Cillian didn’t go straight home after leaving Jameson’s. He had too much pent-up energy—and anger. He shouldn’t have let things get so out of control with Olivia. All he’d meant to do when he kissed her was shock her into not arguing about the stupid tip anymore, and the next thing he knew, he was carrying her into an alley and…
Fuck.
She just wanted a onetime thing. He should be happy that she wasn’t expecting more—or trying to weasel her way into his life under the mistaken impression that his family’s power would rub off on her.
I shouldn’t have had sex with her. That was unbelievably stupid. It was something the old Cillian would have done and to hell with the consequences. The woman obviously wanted nothing to do with him, and that was just fine by him. He didn’t need another goddamn complication in his life when he was up to his neck and sinking fast.
He turned another corner—and stopped dead. It was the one place he’d gone out of his way to avoid, and it was a token of just how distracted he was that he’d found his way back here.
To the spot where Devlin died.
Cillian stared down at the concrete. It didn’t look different from any other sidewalk in Boston—a little scuffed up, a little dirty, but nothing special. There was something so fucking wrong with that. This was the very spot where his brother passed from this world into the next. Where he’d bled out while Cillian stood by, too drunk to be worth a damn. There wasn’t even a stain to mark it. He turned, surveying the street. Even at this relatively late hour, it was nowhere near deserted, and the headlights of each passing car only made the muscles along his spine tense further.
Any one of them could be the enemy.
He tried to take a deep breath, but there was no air. He tried to walk away, but his feet were rooted in place. He tried to reason through what was no doubt another fucking panic attack, but reason had no place here.
He kept seeing the events of that night, over and over again in slow motion. Walking behind Teague and Devlin, singing that stupid goddamn song at the top of his lungs. The SUV screeching to a stop in front of them. The doors opening. The second he realized the guy had a fucking gun in his hand. He’d stumbled back, sure that this was it. The end. His life didn’t flash before his eyes like everyone said. No, all he could think was, What a fucking waste. And then Aiden hauled his ass to the ground and it was over.
A few minutes later, Devlin was dead and Cillian’s entire world was turned upside down.
Jesus. He slammed back into the brick wall, the impact shocking the stalled breath from his lungs. He wheezed, the black spots dancing before his eyes slowly abating. Goddamn it. First time in a month, and it happens in the middle of the fucking sidewalk.
By some miracle, either no one had seen it happen or no one gave a fuck that it was happening. He didn’t care which it was. All that mattered was that he could pick himself up and head home without having to answer any uncomfortable questions.
Home. What a joke.
The town house on Chestnut hadn’t felt like home in a long time, and he didn’t see that changing anytime soon. Things had been heading in that direction for a long time, but it seemed like he’d only woken up to it in the last few months. His siblings were near-strangers these days. His parents? They’d never been close to begin with, but his father now had a wall between him and the rest of the family that no one could get through. And his mother…Well, he barely exchanged two words with her these days because she was so busy throwing herself into one project after the next. She was there, but she wasn’t present.
And now he was getting maudlin. Some days he could barely stand to live inside his own skin, and today was shaping up to be one of them. Cillian scrubbed a hand over his face. Jameson’s might be uncomfortable for him to spend time in, but at least it held one of the happier memories. It was there that he’d spent the last hours of Devlin’s life bullshitting and fucking around.
Now that he thought about it, it was probably the last time he’d spent actual time with his other brothers, too. Sure, they’d all been present for Teague’s wedding, but that hardly counted. They’d been avoiding each other, and it didn’t take a genius to figure out why. The only one of them he saw with any regularity was Aiden, but as soon as the work was done, his oldest brother hightailed it off to God knew where. And Teague…Teague was fully occupied with his new wife. Cillian didn’t blame him for that, but there were days when he missed the bastard.
He focused on putting one foot in front of the other, each step creating some much-needed distance between him and the past. A fine sheen of sweat covered his skin, but there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about that right now. First, home. Second, a shower, as hot as he could stand it. Then…well, if the last nine months were any indication, then he’d spend most of the night lying on his back, staring at the ceiling. It was fucking pathetic.
The only time he’d actually slept through the night was when they had him drugged to the gills after he was shot. He reached up and touched the new scar. He might have slept, but the nightmares were worse while on meds than they were normally. Two nights of that was all he could take. After that, he chose to deal with the physical pain instead.
Enough.
The memory of what he and Olivia had done might be enough to get him through the night, though. She’d been so hot and free in his arms, and for the first time in longer than he cared to remember, he hadn’t been thinking about alliances or politics or death. He’d been so focused on making her go wild around his cock that there was no room for anything else.
