Page 20 of The Ache That Stayed

“Do you know how long it’s been since your name surfaced in conversations it shouldn’t?”

I said nothing.

He stood then—tall, silver hair slicked back, cigar clamped between his teeth like it had grown there. He wore suits cut from the finest cloth but strapped a cheap watch to his wrist, always saying time was the only constant that showed a man what he was made of. The metal was scratched to hell. As though time had tried to fight him and lost.

Broad-shouldered, belly softened with age, but still lethal at sixty-five—like a wolf that had learned patience instead of losing its teeth.

He circled me slowly, like assessing a horse that might need to be put down.

“You’ve brought noise to my doorstep, lad,” he accused.

“All for pussy.”

My fingers tightened around the glass, crystal groaning under pressure. My jaw ached from clenching, tongue pressed hard against my molars until I tasted iron. My shoulders went still. The kind before bones break.

I rolled the whiskey in my glass. Watched the light break through it.

“Some things,” I countered, “aren’t meant to be touched once they’ve been claimed by fate.”

His mouth twitched in recognition.

I swallowed the whiskey, letting it burn my throat. Because breaking him would start a war, I didn’t feel like fighting tonight.

He leaned back in his seat, smoke curling from his cigar.

“You wanted distance,” he said. “I gave you distance.”

Ronnie called it strategy. Sean called it exile with better weather. I never cared what name they gave it as long as it put oceans between her and me.

He took another drag, then studied his cigar.

“I gave you refuge when you needed to disappear.”

The word refuge sat wrong in my chest. Too close to truth. It tasted bitter, like ash caught at the back of my throat.

“Because blood isn’t always born,” he said, with a dramatic pause. “Sometimes it’s chosen.”

Sean had trusted me after Cork—after I took a blade through the shoulder meant for him and buried the two men responsible before sunrise. Now, he let me take care of dock routes, collections and enforcement. The kind of work Sean handed only to men like me—men trusted to keep their mouths shut and their hands dirtier than his own.

His gaze hardened.

“Don’t make me regret choosing you.”

He stood up from his chair and strolled toward me, taking the other side of the window.

“You’re killing men on my turf because you can’t keep your hands off a memory.”

I met his gaze without flinching.

“She doesn’t belong to you,” he said. “She never did.”

An old and violent feeling stirred in my chest.

“She belongs to herself,” I replied.

He laughed, dry, unamused.

“That’s what you tell yourself when you don’t want to admit the truth,” he said. “You don’t want her safe. You want her untouched by anyone else.”