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Clearing my throat, I bit out, “You should’ve picked dare.”
Lifting my arm, I aimed at his head and pulled the trigger.
As soon as the meeting ended, I left for the guesthouse without giving anyone the chance to stop me. I didn’t want to stay for the show, as Mickey had called it. My throat tightened and stomach churned at his excitement over what was to come . . . at who it involved.
As soon as I was inside, I headed for the kitchen to make coffee, and the water had just started boiling when Conor began a perimeter check around the house.
No sign of Beck or Kieran.
Then again, I doubted I’d see them anytime soon. When I’d snuck out at the end, Kieran had still been leaning against the wall with a calm, lethal expression as Bailey gripped at the arms of his chair, too afraid to move.
As I waited for the coffee to finish brewing in the French press, I wondered how long Bailey would stay in that chair if Kieran never moved from his position, and how Kieran had happened to show up after Bailey’s comments when I couldn’t remember the last time he’d been on property during the day.
Before he’d been forced to take Aric’s place, Kieran had only worked when Mickey needed someone silenced. I’d spent all my days and nights with him and had hated the few hours when he was gone.
Now, everything had changed. Mickey had him working constantly. Two or three nights a week, I’d wake up to Kieran slipping into bed only for him to be gone when I woke.
Yet I’d never felt more suffocated or hurt by him.
And somehow, the only person who noticed was a breathtakingly captivating guy who had stolen my thoughts, one by one, and crept into my dreams, unbidden . . . until I’d found myself falling asleep, praying he’d meet me there. He had a relaxed smile and an easiness about him, while still managing to remain intimidating.
And he saw straight through me.
I’d been sitting on the bench at the kitchen table, mind on an intriguing stranger’s words, coffee long since cooled, forgotten, when I noticed it . . .
The change in the house.
The charge pressing against my ribs and stealing my breath, growing stronger by the second.
The only way I could ever have known Kieran was there, moving closer with each stuttered beat of my heart.
I hadn’t even heard the door open or shut.
Silent as the night.
His hand suddenly covered my own, pinning it to the table. My body stilled and I slowly turned my head to look at our overlapping hands until he removed them both from the wood.
There, below where my hand had rested, was a symbol smudged onto the surface of the table that chilled me to my core.
Lines and circles.
A symbol I’d been taught to fear growing up.
A symbol I drew without meaning to.
My subconscious conjured it up in ceilings and clouds and woodgrains. I saw it inked onto a forearm when I closed my eyes . . .
Even if I never knew why the men were in my room that night, the man who’d shot Aric and tried to take me with him had revealed enough secrets once he was dead.
By way of this symbol tattooed on his arm.
I’d always known what it meant—known who wore it with pride. But I’d never seen the symbol on a person before that night, and I hadn’t since.
That didn’t mean it had stopped haunting me.
Four horizontal lines, each shorter than the one above it, with one vertical line slashing through, longer than all the others. All centered in an outline of a circle.
The symbol that a mafia family had adopted long ago.