It had been fucking glorious.
He walked through the front door of the town house, bracing himself for running into someone in his family.
Sure enough, as soon as he got to the top of the stairs, he was nearly run over by his baby sister, Keira. Baby? She was nineteen years old now.
“Keira.” Then he did a double take. “What the fuck is this?”
She wore shredded skinny jeans and a tank top that started its life as a T-shirt, nothing that would make him give her a second look…But the size of her pupils did. She was on something. He’d bet his favorite suit on it.
She lifted her chin. “I’m going out.”
“The hell you are.” He took in her bedhead that had to have taken her a hell of a long time to create, the dark eye shadow, and lipstick that on any other woman he would have called fuck-me red. Seeing it on his sister made him break out in hives. The reckless look on her face was even worse. “What are you on?”
Keira laughed. “Please. You’re not our father, and you can’t tell me what to do.” She shoved past him and wobbled down the stairs, bumping into the wall as she went. Cillian inhaled sharply. Vodka. That’s what he smelled on her breath. Drugs and alcohol. Shit.
“Keira!”
But she was gone, disappearing toward the back of the house—the better to sneak out without an escort. Fuck. He started to go after her, but his legs chose that moment to remind him that he was still shaky from the stupid goddamn panic attack. And what the hell was he going to do? He couldn’t help her. Hell, he could barely help himself.
He couldn’t just let her go by herself, though. He already had the blood of one sibling on his hands—another one might actually kill him. Cillian fished his phone out of his pocket and texted Liam. Keira’s heading out the back door.
A few seconds later, it chimed. On it.
Cillian sighed and walked to his room, managing not to run into anyone else. He stripped, leaving the clothing wadded up on the floor as he headed for the bathroom. He’d given up a lot of things since everything went to hell, but his suits were one thing he still clung to. There was nothing on this earth that could fool him into thinking he was in control like shielding himself in a perfectly fitting suit.
He turned the shower as hot as he could stand it and stepped beneath the spray. The shock of it hitting his skin centered him, which only made it clearer just how off-balance he’d been since he left Jameson’s. He wished he could blame it on Olivia and that goddamn sex. It wasn’t the truth. The snarly bartender, the panic attack, and his run-in with Keira were just the icing on the shit cake.
It didn’t matter.
Tomorrow was a new day, except nothing would change and he’d just be going through the motions all over again. Sometimes he felt like he was in a particularly brutal version of Groundhog Day, stuck in a wheel that would never stop spinning.
*
Olivia climbed out of the cab in a daze. She couldn’t believe she’d just gone there with Cillian O’Malley. She licked her lips, still tasting apple juice and him, and shivered. It was a onetime thing. It’ll never happen again.
As good as it was, he was the kind of trouble she couldn’t afford, even if she was in the market. Which she wasn’t. She nodded to herself and headed for the stairs up to her apartment. She had other priorities.
She was so tired, she almost missed the shadow detaching from the wall across from her apartment door. Olivia froze. “What are you doing here?”
“I wanted to see you.” Sergei’s low voice with his thick Russian accent used to make her feel safe. He was just as big and blond and brutal looking as he had been when she’d fallen in love with him, his nose broken one too many times to be rakish, his face that of a warrior. His sheer size was something that had attracted her to him in the first place, a wall between her and the speculative looks she started getting from Andrei Romanov’s men as soon as she turned eighteen. Sergei was the only one who’d looked at her like she was a person, and a special one at that. He made her feel like more than the bastard daughter of the patriarch of the Romanovs—what was left of them.
She’d been such an unforgivable idiot.
She crossed her arms over her chest, shifting so she could get to the gun in her purse if necessary. “Why don’t we try that again? What are you doing here, Sergei?” She went ramrod straight, all the lingering looseness in her body from her encounter with Cillian going up in smoke. “He sent you, didn’t he?”
“Your brother is worried about you.”
“Half brother.” A vital distinction. They might share the same father, but Olivia would never be a Romanov. The old hurt rose, the feeling of having no place of her own, but she forced it down. She wasn’t in that life anymore, and she wasn’t about to be dragged back in because Dmitri suddenly decided to remember that they were related. The Romanov name came with more strings attached to it than Pinocchio. She’d dodged a bullet by her father never officially acknowledging her as his child—and she fully planned to keep on dodging it for the rest of her life.
She had to figure out what Sergei—and by association, Dmitri—was here for so she could get them both back out of her life. “For the last time, what do you want?”
