Ciaran
I felt like hell. Worse than that, I felt like hell reheated, then frozen again, then tossed to the dogs to gnaw on. My head was pounding like a son of a bitch and I felt the uncomfortable, painful pinpricks of a body warming up after a long, cold night in the snow.
Which was exactly where I’d been.
My brain was a little foggy about some of the details, but I knew I’d been slumped over in the snow, freezing and half dead when I saw her. Beautiful. Perfect. And very clearly a figment of my imagination. She brushed the snow from me like a soft fleece blanket. Her hands were like petals, but petals on fire. They were so soft, but they burned everywhere they touched. She looked down at me with the biggest blue eyes I’d ever seen, like two shining orbs, beacons of light in an otherwise dark tunnel, and I thought she couldn’t be real. Something like that just didn’t belong in the real world.
But reality snapped back pretty quickly. The cold numbness in my fingers and my limbs ached like nobody’s business, and when she finally got me to roll just a bit, I felt like I might just break in half. But I pushed through as she coaxed me to my feet. I didn’t even know how I managed it. I felt too fragile to move, something I was most definitely not used to or fond of, yet somehow she got me to my feet. Slumping heavily against her, her body warm and pliant, sweetly curved beneath a half dozen layers of clothing, and her soft brown hair tickled against my skin like silk. It made me groan a little at that touch of heaven.
It was pretty obvious I was delirious with all this imagining of ethereal angels and heaven and such bullshit. Not exactly my normal MO. In fact, I had a tendency to view women in two respects: little sister or a quick, hard fuck. My lifestyle didn’t really lend itself to a lot of in between in that respect.
The first responded to a deep-seated need to protect. That usually was reserved for my boys, my family, but I always had a soft spot of little girls in need. I would never let one go hungry, but as soon as they were fed, I’d find a spot for them and send them on their way. I had a soft spot for them, but not a home. They had no place in my kind of dangerous life.
The second view solved my natural, biological needs. The physical ones. I enjoyed sex as much as the next guy and I took it where and when I wanted it. There hadn’t been any shortage in that supply, but I’d never met one I wanted more than once.
But as this beautiful woman helped me struggle through the knee-deep snow in the middle of what sure as hell looked like a damn blizzard, I found myself trying to categorize her.
Those big blue eyes screamed at me sweetness, innocence. My inner need to protect tried desperately to rear its fierce head, to pump me up enough that I could cover her with my body and shield her from the danger that lurked right around every corner. But as I leaned against her much smaller frame, my back bent over because she was so much shorter than me, I couldn’t help but notice other things.
The curve of her waist, small and fragile beneath her coats. The length of her denim clad legs, shaped just right to wind around my hips. Her firm, perky rear with that perfect mixture of fit and supple.
And her breasts. I couldn’t see them beneath her sweater and her coat, but as I slumped against her I felt the full curve of one against my ribs, soft and pliant. I was delirious enough to imagine the shape of it beneath all of her layers, that sweeping softness, that firmness, that silky smoothness I already felt like roughing up with the stubble growing along my jaw.
My physical urges towards her were instant and undeniable. She was a gorgeous woman and my mind could imagine doing all sorts of things to her as she writhed beneath me—and looked up at me with those impossible, huge blue eyes.
I never mixed the two categories of women. If you were a little sister, that was it. I treated you like a child in need of protection and I didn’t want a child in my bed. And if you were a wanton woman in need of a good fucking, well, then you were in my bed and then you were out of my house. Period.
But this woman…
She didn’t seem to fit, though I admitted I was hazy and more than a little out of it. I probably thought clearer when I’d had half a dozen shots of whiskey. At least then I’d be warm, I thought, the idea running through my addled brain helplessly.
My eyes were mostly closed—they felt frozen shut, though they weren’t actually—but as we moved up the ditch bank, I realized where we were going. Parked haphazardly along the side of the road and still running was the worst piece of shit car I’d seen in a long time. It looked like it was saved, just barely, from the scrap yard after the claw had sunk into it and carried it halfway to the crusher. And yet it still hiccupped and ran, puffing out steam from its tailpipe and grinding a little from beneath the bent hood.
It looked just shy of ready to blow up. I wasn’t thrilled by the thought of it, but when she slid me into the seat all of my concerns about it melted away. Heat. Blessed fucking heat. It poured from the vents and even though it was being sucked away out the broken back window and God knew where else, I still felt better. Warmth of any kind felt better.
She closed the door on me and I was unconscious before she even got into the driver’s seat.
