Page 135 of The Endless Want

My chest constricts.

Nadia smiles. “And mine.”

I close my fist around the ring box.

Liam steps back. “Then get your head straight, because we move on the estate at dark and I need you thinking about walls and sightlines, not weddings.”

“I could be there and back in two hours.”

“You could.” He doesn’t blink. “You’ve waited five months. You can wait until the building she was held in is rubble.” Something almost gentle crosses his face and is gone. “Ask her when you can tell her it’s finished.”

I push the ring box into my pocket. It feels like a live heartbeat. “I won’t,” I say.

CHAPTER 41

Declan

The road to the border estates still smells like smoke.

Even after the fires die, after the bodies are cleared, after the last bullet casings are swept into evidence bags, the air carries that charred bitterness that clings to your clothes and hair and skin. It settles somewhere deeper too—in the chest, in the mind, in the place that remembers fear long after the danger is gone.

The Irish and Italians take both compounds that night. Bulldoze them in spirit if not yet in stone. We raze the first estate—the one where they held her. Then hit the second, farther up the valley, a trafficking hub stripped bare but still echoing with the lives that pass through it.

We give mercy to the ones who beg for it and offer names. We give death to the ones who spit in our faces.

By dawn, the surviving Russians are either allies, prisoners willing to defect, or smears on the tiles. It should feel like victory. The teams high-five. Rory cracks a joke about “border hospitality.” The Italians pass around bottles and toast to the end of the nightmare.

But victory isn’t a clean word.

Liam and I stand shoulder to shoulder as the sun rises over the smoking land, and for the first time in years, it feels like we are brothers without a wall between us. He doesn’t look at me like a threat or a liability. And I don’t look at him like a rival. We just stand there, watching our men secure the area, listening to the new Russian defectors whisper names and codes and warnings.

One name keeps coming up.

The Vore.

Not a gang. Not a cell. A movement. A tier above the old Bratva structures. A hierarchy based on blood or fear or both. No one can explain it fully—not the defectors, not the Italians who heard rumors months ago, not the handful of FBI contacts Liam has in his back pocket.

But the message is clear.

This isn’t over.

This is the first punch of a heavier fist.

A week later, the summit is called.

Neutral ground: an abandoned train depot halfway between the city and the border routes. Iron ribs arch overhead, rusted and hollow, scattered sunlight leaking through the broken panes. The Italians arrive first, sleek cars rolling up one after another. Then the Irish crews. Finally, escorted vans with what’s left of the Russian defectors.

I arrive with Liam. He walks with the quiet confidence of a man who’s earned every scar on his body. I walk with a different weight—one that has everything to do with the ring box in my pocket and the woman sleeping under safehouse guard twenty miles away.

The depot hums with tension. Guns are visible. Inside the makeshift hall, Liam and I take our place at the center table. A rare thing—co-leading. Something neither of us would have tolerated six months ago.

Now? It feels like the only option that makes sense.

Nadia sits beside him. Finn takes a seat near the back, watching the defectors with eyes that miss nothing. Returning because he’s needed as much as he wants to be done with this life.

Conor leans against a pillar, arms folded, while Mackenzie stands next to him, radiating frost and fury in case anyone breathes wrong about Ailish or the baby.

I sit at Liam’s right. A place that used to belong to someone else. A place people have fought over before. A place I’m finally willing to earn.