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Willow tugs against her papà’s hold, staring past Curse and directly at me.
“Where’s Deirdre?” she demands, practically spitting. “Is she still at your place? Is she safe?”
Her papà goes so red with rage I think his head is about to explode from his daughter’s audacity.
“Shut yer mouth, Willow,” he hisses. “My apologies, gents.”
“No apology required,” I say smoothly, honestly kind of amused by this whole thing. A smirk tugs at one side of my mouth, and I’m already savouring what I’m about to say next. “It’s only polite, after all, to enquire about a man’s fiancée.”
Willow’s so startled by that last word that all the fight drains out of her for a second. She pales, then goes slack and still in Paddy’s hold.
“Fi… fiancée?!” she echoes.
But then she’s back at it with twice the energy, pulling against Paddy’s arms and swearing. But her papà has got at least eighty pounds on her. He’s got a big gut but also big fucking shoulders and he tilts them, dragging Willow backwards towards the room he first emerged from a minute ago. It’s one of those swinging doors, so he just ploughs back-first through it, yanking his daughter along with him until they’re out of sight.
But not out of earshot. I can hear them through the door. Paddy’s Irish accent gets thick in his fury.
“Question Elio Titone in this feckin’ pub? Are ye completely mad, ye eejit? Or just daft? Darragh will have yer empty head if one of the Titones don’t blow it clean off yer shoulders first!”
“He’s got my best friend! Did you hear him call her his fiancée?! I need to know what the hell is happening!”
“Ye don’t need to know nothin’! All ye need to do is pack yer feckin’ bags. Ye’re going to stay with my sister just like I knew ye should have when all this shite started with the O’Malleys!”
“Oh, fuck no! You can’t just ship me off to Ireland!”
“I can and I will! And don’t even give me that look, lass, because I’m one feckin’ hair away from sending you to a bloody convent instead of just to stay with yer cousins and aunt Orla! No, not one more word!”
I’m pretty sure Willow does have another word for him, more than one, in fact, and choice ones too, but I stop listening because someone else has entered from another door at the other end of the pub.
He looks like a fucking Viking, a mountain of a man with a close-cropped ginger beard and thick red hair pulled back into a ponytail. A black T-shirt is stretched to its absolute limits across his barrel of a chest, and his trunk-like arms are criss-crossed with tattoos.
“Darragh sends his greetings,” the giant says. “He’s currently engaged downstairs, but will be finished shortly. If you’ll follow me, he will receive you in his office.”
He crosses back to the door he emerged from and yanks it open, revealing a set of stairs going down. I can practically hear Enzo and Curse running scenarios through their heads. Neither of them want to get cornered in a basement shootout or some shit like that. Personally, I don’t really give a fuck. I wonder briefly about fire exits, then stride towards the door, Enzo and Curse pulling up the rear.
The Viking leads us downwards. The old wooden stairs creak under the weight of four big men clomping down them. But, somewhat surprisingly, it isn’t all dank and dark down here. Wrought-iron lanterns, the kind you’d expect to see outside a building, are nailed to the walls, casting warm light down the stairs. At the bottom there’s nothing but a door. I can’t quite tell what it’s made of. It looks like it could be highly polished wood, but it’s onyx-black.
When the big ginger guy opens it, I realize that whatever it’s made of, it must be soundproofed, because noise pours out like someone’s just switched on a very loud radio.
I know that Darragh runs several clubs and gambling halls, and if his office is also here then I wonder if this one is his main hangout. By what’s going on inside this swanky space, you’d have no idea it was only mid-morning up above. It looks like it should be midnight. Men in various forms of dress, all the way from three-piece suits to denim and T-shirts like our bearded escort, are scattered throughout the room, resting on leather chairs or leaning over cards tables, most of them with pints of beer at their elbows. There are women, too, some of them perched in short dresses on the knees of the card-playing men, others weaving to and fro with trays of drinks and snacks balanced on manicured fingers. The sounds are raucous, hearty laughter and insults lobbed back and forth like balls in both English and Irish.
But the men chatting and gambling aren’t the main source of the noise in the room. That comes from the furthest corner, opposite from us, where a boxing ring has been set up. There’s a bit of a crowd gathered around it, but it’s raised off the floor so that over the heads of the on-lookers it’s easy to see who’s fighting.
I don’t recognize one of the men, the one currently taking a pummeling. But I sure do recognize the one doling out punches so fast they almost look frenzied. Because that right there is the head of the Irish mob in Toronto and the current bane of my existence. Darragh fucking Gowan.
“Darragh.”
I don’t say it loudly, but there’s a dangerous hardness in my voice that makes it carry. It slices through the room, silencing men as it goes as surely as if I’d slit their fucking throats. Every speechless head in the room swivels our way until the only one not looking at me is Darragh himself. Even his opponent has cranked his head towards us, which earns him a blow to the temple that topples him. He crumples to the mat, and Darragh finally looks up. From across the room, our gazes lock.
And then the fucker grins at me, waving jauntily like I didn’t dump the bodies of three of his men on his doorstep this morning.
He leaps out of the ring with the grace of a cat, prowling through a silent crowd that parts easily for him. He’s shirtless, his scarred and tattooed skin shining with sweat. He runs a raw-knuckled hand through tousled hair, the damp locks a dark red colour somewhere between bronze and deep copper.
I’ve never actually been this close to Darragh. I know who he is, and what he looks like, but as he comes to a stop before me, this is the first time we’ve actually spoken face to face like this.
He’s about as tall as I am, though leaner, his muscles hard, veins and arteries all juiced up and popping along his long-limbed frame. The smooth, clean shave of his face lays bare the hard lines of his jaw and the high, angular cheekbones that jut out beneath a fucking weird pair of eyes.
It takes me a second to pinpoint what’s so unnerving about his gaze. It isn’t just the relentless, calculating probe of it, because I’m used to that kind of thing. I’ve been keeping my chin up under hard stares like that since before I entered fucking puberty. No, there’s something else disorienting about Darragh’s gaze, something that makes me feel like I don’t know where I’m supposed to look to maintain eye contact, and I suddenly realize it’s because his eyes are two different colours. His right eye is dark brown, his left hazel-green. The lighter coloured greenish one has an inky splotch at the bottom of the iris that makes it look like his pupil is bleeding out into the rest of his eye.
