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She wanted to hit me, I could see it in her eyes. Sloane had once told me that Teeghan wasn’t someone you wanted to mess with, and I had seen glimpses of her anger but according to Sloane, I hadn’t seen anything yet. I wanted that fiery woman to lash out so hard that all of Ireland would run scared when she came near. Tee wasn’t scared of anyone, which was why Conor had gotten wrapped up in her from the beginning.
Conor put himself between us, and edged her away from me. She knew exactly how to rile me up and for once, I was thankful for it. I needed this anger to keep my woman safe.
“The place looks empty,” Jeremiah said. “There should be cars here, Ronan doesn’t travel alone.”
He was right. That fucker always had a cavalcade of people around him. Safety in numbers I assumed.
“We need to check it out anyway,” Lorcan said. Jeremiah simply nodded and pulled out his own gun. We took the house strategically, Lorcan and Conor with Teeghan behind to the side, Aidan, Jeremiah and me on the other side. Each of us looked in the windows and made sure we weren’t going to be ambushed.
Lorcan signed to us that he would take the back with Conor and Teeghan. I led Jeremiah and Aidan to the front door, kicking it down with one of my hardest kicks to date. The door exploded with my kick, flying off the hinges and landing on the floor a few feet away. We entered, splitting up, our guns raised.
“Shoot anything that moves,” I said to them. Moving down the hall, I unlocked the back door and let the others in before I checked the other rooms.
I got to the first room after I left the kitchen and kicked the door open. It swung open as if it had only been closed slightly and I stilled in my tracks.
My hand fell to my side as I moved inside, my eyes focused on the wall with three singular polaroid photos glued to the wall, surrounded by red scribbles all over the wall.
I smelt the copper before I could see it was blood. The fuckers had given me a message in blood. In the first photo, I saw Sloane chained to a bed, a dirty rag in her mouth to keep her quiet, her mascara running down her cheeks. The second photo, she had a bloody nose and cuts on her lips and eyebrows and in the third, she was naked, hovering in the corner of the room with her sick and twisted cousin laughing at her.
Lorcan grunted to let me know he was behind me as I turned to him, the message emblazoned in my mind:
“Nice try.”
They knew we were coming. They knew Jeremiah would give the information up. They didn’t know just what I was capable of yet. After seeing those damn photos, I knew the assassin was coming forth…only this time, he wasn’t going to be calm.
I ripped the photos off the wall and pushed past Lorcan and out of the house so I could breathe. They were beating her and humiliating her…because of me. I never should have told her to go, I should have fought to keep her close.
I was a fucking idiot.
And she could die because of it.
I grabbed a lighter off Aidan who was standing by the porch and set the photos alight, tossing them to the ground and watching them burn until they were ash.
Teeghan came out of the house with Conor, her face ashen and her eyes staring off into the distance.
“What?”
“If he knew we were coming here, then he’ll buckle down, right?” she said. “He’ll go somewhere we will never find.”
“We have to bring him to us,” Jeremiah said from behind me. I turned around to see him coming to stand next to us. “A trade. He wants me dead, and he knows you won’t do it. If you promise to give me to him for her, he will bring her with the intent of never giving her to you, but she will be close enough you can get her.”
“You’ll be killed,” Conor said.
“If that’s what has to happen, then that’s what happens,” he said. “I’m sick of my brother and his twisted mind. He won’t stop until he has ultimate power and that’s not good for Ireland. You guys have always been what’s good for Ireland, and he knows that.”
I hated to admit it, but the guy was right. He will bring her to show her to me, but he’ll use her against me. He wants me to lose control, he wants to show our townspeople that we aren’t right for the job of looking out for them.
“Call him.”
Conor wanted to turn and hit me but Jeremiah slunk off to call his brother. A call we didn’t want to make but it was always going to be an option if it ever needed to be done.
“We can’t let him walk into a death trap,” Conor said to me.
“You think I want him to die?” I shot back at him. “But we are out of options and Sloane is running out of time. We don’t have the upper hand, we don’t even know how many hands we’re going to need.”
“We’ll find a way to protect him,” Teeghan offered but we all knew the chances of Jeremiah walking out of that meeting with his psycho brother was nil.
Jeremiah headed back up to meet us just as Lorcan came out of the house.