I was meeting with Shane McCarthy and he was late. And not just a little late. Half a fucking hour late and it was pissing me off. This had been half his idea, half mine. We were rivals, it was true, but that didn’t mean we didn’t have history. And it didn’t mean that once upon a time we hadn’t been closer than any two brothers could be. We weren’t blood, but we didn’t have to be. We grew up on the same streets and were taken in by the same old couple.
But that didn’t mean we were the same.
Things had changed since our childhood and not for the better. The Lucky Skulls were counting on me and thus far I hadn’t let them down, but when McCarthy started up the rival gang, the Irish Hounds, it wasn’t any wonder things went downhill, and fast. Suddenly the territory that had been plenty for the Lucky Skulls was being wrenched away from us forcibly—by people who had once been like brothers.
War broke out. There had already been casualties. I lost Tim, James, and Dorian. McCarthy had lost just as many.
I couldn’t have guessed that the old man dying would have torn us apart like this, but it had. Marie begged it to end, but how could it when neither of us seemed willing to let the past be the past? We couldn’t even be in the same room with one another without pulling a knife or a gun.
Marie told me the honest truth in the way that only a seventy-six-year-old woman can: “You’ve gotta be the bigger man, Ciaran m’boy. Make the first move or no one’s going to.”
It was a truth I took to heart, and when I threw the suggestion for a meeting to the wind, McCarthy got it loud and clear. I heard back from him in a short week’s time and the meeting was set up for tonight.
I hadn’t expected the snowstorm that was rolling in like a bad omen, despite the rings around the full moon and the weather report that was suggesting it could hit at any time. I’d thrown on jeans and a t-shirt, and of course wore my thick leather jacket, but as I stood there shivering in the snow, I thought it definitely wasn’t enough.
And what kind of idiot wears steel toed boots in the snow? I thought as I stood there blowing warm air across my knuckles in a vain attempt to warm them back up. They were already starting to go numb, and if this turned into a fight, I didn’t want to have numb, cold, sore split knuckles. That was just a bit much. Though at least my cold hands kept my attention away from my cold toes. I hated cold feet.
But it looked like in the end all of it was a moot point. No one was here and we were coming up fast on an hour. If I waited much longer, I’d just make myself angrier than I already was—and I’d probably make myself look weak to anyone who found out about it. My men or the Irish Hounds.
“Fuck, McCarthy,” I cursed into the frigid air. “You’re a real piece of shit.”
I finally decided I wasn’t going to wait anymore. I just turned to get back on my bike and get the hell out of here before the roads got too icy and the air too cold to make for any sort of a comfortable ride when I heard a voice ringing back to my ears.
“Is that any way to start off peace talks?”
I turned around again to see McCarthy was waltzing up towards me, a half smile plastered on his face as usual, his red hair brighter for all the falling snow. He looked a little crazy, like some demon walking through the soon-to-be white out.
I frowned. “About as good as to start it off by making the other party wait almost an hour.”
He shrugged his large shoulders, unconcerned. “Didn’t mean to worry your pretty little head over it, did I?”
It took everything I had to force calm into my system. I was pissy with him already and it didn’t help that he made me wait and was now teasing me for it. But I reminded myself that we were here to talk about making things right between us, ending this stupid feud before we lost anyone else.
“Dunno. You were never the brains,” I muttered, unable to help myself.
I saw his smile flicker, the only reaction he had to my goad. He continued as though he hadn’t heard it at all, which was how I know my words had really pissed him off. “But I’m here now, so let’s talk peace.”
Forcing a steadying breath into my lungs, I closed my eyes for half a second before opening them again and getting myself ready for a long, grueling night and a conversation I really didn’t want to have. I knew I was going to have to make compromises. I knew I wasn’t going to like any of them. But I also knew I didn’t have a lot of options. Either we fought it out until there was only one man standing or we figured out how to make things work between us.
“Alright. Any chance you’ll just move on and find greener pastures?” I started, mostly kidding, because there was no use in hoping. I knew he and the Irish Hounds were here to stay.
He actually laughed. “Oh, you’ve got quite the sense of humor, Ciaran, my brother. But alas, no, I’ll be staying for the long haul.”
Something in me tensed at the brother comment. I never forgot where we came from or how we were connected, but it was an old wound that had been torn open again not so very long ago. I hadn’t yet come to terms with all of it and I had the sense that he probably knew it. “Fine. I expected as much. So I guess we need to start talking compromises.”
He shrugged nonchalantly, then crossed his thick arms over his broad chest. He wasn’t as tall as me, but he was solid as a brick. I wasn’t sure he was stronger than me, but I also didn’t want to test it one way or the other if I could avoid the fight. “Compromises? Well, that’s simple. I want Merrill. All of it. No exceptions.”
