but I hope I never see you again.”
“The feeling is mutual,” he said, stone cold.
“You, however…” Eden hugged me. “You get tired of this man pretending he’s not crazy about you and I will be back in an instant.”
“Where are you going?” I asked into her hair, awash with surprising affection for this woman who literally blew up my life.
“One quick reckoning for my sins with Bryant and then…” She tilted her head. “I don’t know. Eastern Europe? Maybe I can find an old count with a castle somewhere who needs a wife to blow his mind and spend his money.”
“If anyone can find him, it’s you,” I said and then squeezed her one more time. She was born in the wrong time. I could easily imagine her in some medieval royal court, keeping secrets and dispensing poison. “Stay safe.”
“You too,” she said, and with a wave of her fingers she climbed in the back of one of the town cars and it drove away.
“Are they going to kill her?” I asked Ronan without looking at him.
“I hope not.”
Slightly stunned by what passed as an emotional outburst from the man, I turned to stare at his profile. His cold beauty was familiar, it held no new torture for me. But there was something else in his eyes and
the corners of his mouth. Something softer. Contemplative.
That would be the end of me. I would see what I wanted—affection and concern when it was just exhaustion. Or gas. I had to remember that, to not go falling in love with what I wanted to be true.
Ronan’s hand touched my back and he gestured to the open door of the other town car. Doors again.
I wondered bleakly where this door would take me. What bitter world it opened up. I climbed in, surprised to see another person in the back seat. A young man with light brown skin and deep black hair. “Ma’am,” he said with a thick Irish accent.
Ronan swept in behind me. “Raj,” he said to the boy and held out his hand.
“I got ya the phones.” Raj put two new iPhone boxes in that hand. Ronan handed one to me. “Set them up, programmed a few numbers into them. You can call each other. Me.” Raj smiled at me. “You can call your sister.”
I clutched the phone to my chest like a lifeline. Ronan had given him those instructions. To put Zilla’s number in the phone. Stop it, Poppy. Stop seeing care where there’s only expedience.
“Thank you,” Ronan said, his voice different as he talked to Raj. Brusque and commanding. “The other instructions?”
Raj’s eyes drifted from me, back to Ronan, back to me. “It’s fine,” Ronan said. “Poppy knows what we’re walking into.”
“I brought on the lads you asked for,” Raj said. “Twenty new soldiers. All of them clean. Niamh gave me their names.”
“That’s good.”
“The house has been silent. Though Caroline Constantine’s new killer drives by once a day, real slow, window rolled down. Swear the fucker is just looking for a bullet between the eyes.”
“Don’t be provoked,” Ronan said.
“She’s put a bounty on your head,” Raj said.
“What? Why?” I cried. We’d known while in Ireland she was looking for him. But a bounty?
“She’s just yanking on my leash,” he said. “Reminding me who owns me.”
“Just so I’m clear,” I said. “I’m wanted by the Morellis dead or alive and now Caroline wants you dead or alive?”