Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Sixteen

Where were you?” Aiden made an effort to keep from massaging his temples, though he could damn well feel a headache starting. At this point, the pain was almost welcome. Anything to distract him from the bullshit he was currently dealing with.

His youngest sister crossed her arms over her chest and lifted her chin, the move so like Carrigan’s that his heart actually ached for a moment. Keira narrowed her eyes. “Last I checked, I was over eighteen and can do whatever I want.”

“And last I checked, one of our sisters is missing, and our enemies are multiplying by the second. Stop slipping your security detail or—”

“Or you’ll lock me up?” She kicked her feet up onto his desk, her combat boots looking ridiculously massive on her thin legs. Everything about her was thin these days, to the point where he suspected she had more alcohol and coke in her system than actual food or water. Keira laughed harshly. “Or are you going to shuttle me off to a nunnery? You can’t hold me. None of those places can. You might as well just deal with it.”

There was no just dealing with it.

Aiden already had blood on his hands in his efforts to keep the power base stable and his siblings safe. He didn’t like it, but he’d do the same thing over again. A transfer of power, even to someone groomed for it, was fraught with potential difficulty. He couldn’t afford to be weak.

Letting Keira have run of the place and disappear to God knew where was fucking weak.

He steepled his hands, and then stopped the move when he recognized it for one their father used. “Keira, this isn’t a game.”

“You think I don’t know that? Carrigan is gone, God knows who has Sloan, and Devlin is dead.” Her feet hit the floor with a heavy thud. “You don’t have to tell me a single fucking thing. Leave it alone, Aiden. We’re all dealing with this shit the only way we can, and if you lock me up, I’ll put a gun in my mouth and pull the trigger. Simple as that.”

He stared. He wanted to tell her that she was being dramatic and threatening that sure as fuck wasn’t the way to get him to back off. But as he looked at her, really looked at her, he suddenly wasn’t sure if it was theatrics. Keira’s eyes were a little too wide, her hands shaking at her sides. She looked half a second away from bolting out of the room.

“Keira—” He cut himself off as the door opened. “Get out. I’m busy.”

Cillian poked his head in. “It’s important.”

Importantcould mean any number of things, none of which were good from the look on his brother’s face. He drummed his fingers on the desk. Keira didn’t look any more interested in whatever news Cillian had than she was interested in anything lately. He wanted to shake her, to yell in her face that she was still among the living and her lifestyle would put her in an early grave faster than being an O’Malley would.

He made an abrupt decision and nodded at Cillian. “Tell me.”

His brother stepped into the office and shot a look at their sister. When Aiden didn’t tell her to leave, Cillian shrugged. “A courier just delivered this.”

The envelope was the size of a greeting card, the paper thick and their address written in a bold hand across the front. The return address was just an emblem, a stylized R that wasn’t quite a family crest. Romanov. “What does that bastard want?”

Keira laughed, tilting her head back against the chair to stare at the ceiling. “What all evil bastards want—world domination with a side of death and destruction.”

He opened the envelope and examined the card. It wasn’t much to look at. Plain white, obviously expensive, but without any pictures or words on either side. Aiden cursed himself for stalling and flipped it open. It took his brain precious seconds to process the words, and when it did, he had to fight not to throw the thing in the nearest fireplace. Instead, he very carefully read it aloud.

I’ve found your darling Sloan. That old proverb demands an eye for an eye. By my count, you owe me both a wife and a sister. I’ll be content with one of yours. Keira or Sloan, Aiden.

I’ll be generous and allow you to pick.

The alternative is war.

“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.” Cillian looked ready to drive to New York solely to throttle Dmitri. “He has to know that you won’t give up either.”

“He does know.” This wasn’t about a wife, and it wasn’t about Dmitri’s half sister, Olivia, who was currently residing in the family home with Cillian. It was a power play, plain and simple. If they bowed to this demand, they might as well kneel and offer their throats for whoever wanted their territory.

Not to mention I’ll give one of my little sisters over to him over my dead fucking body.

He’d let his father dictate Carrigan’s marriage, had stood back while her desperation drove her straight into James Halloran’s arms. He’d be damned before he let it happen again. “He wants war.”

“No.” Keira pushed to her feet, shaking her head. Her eyes looked clear for the first time since he’d had her hauled into his office. “Not that. Never that. I don’t care what it takes. I’ll do it.”

“Out of the question.” He nodded at Cillian, who instantly stepped forward to usher Keira out of the office. Only then did Aiden give in to the urge to shred the card into tiny pieces, each move controlled and contained. It didn’t help. He could still see the words imprinted there, the silk-coated threat.

They had to do something about Dmitri Romanov—and they had to do it now.

*  *  *

MacNamara.