I stiffened.
Merrill was an old industrial city that was half as prosperous as it had been when it started. Work started drying up as the money flowed elsewhere, but it was home. It was where I’d scrounged and hustled to stay alive on the streets, and it was where I’d met Ma and Pa, Marie and Donnie Sullivan, who’d been better to me than anyone else in this life. And he wanted me to give all of that up? There wasn’t a chance.
Don’t forget, it’s his home, too, an unwelcome voice whispered in my head. I pushed it aside and focused on the conversation at hand. “Not much of a compromise,” I commented. “How about we talk about boundary lines instead?”
He laughed again. “You honestly think I’m willing to cut up what is rightfully mine? You really are crazy, Ciaran.”
I licked my lips. This was sounding less and less like a peace talk and more and more like the kind of meeting you have when you want to lay down the law—or intimidate the hell out of someone. Which I expected was the real reason for our little get together. It made me angry and cautious both. If he were here to make me afraid—which, good luck with that—then he likely had something up his sleeve should I not cooperate.
Which there was no doubt in my mind that I wasn’t going to.
“Rightfully yours?” I questioned.
His eyes narrowed, but his smile never left. I knew this was bad. “That’s right. The old man would have wanted it this way—”
Before he could say anything more, I took three steps and got in his face, grabbing him by the scruff. For a split second, the smile faltered and he looked genuinely scared. Then the second was gone and he was once again the cocky asshole I had the misfortune of calling brother. Getting my face up close to his until our noses were nearly touching, I said through gritted teeth, “How the fuck would you have known what Pa would have wanted?”
He tried to lift his shoulders in a shrug, but with me holding him so tightly, he couldn’t really do it properly. It made him look like invisible strings were tugging him on. “He was my pa, too.”
I shoved him away, disgusted. “Fuck you,” I told him.
“No, Ciaran, this time it’s fuck you,” he growled at me, almost baring his teeth as though he were a wild animal snarling. It didn’t seem so far off from the truth at the moment. “I’ve stood in your shadow long enough. This time, it’s on you. After Macalister—”
“Macalister was in self-defense!” I retorted immediately.
He snorted. “So you say. But he’s dead and conveniently can’t tell his side of the story. You’re a murderer, Ciaran. I’ve always known it and now everyone else does, too.”
“You bastard!”
We almost came to blows then. We would have if a car hadn’t pulled down that road. It looked like a police car and it was enough to encourage both of us to just walk away from the impending fight. Besides, it wasn’t like we wouldn’t get the chance to go at it again later. I gave him a grim look that said as much, then turned to head back to my bike. I heard more than saw him do the same.
I was a little ways off the road, my bike buried in the trees somewhere to avoid being seen—I wasn’t on the best of terms with the cops. As I made my way over towards it, I heard the soft crunching of fresh snow. I frowned; it wasn’t the snow beneath my own feet. I was about to turn when the blow came.
A metal bar swung from out of nowhere made hard contact with my head. It sent a shock of pain through me, making my body send off all kinds of warning signs, but it was too late. My system shut down. I blacked out.
I jerked myself awake, or maybe it was just that the car had stopped moving. The heating was still trying desperately to fight the cold, for which I should have been grateful, but strangely enough I felt as though I was burning up. The heat felt like far too much for me and all I wanted was for it to stop blowing in my face.
A groan escaped my lips before I could stop it.
“Oh, thank God!”
The sound of a woman’s voice was enough to get me to jerk my eyes open. I saw it was the same woman from before, her dark locks damp from melted snow and speckled by flakes of freshly fallen snow, her blue eyes just as large as I recalled.
So I hadn’t imagined her, I thought lazily, having difficulty focusing.
I felt darkness struggling to swallow me again. I fought it, but I somehow knew it was a losing battle. Maybe it was the blow to my head, or maybe it was just the rough shape the cold had left my body in, but I was having difficulty focusing and staying awake both. I was also having difficulty deciding if this was all real. There was still a part of me that was delirious enough that I was half convinced the beautiful woman next to me, talking in a soft, soothing voice wasn’t real, couldn’t be real.
But she felt real.
Her hand shook at my shoulder as her full lips formed around words that my ears barely caught. “Please, I need you to stay awake! I’m not strong enough to carry you!”
It was a mixture of the desperation in her voice and the admission that she wasn’t strong enough that drove me to fight so hard to stay awake. She needs me, I thought blearily, despite the fact that I was feverish, delirious, and probably had a concussion.
