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“It’s all ruined,” I said. This whole life. The person I’d been. It was a stranger’s house. A stranger’s life.
I walked upstairs to my old bedroom. My dresses, thousands and thousands of dollars’ worth of them, destroyed. My underwear and toiletries thrown around the room like confetti.
“Can you help me?” I asked, turning the light on in my closet. “I can’t reach—”
He was beside me immediately.
“The very back of the top shelf. It’s a small box…”
He stood on his tiptoes and felt around.
“I don’t think it’s there, lass,” he said and the hopes I didn’t want to have crashed to the ground.
“Wait,” he said and managed to reach a nothing-special shoebox. But it was the most special thing I had. So special, my sister wouldn’t have known about it. So special to protect myself I had to forget it even existed.
He handed it to me and I walked back out to the bedroom to set it on the mattress that had been ripped apart.
“I haven’t looked in here in a long time.” I took a deep breath, bracing myself for the memories and then lifted the lid.
There was a pink and blue baby blanket that Zilla had been wrapped in when she came home from the hospital as a newborn. There was a book my mother had made for me when I was little. Crinkly pages of buttons and zippers so I could practice fine motor skills. A silver rattle that had been my father’s as an infant. Onesies with little elephants on them and striped footie pajamas I’d bought the first time I’d been pregnant. An ultrasound of a baby that didn’t survive.
I put the lid on the box and faced him. I knew he could see my heart. How much I loved him. “Thank you.”
His face was haunted. “Are you—” He gestured helplessly at my belly.
“It’s too soon to tell,” I said. “But if I am… I wanted these things.”
“Aye.” He nodded, solemn and serious.
“You’ll be a good father, Ronan.”
He turned his head away like I’d slapped him.
“Our baby won’t care about what you used to do to survive. Our baby won’t care about the blood in your veins.”
“Our baby will have the same blood,” he said, like it was a warning.
“You’ll be a good father. You’ll make your mother proud.”
His breath was shattered and I wrapped my arms around him.
“Well, well,” a cold voice behind us said. “The Bulldog and his bride.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Ronan
In a heartbeat I had my gun in my hand and Poppy behind me, but I was too late. There were three men in the bedroom with us. All of them were armed, blocking the doorway. We were trapped. Caught.
“We saw your lights on.” The man in the very back, stepped forward. “Hope you don’t mind.”
Tiernan Morelli. Dark hair. Handsome. Smug.
Evil.
I’d been so caught up in Poppy, in the baby things and dreams that could never come true, I didn’t even hear them coming. Niamh was right. This was what having a weakness did to a man like me—it put everyone around me in danger.
“Drop it,” Tiernan said, pointing his gun at Poppy. “Or I’ll put a bullet in her shoulder for real.”
“There’s no need for this,” I said, putting my gun down on the bed.
“That’s not the way Bryant sees it. My dad is a little pissed with you, cousin.”
“You can’t kill him,” Poppy said to the men, trying like a daft fucking girl to get in front of me. To protect me with her body. “He’s a Morelli.”
I put her behind me. Too rough. But it was rough or nothing. I thought of Niamh and her little boy with his sleeves rolled up. I stepped towards the men. “I’ll come with you. Let her go.”
One of Tiernan’s thugs stepped forward as if to grab Poppy and I met him with my fist. Putting him on the ground. Another one swung towards me and I grabbed the gun out of the man’s hand so fast he didn’t have time to react.
And then I kicked him in the stomach, sending him backwards against the wall. He fell onto his hands and knees and then to the ground, gasping for breath with at least one broken rib and a diaphragm that wasn’t working the way it should.
I pointed the gun at Tiernan, but I was too late. He had Poppy against his chest, the gun in his hand pressed to her head.
“You’re too fucking predictable, Ronan,” he said. He spread his hand out wide across her stomach, trying to get me to do something stupid. “Stop,” Poppy said, shoving his hand away. My brave fierce girl. “We’ll go. No problems.”
“See?” Tiernan said. “That wasn’t so hard. She’ll drive with me and you can follow behind. Anyone does anything stupid and she’ll pay the price.”
* * *
Poppy
“I heard you were a meek little thing.” Tiernan sat next to me with his gun on his knee as we drove from the Constantine part of Bishop’s Landing to the Morelli side. “That you wouldn’t be a problem.”