The name seemed to echo between them, and in the silence that followed, Sloan half convinced herself that she’d misheard. “That’s impossible.” She wasn’t foolish enough not to realize there had to be other people with that last name in the country. Of course there were. But for him to be here, to know the things he knew…She shook her head. “Impossible.”

“I have no issue with your family.”

Every word he said confirmed what she could hardly believe. Everyone knew what had been done to that family, though the details on why they’d deserved it were a little hazy, most likely because her brothers hadn’t wanted to traumatize her. Sloan had met Callie’s father. He might be as ruthless as her father—he couldn’t have brought his family into so much power if he wasn’t—but he seemed to actually respect the fact that his daughter had the skills necessary to take over their operations. Something he and Seamus O’Malley didn’t see eye to eye on.

She’d thought the stories must have been exaggerated, but…“I don’t understand. How are you here? Colm Sheridan…He…”

“Wiped out my entire family. Yeah, I’m aware.” Nothing showed on Jude’s face, but then, he’d had a very long time to come to terms with this truth. Sloan had had all of thirty seconds.

She shook her head again, the pieces clicking into place. “Your mother was pregnant.” Then his other words penetrated. I have no issue with your family. Which meant there was a family he had an issue with. The Sheridans.

She started shaking. “That’s why you’re here, why you’re in this house. You were waiting for Sorcha. But she’s hardly a Sheridan. She hasn’t been considered part of the family for decades. Callie only found out about her recently.”

His eyes went hard. “Sorcha is no innocent. You can trust me on that—though I wouldn’t expect you to understand.”

Except she understood all too well. After Devlin had died, if someone had wiped out every single Halloran, she wouldn’t have shed a single tear. It would have been justice.

But that was before her sister became a Halloran, in everything but name.

“You have some sort of vengeance scheme in place.” She held her breath, waiting for him to deny it, to tell her that she was being dramatic.

He didn’t.

Jude crossed his arms over his chest. “I would hardly call my life’s work a scheme.”

His life’s work…

She ran her fingers through her hair, panic building with each heartbeat, a steady whoosh-whoosh sound that drowned out everything else. She couldn’t do this. She got out. She’d worked so incredibly hard to make a life for herself that had no strings leading back to Boston.

And yet she’d taken a man into her bed who had more strings than she did. No wonder Jude had told her that he had no room for a relationship—no room for her. She’d allowed her needs—allowed herself—to be put last time and time again.

She wasn’t going to do it now.

She lifted her chin, even though all she wanted to do was break down sobbing. “Please move.”

“Sunshine…Fuck, just give me a chance to explain this.” For the first time since he’d revealed who he was, he looked less than sure of himself. “I didn’t plan on this—on you. I knew you had some connection to Sorcha, which meant you had some connection to the Sheridans, but I had no idea that you were an O’Malley at first.” He scrubbed a hand across his face, half reaching out for her with the other before he let it drop to his side. “Fuck, Sloan, I like you.”

She barked out a laugh. “At first. That means you knew at some point. When was it? When you came over and let me throw myself at you? When you agreed to sleep next to me? Tell me.”

“After we had sex that first time.”

She waved a hand as if she could banish his words. “You should have told me. You lied to me.”

“No, I omitted. I know that might seem like the same damn thing to you, but we were on the same page—you wanted my cock and I wanted you on my cock. Simple. This wasn’t supposed to last, so it didn’t matter who I was or who you were.” He raised a single eyebrow. “And if we’re on the subject of lying, you sure as fuck weren’t offering up the truth to me, either.”

“That’s different.”

“Is it?”

She opened her mouth to confirm that it was, but stopped. If the Sheridans knew that there was a MacNamara left alive—especially one as capable and filled with a need for vengeance as Jude—they would hunt him to the ends of the earth. The only way for him to pay Colm Sheridan back in kind would be to remove every living Sheridan from the equation.

Callie.

Sloan clenched her jaw to keep from asking him for details. Callie was pregnant and running the Sheridan empire with Sloan’s brother at her side. If Jude meant Callie harm, that would put him directly at odds with Teague.

With Sloan.

She shook her head again, slower this time. “Callie is my sister-in-law. She is desperately in love with my brother, and she has fought too long and hard to survive to fall victim to something that happened before she was even born.”

“There are no innocents in this game. If you think Callista Sheridan is one, then you’re even more naive than I could have guessed.”

She wasn’t naive. She knew the stakes better than anyone. She’d lost a brother, same as Callie…

A slow dawning horror rolled over her. She looked up into Jude’s face, as a part of her that had stopped praying a very long time ago began to pray. Please no, please don’t be true.

“Did you have something to do with Ronan Sheridan’s death?”

It was an accident. He drank too much and wrapped his car around a telephone pole. Please, please, please don’t have had anything to do with this.

The tightening in Jude’s jaw confirmed it even before he spoke the damning words. “He was a Sheridan, sunshine.”