“That’s it, hang in there,” she murmured softly as she pressed herself to my side, sliding her shoulder beneath my arm. She felt tiny beside me, the size of a fucking fairy. But despite her words, she was stronger than she looked. She managed to help me out of the car—I slipped to one knee once, but she got me back up—and supported me as we stumbled through the snow.
My voice was like gravel as it came out and I wasn’t entirely sure that it was coming out coherently, “Where…are we?”
The snow was still deep and getting deeper, I noticed. The blizzard hadn’t let up. But we’d pulled into what might have been a snow-covered parking lot outside of what looked like some rustic tourist trap that was in need of some serious renovations. The place looked like it was close to falling apart, probably only held together by rusted nails and superglue. But it had a charm to it. The buildings, which looked like they were scattered about, the walkways between each covered with pure white powder, were log cabins. I thought they might be real log cabins even, not just the kind of siding made to look like it. The one nearest looked small but cozy, with a small covered porch, the overhang weighed down with a heavy blanket of snow.
Beside me, the woman huffed, her breath coming out in smoke-like puffs in front of her pretty, pale face. “It’s…oh, hell, I don’t know,” she said, sounding adorable as she said a curse word that was so mild and yet was probably very risqué for her. “It’s the first place I saw to turn off and you need to get out of this cold.”
I felt my lip try to tug into a smile. That was when I noticed that my head wasn’t the only thing that hurt on me. The cold had numbed a substantial amount of it, but my body felt bruised all over. My lower lip was split wide open and I noticed that my ribs felt like they weren’t doing so hot either. I realized that bruises covered my body. Probably, I had been kicked while unconscious.
Bastard, I thought, not sure it was Shane, but willing to pick a fight with him over it anyway. If fingers were going to be pointed, they would probably be at him.
“Hotel?” I ground out. Now that I’d noticed my ribs, I noticed that it hurt to take deep breaths.
“Maybe,” she admitted. “Let’s check over here.”
We headed to what looked like a main office. It was rustic like everything else and looked to be pieced together just as well. We stumbled through the door. It wasn’t warm inside, but at least it wasn’t snowing and there wasn’t any biting wind. Not that my feverish body could really be convinced it cared about that right now.
“Hello?” she called out.
I didn’t have the energy to look around, but when we went to the front counter, I allowed myself to slump there. Though there was a chair beside us, it appeared that neither of us were willing to risk putting me down in it given I would likely pass out and not get back up. Even slumped over the counter, just barely on my feet, I felt my eyes tug themselves closed. I heard rustling and then a jangling noise.
The woman let out a victorious, “Ah-ha!” then came back around to me. “C’mon. Let’s see if this cabin is in any sort of shape.”
She pulled me along and somehow managed to get me up three steps to the porch of one of the log cabins. She fiddled with the key that she must have retrieved from the office and after a moment, I heard a click. She pushed the door open.
“Thank God,” she breathed. “C’mon.”
Once again, she threw my arm around her shoulders and ushered me inside. After that, I couldn’t say exactly what happened. I remembered collapsing. It was either on a bed or a couch, the padding beneath me soft and smelling slightly of musk. There were sounds. Shuffling and quiet cursing. Scraping noises. Finally, I heard the distinct sound of a spark and that got my eyes open just long enough to see the ember flames jumping on a neat stack of logs. Sitting beside the fireplace was the beautiful woman, her features aglow in the firelight, making her look just as ethereal as the first moment I’d seen her.
I mumbled something, then dozed off again.
I awoke on and off through the night. Each time I would catch sight of her. She’d be pacing or she’d be cursing, or she’d be kneeling by the fire, stoking it and making sure it stayed strong and bright. Sometimes she’d be checking her cellphone, holding it up towards the ceiling as though trying to get service, only to bring it back down a second later and curse.
The night was both incredibly short and very long for me. My sleep was fitful, full of half-waking dreams and nightmares mixing in with reality. I dreamt of the woman sliding her petite body on top of me and running her hands over my chest. I dreamt of her grinding against my hips until I felt like bursting beneath her. And then I dreamt of her sweetly brushing the damp hair away from my forehead or singing sweetly until the dream shifted again to something else.
All the while, I knew the snow continued outside. I sensed it, the quiet as it fell, the cold as it wrapped over and across everything until the powdery white was like the tip of an eraser, sweeping away all the mistakes of the world.
And beneath that sense was another one, far more urgent.
The sense that I had to get out of here, because my being here was putting this woman in direct and very real danger.