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I’m no hero. Even if everyone thinks I am.
I exhale as I roughly shove my hands up my face and into my hair.
She tasted like cherries and sin.
And I need—need—to get that, and the memory of everything that happened on that rooftop last night, out of my system. Forever.
It’s not that I’ve never noticed Callie before in that way. I mean it would be impossiblenotto. The big blue eyes that almost look supernatural against her dark lashes and tanned Mediterranean skin. The pouty lips and soft chin. The long dark hair down to the middle of her back, or the way she’s so fucking tiny and petite, and yetstillseems to be ninety-percent legs.
No, it’s not that I haven’t noticed Callie.
It’s that Ican’tnotice Callie. Not like…that.
Not when she’s twelve fucking years younger than me, for Christ’s sake. Not when she’s Ares, Hades, Kratos, and Deimos’ little sister. Not when she’s best friends with Neve and Eilish, the women I basically see as myownlittle sisters.
I’m not blind. I’ve seen the way Callie looks at me. But I never thought much of it. She’s a flirt. A tease. A party girl who grew up in wealth and privilege as the Greek Mafia princess she is, not to mention the baby of the familyandthe only girl, with four big brothers.
But even if none of that was the case: even if she wasn’t who she was, and was age appropriate, and wasn’t best friends with my little almost-sisters—eventhen?
There’s still the inescapable fact that I’mme.
Broken. Haunted by the memories of the wars I fought in, not to mention the battles I bled in years before I was old enough to pick up a gun for my country. Damaged and supremely fucked up from a childhood I’d rather forget and an adolescence that almost destroyed me, before growing into a man under a foreign sun fighting foreign wars.
There’s no place for a woman in any of that mess.
I’m about to get up and start exorcising my demons again with the practice bag when something fuzzy brushes up against my sweaty back. I turn, rolling my eyes at the tubby little black and white fur ball who looks up at me with a mix of boredom and begging.
“Well, color me fucking shocked,” I mutter with a shake of my head. “You’re hungry.Again.”
Bones, Una’s cat, meows insistently as he butts his head into my side. With Cillian and Una finally taking a belated and extended honeymoon in Ireland, Bones got dumped on me back here at the Kildare family brownstone.
Ten years ago, when I first came to this house, my jaw was never off the ground. I grew up with jackshit, in a hovel of a basement apartment in Alphabet City, amongst the crackheads and worse.
Then Cillian found me after I got back from serving with the Rangers—half-broken, half-mad—and gave me a job I never asked for. Said job involved cominghere, to the stunning, gilded brownstone on the Upper East Side, which would become my new home.
These days, it’s a whole lot quieter.
When I first started as Neve and Eilish’s bodyguard all those years ago, it was them, myself, and even occasionally Declan Kildare, Neve and Eilish’s father and Cillian’s half-brother. After Declan was killed, Cillian moved to New York and into the brownstone as well.
Now, Neve is gone, living with Ares.
Cillian is gone too, living at his new place in Brooklyn with Una.
Even Eilish is half gone, spending a ton of time with Gavan Tsarenko—and that’s a wholeotherthing I need to figure out how to deal with, even if I’m not technically her bodyguard anymore.
But that leaves this house decidedly quieter. Now, it’s just me here rattling around in the huge old Kildare brownstone. And I’m not even a fucking Kildare.
Bones meows again.
“Okay, fine,” I grumble, scooping him up as I stand and head out the door of the gym. In the kitchen, I plop a spoonful of wet food into Bones’ bowl, followed by a sprinkling of the dry stuff on top, which is his favorite combo.
“You’re a spoiled little shit, you know that, right?” I smirk as I lean against the fridge and open a bottle of water.
My phone buzzes.
“How’s the old country?”
Cillian chuckles quietly. “It’s Ireland. It’s great. How’s the home front?”