“You know what I want.” The look on his face said it all. Her. But that ship had sailed two years ago, and it wasn’t coming back—ever. He knew it. He had to know it. He might pretend he could go back in time and regain her trust, but it wasn’t happening. Olivia had been fooled once, but she’d never put him in the position where he could hurt her like that again. From his muttered curse, he read that knowledge from her expression. “I want to see Hadley.”
No way. Not my daughter.
Olivia stopped short, clamping her lips shut around the instinctive denial. Hadley was hers. Where had he been for the last year while she’d been struggling to make ends meet? Off with Dmitri, probably torturing small animals and beating the crap out of helpless people.
Okay, that wasn’t fair, but she wasn’t feeling all that fair when it came to Sergei. She had no doubt that he loved their daughter as much as he was able, just like she had no doubt that he’d loved her, too. She also knew that he’d put a bullet in both their brains and throw their bodies into the river if Dmitri commanded it. Sergei might—might—feel bad about doing it, but he’d do it all the same. The Romanovs were his end-all, be-all, and nothing could compare to that.
If he was really here to see Hadley, he wouldn’t be showing up at one in the morning. “She’s sleeping. Her bedtime is eight.” Olivia hesitated. Every instinct demanded that she do whatever it took to see the last of him once and for all, but she was afraid that was her hurt talking. Like it or not, he was Hadley’s father. She cleared her throat. “If you really want to see her, you can come by in the morning.”
“I will.” He looked away, his Russian accent getting thicker. “But I am not here only for you.”
Of course he wasn’t. She should have known better than to think he’d shown up after twelve months of silence just to say hello. “Tell Dmitri to leave me alone. He doesn’t want me in the damn family any more than I want to be there. He needs to let it go.” Maybe if she said the words enough times, he’d actually listen. She wasn’t holding her breath.
“He can’t do that and you know it.” Sergei still didn’t look at her. “He is not a patient man, Olivia.”
She knew that. Hell, she knew that better than most people. “I left all that behind when I moved away from New York.” She didn’t want it—any of it. She didn’t care that Andrei got terminally ill and suddenly had a change of heart about the bastard daughter he’d spent the last twenty-two years ignoring. She had no desire for a position within the Romanov empire or any of the so-called perks that came with it. The only thing Andrei had done that was less than despicable was making sure she had a roof over her head and didn’t starve while growing up. The bare minimum for survival. She didn’t owe him anything, and she sure as hell didn’t want any of his guilt-driven gifts.
Was she being stubborn? Hell yes. She and Hadley were doing just fine without touching the money Andrei had put in an account for her—especially since she couldn’t touch it without agreeing to everything else he’d wanted from her before he died.
“I don’t want the money, and I don’t want anything to do with the Romanovs.”
“That’s not what Andrei wanted.”
And that was the crux of it. Dmitri loved his father. It was one of the only redeeming things about him, for all that Andrei hadn’t been a saint. He wanted to honor Andrei’s last wishes, whether he agreed with them or not. She got that. She just wasn’t willing to sacrifice both her and Hadley’s future to please a dead man.
Olivia took a deep breath, counted to three, and exhaled. Yelling at Sergei wasn’t going to do a damn thing. She looked up at him, suddenly so tired she had to fight to keep from weaving on her feet. “Tell Dmitri that my leaving is the best thing that could have happened for either of us. He doesn’t want me in New York. I don’t want to be in New York. He tried to bring me into the fold like our father wanted, and as far as I’m concerned, he’s done his duty.” There would be no going back—not for her, and certainly not for Hadley. She’d fought too long and hard to put that life behind her, and get to a point where she could raise Hadley in a household that didn’t think everything from tax evasion to torture to downright murder was acceptable as long as their bottom line was met. A family who’d do anything for a little bit more power. She might not be rolling in the cash the way Dmitri and his people were, but it was an acceptable tradeoff as far as Olivia was concerned.
Sergei shook his head. “Livie…that’s not good enough, and you know it.”
Yeah, she did. But she had to try. All Olivia had ever wanted was to grow up normal, and she had the chance to do that for her daughter. Going back to New York wasn’t an option. She slid past him to her door. “Good night, Sergei. I don’t want to see you around here again unless you’re actually deciding to be a father. Dmitri can send someone else to be his errand boy.” She walked into her apartment without another word and quietly closed the door behind her.
It wouldn’t be that easy. Dmitri excelled at pushing people’s buttons, and Sergei was a giant one when it came to Olivia. She could barely look at his face without being transported back to that idiot girl she’d been when she thought that he’d leave with her. That he’d step up as father to their child after the initial surprise of the pregnancy. That he’d be the only person in her life who’d actually put her before the Romanov bottom line.
He hadn’t, and she’d barely gotten out as a result.
Except she hadn’t gotten out. Not really.