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“No. He wants me to stay far away from all of it,” she admits. “But I can’t just sit there and watch him and everything he’s worked for be torn to bits by that table of men. I’m his wife, and I’m part of this, too. I want to take care of him, the way he’s taken care of me.” She narrows her eyes at me, and I see a tiny bit of fire there that I’ve never seen before in her. “I cared for him, you know, when he came back from what you and the Kings did to him.” Her voice holds a touch of venom, too, and it’s startling coming from her. “I saw his burned hand, his back cut open from the belt. You’re fucking medieval savages, all of you, to do that to someone. You especially, to burn him like that—” Anastasia cuts off, her face pale. “I don’t know how you could do that to someone you supposedly loved.”
“I never loved Liam,” I tell her flatly. “I hoped for love between us, one day. But I didn’t love him then, or now. What affection I had for him was snuffed out when he rejected me, over and over again.”
“Could you have done that to him if you were still his fiancée?” Anastasia asks accusingly. “His wife?”
“If I was, I wouldn’t have had to,” I say coolly. “What I did was my duty. It was tradition. It was—”
“Oh fuck your duties and your traditions and all that bullshit,” she hisses. “Where has that ever gotten any of you? All it’s gottenyouis into another loveless engagement with another man who doesn’t want you.”
“It’s going to get me a great deal more than that. And now I suggestyouleave, before this is worse for you than it already is. If Liam finds out—”
“If he finds out, he’ll understand, because he loves me.” Ana looks at me with something almost like pleading in her eyes. “Saoirse, just ask Connor to back down. To go back to London or do—anything. Anything other than take this from Liam. He’s tried so hard to bring back the table from what his father did, to be worthy of it, and for him to lose it because of me—”
“Why would I do that?” I meet her gaze evenly, inwardly wondering how someone can be so ill equipped for a life that she’d married into. “IwantConnor to take over, Anastasia.Ihelped bring him here.Italked him into going along with my father’s plan. I have been a part of this ever since my father found out that Connor was still alive, and I’m not about to stop now. Iwantto marry him. You might think I’m some pawn being forced into this, the poor disgraced girl thrown over by Liam and now handed off to his brother to salvage the situation, but that’s so far from the truth of it that you’re not even beginning to see what’s happening here. This is his birthright, Anastasia, and mine too. He wasbornto be the Irish King, and I was born to be his wife. That was always how it was meant to be, and if anything, you did us both a favor drawing Liam’s eye away from me. Now Liam just needs to see that, too, and give up.”
I pause, looking directly into Anastasia’s wide-eyed gaze, her pale delicate face. “I understand why you’re doing this,” I tell her, as gently as I can manage, gesturing at her still-flat belly. “You want your husband to keep his seat, so that your child can keep his inheritance.” I smile sympathetically at her. “I suppose he hasn’t told you that the Kings want him to disinherit your child in order to keep it? To promise that the half-Russian baby growing in your belly won’t ever rule over them?”
“Myhusband doesn’t keep secrets from me,” Anastasia snaps. “He’s told me all that, and more. I’m not here because I care about his position, or a position for our child. I’m here for my husband’slife, Saoirse. Can you really tell me that Connor won’t kill him, even if he agrees to give up the seat? That he won’t relinquish it only to find a knife in his back later, or for us to be chased across the continent? I want my husband and my family safe, Saoirse.”
My name sounds like acid on her tongue, as if it hurts her to say it. “I love my husband and my child,” she whispers. “I love my family. It tore me apart to see what you and your father did to Liam, to wipe away his blood and clean his wounds. I fought through hell and back to be with him, and he did the same for me. I don’t give a shit about your Kings or your table, but I don’t trust a single man who has anything to do with it, or you, Saoirse O’Sullivan. So unless you can promise me that Liam will go unharmed if he steps down, then no, I won’t be speaking your poison in Liam’s ear.”
I don’t for a second believe that Connor wants Liam dead unnecessarily. It was his life that we bargained with to get Connor back here in the first place, the promise that Connor could save him from the verdict of the Kings if he took up Liam’s place. But it’s clear that Anastasia—and possibly even Liam—don’t know that.
Which gives me the inkling of a plan that could help achieve my husband-to-be’s ends, from the inside.
See, Connor? Already my loyalty is to you.
“What would you do?” I ask carefully, “if I could guarantee that Liam would live, that you and he and your unborn child would be allowed to leave Boston peacefully and unharmed, and start a new life somewhere else without the threat of the Kings following you?” I pause, looking her squarely in the face. “Would you try to convince Liam to give it up? To cede to Connor, and take his family away from here?”
Anastasia looks shocked, her mouth dropping open a little. “Are you serious?” she whispers incredulously. “Are you really askingmeto conspire withyou, to work for your ends against my husband’s desires to further yours?”
I shrug, smiling a little. “It’s for your own good, isn’t it? Yours, and Liam’s, and that baby of yours?” I gesture towards her stomach.
“Well yes, but—”
“This is what women like us do, Anastasia McGregor.” I purposefully use her last name, reminding her of who she married, who she is, what she stands to lose—as if she needed it.
“What?” Her blue eyes are wide. “What do we do?”
I smile gently at her. “What we have to, Anastasia. For the men that we’ve chosen to be loyal to.”
7
CONNOR
“Ihave a piece of information that might matter.”
We’re meeting on the second floor of the brick warehouse again the day after I saw Liam in the cemetery—all of us, sans Viktor and Luca’s right hand men, who have briefly gone back to New York to handle other matters…and Graham, who I intentionally left out. I look around the group, frowning.
I’d thought long and hard, all night, about whether what Max had inadvertently revealed to me actually mattered at all, and then after that, whether or not I should bring it to my own small table.
Particularly considering the ramifications it might have for me, and for Saoirse.
Do I really want to go back to London?I’d lain awake most of the night, trying to puzzle out how I felt now that my feet have been back on solid Boston ground. The answer I came to, every time, was a resoundingyes.
I miss my flat, my motorcycle, the cigar smoke and alcohol perfumed room where my men and I played poker every week. I miss every familiar street and alleyway, the docks and the pubs, all the places where I built a life for myself with nothing but my own two hands, no name to fall back on. That life, my life as William Davies, feels more like the life I belong to than anything I ever did here.
If there’s a chance I could have it back, I need to take it, for my own sake.
