Page 48 of The Endless Want

It’s not soft. It’s not gentle. It’s a collision—weeks of restraint snapping like a bone.

Her breath shatters against mine. Her fingers clutch at my shirt for a single heartbeat, dragging me closer—Then she pushes me back hard enough that I actually step away.

Her chest heaves. Her eyes are glassy with anger, frustration, hurt, things I put there. “You don’t get to do that,” she whispers, voice trembling. “You’ll tear this city apart for me and you won’t sit in a room with me. You do it all where nobody can see it, and then you leave, and I’m supposed to work out from the wreckage that you cared.” Her jaw clenches. “I don’t need you as a distraction when the Russians are still watching me. And I can’t work out whether being watched from inside this house is better or worse than being watched from outside it.”

It isn’t the rejection that lands. It’s that she’s right, and that she got there on partial information, and that I’m the one who gave her the partial information.

She steps around me toward the door. “Focus on your job, Declan. You’re in charge of the speakeasy, the shipments, and half the security operations. Start acting like it. The Russians aren’t waiting for you to get your head on straight.”

Her words slide under my ribs like a blade. She doesn’t raise her voice, but the blow lands anyway.

I watch her disappear down the hall, shoulders squared the way they get when she’s furious enough to cry but refuses to.

I stand there too long. Long enough that Conor texts me:

Conor; Opening week tonight. You showing up or letting the boys drink without you?

I stare at the screen. At the empty hallway. At the imprint of her mouth still burning against mine. Then I text back:

Declan; Pour me a drink. I’m on my way.

And I leave the office with every intention of getting drunk enough to stop thinking about her.

The trip is short, or maybe it’s just the fact that I will my mind to go blank so I don’t notice the distance.

The boys are already loud by the time I reach the speakeasy, their voices spilling up the back stairwell like heat from a boiler room. The pub upstairs is packed—opening week draws in half the neighborhood—but the real party is below, where our investment is meant to thrive and rot at the same time.

A legitimate business upstairs, a shadow operation downstairs. The Italians’ brilliant idea. Mine and Conor’s burden to keep clean enough not to attract the wrong kind of attention.

The door guard spots me and stiffens. Not because he’s scared—he’s loyal—but because he knows what my face looks like when I’m trying too hard to look calm. “Good evening, sir,” he says, stepping aside.

The basement is half lit, smoky, warm with bodies and spilled whiskey and the thrum of a jazz-blues fusion band the Italians insisted would ‘guarantee atmosphere.’ The leather booths shine under dim lighting; the wallpaper looks like it belongs in a 1920s brothel. It’s aesthetic, indulgent, and dangerous—like everything in our lives.

Conor lifts a glass when he sees me. “Twenty-two minutes. I told Rory thirty.”

I drop into the booth beside him, snatching the nearest glass. I don’t ask what’s in it before drinking half of it in one swallow. It burns. Not enough.

Rory slides in opposite me. “You look like shit.”

“Feel fine,” I lie.

“You always say that when you’re two minutes from punching someone,” Conor mutters, motioning the server for another bottle. “Who is it this time? Liam? Me? Yourself?”

I ignore him. The room is too warm, too full of laughter and card shuffling and the kind of decadence that reminds me life goes on even when your insides feel like a ruined battlefield.

Ailish’s voice won’t leave my head.

I don’t need you as a distraction.

Start acting like it.

Coward.

The words haunt me, echoing louder than the music vibrating through the floorboards. I stare into the whiskey, hoping for clarity or numbness or something that feels like control. The liquor offers nothing.

Conor watches me. “She got to you.”

I drag a hand through my hair. “She thinks she knows what she’s talking about.”