“If you try to leave with that map again, you won’t get far. You’ll be lucky to make it out of this office without another one of those bruises,” Grace smirked, reveling in the surprise that had spread across Kilian’s face.
“Get out of my way,” he tried to brush her aside, his eyes lined with irritation. “I mean it, Grace.” Even though he towered over her and had more fighting experience than her, Grace knew that she could handle her own against him. If not for the entire fight, then definitely long enough for her father to realize that she’d disappeared—she thought of Mark then, comparing the imminent danger that she and her brother faced tonight. Despite their hatred for one another, Grace wasn’t entirely sure she believed that Kilian would hit her—he’d always found a way around it or ended up pulling his punches. Maybe deep down, Kilian Kelly just wasn’t as much of a fighter as the rest of his family.
Tightening her fists at either side of her face, Grace took a small step towards Kilian. He backed up, his eyes watching the tops of her knuckles, especially the two on her right hand that had delivered the punch his face was still healing from. She hadn’t noticed it before, but the shadows of the office accentuated the soft, faded lines of yellow that ran around his eye in a semi-circle pattern. “What did your brothers think of the shiner I gave you last time?” Grace asked, hoping to rattle him enough to decide the map wasn’t worth the trouble. “I could give you a matching one.”
He sighed, giving her a leveling expression. “That’s more than enough.” One of his hands lowered to his hip, a gesture she’d seen him do when he felt threatened—had he subconsciously reached for a gun? A burst of panic started in Grace’s chest when she considered the possibility of Kilian aiming a gun in her direction, wondering if her taunting was enough to get her into that situation. “I let the first one slide because of our fathers, but this is not becoming a theme. I’d have each of you arrested for assaulting an officer.”
Grace gritted her teeth, feeling the urge to bare them like a wild animal. Having both the law and the criminal element on his side made Kilian practically invincible in times like this. If he hadn’t used his position against her family, Grace might have been impressed by Kilian’s ability to balance the demands of both sides of the coin—but she wasn’t sure she could ever get over the immense irritation that flooded her mind each time she caught him turning his nose up at someone. “And I’d tell them you were searching our property without a proper warrant.”
A moment of silence passed between the two of them. Kilian stared at Grace, his chest rising and falling quicker than before. He flipped the folded piece of paper in between his fingers like a coin, running it back and forth as he thought. Weighing the options in his mind quickly, he pulled back from Grace’s readied fists. Kilian crossed his arms, his face softening. “Fine,” he said reluctantly. “We can work together, but on one condition.”
Mimicking his stance, Grace crossed her arms in front of her. The weight of her arms on her chest comforted her, suppressing the overactive beating of her heart. Her fingers fiddled with the edge of the journal to remind her that she still had a hold on a piece of the puzzle—even if the map was all she really needed to finish the search for her family’s heirloom. “Name it.”
Kilian’s arms uncrossed, the arms of his dark jacket relaxing at the shoulders. “If we’re going to work together, I don’t want anyone in our families to know, especially our fathers.”
The request didn’t faze Grace at all. In fact, she’d considered establishing the boundary herself. And yet, despite the similar feeling of hesitation regarding her family and the quest she was embarking on with a Kelly boy—and Kilian out of all of them—Grace couldn’t help but feel slighted in the moment. She ignored the feeling because it surprised her, but she was certain that it had presented itself on her face. “Obviously,” she said, trying to feign an air of casualness while she searched herself for the reason for the hurt inside her. She could only imagine the kinds of comments that each of them would become subject to if anyone were to find out that they were working together, especially if the book was half as important to the Kelly family as Kilian was making it seem.
Kilian nodded, his mouth forming an impressed smile. He looked as surprised as Grace felt that they’d managed to come to some sort of resolution. “I’ll see you first thing tomorrow then,” Kilian said, starting towards the door. He tucked the map into his trouser pocket.
Grace stepped in front of him once more, placing a hand on his chest to stop him. “Like hell I’m letting you out of here with the map.”
Kilian’s mouth opened to protest; his arm already thrown around him to gesture towards the spot he’d been standing when they called their truce.
Grace interrupted him. “We might be working together, but that doesn’t mean I trust you yet.” Expecting him to be wounded by her dig, Grace was infuriated to see a smile pull at the corners of his mouth. His eyes sparkled with respect when he looked at her, holding up his hands in a mocking gesture of submission.
The walk back into the gym was a brief, awkward affair. Both Kilian and Grace refused to look at the other, even when Grace found herself a seat at the end of the Kelly family’s front row. Sitting throughout the rest of Mark’s match at Kilian’s side, Grace couldn’t help but feel that she had betrayed her family twice in one night—by missing the opening portion of Mark’s first fight, and by agreeing to work with the son of her father’s worst enemy.
10
Night had fallenover Kilian’s house a few hours ago. Grace had felt it right, watching the shadows extend over the dark waves of the lake, that their first meeting as a team was happening in the middle of the night.
Being here, in the house of Kilian Kelly, felt wrong on multiple levels, but she wouldn’t let herself think of her father or what he might say if he were to find out where she was. She pushed the thought aside, deciding that the only reason she even considered partnering up with Kilian was for her father. She was going to bring him the thing he’d wanted to return to the family for as long as she could remember—a dream he’d put off when he’d become a father. Part of Grace had always felt responsible for helping her father achieve his dreams, but never having the ability to do so—until now.
Her eyes unfocused from the dark waters and the small breaks in the water that exposed turning fish bellies. Her eyes found her reflection staring back at her in the glass, illuminated by the dull lighting that bled out from the kitchen behind her. Even in the low lighting, she could clearly see how tired she’d become over the hours of getting back to Kilian’s place without running into either of their families on the way—a task that proved more challenging than either of them expected.
Slight dark circles ran underneath her eyes, accentuating the rings of dark brown in the centers of her irises. She’d pulled her hair back into a tight, high ponytail, but had managed to miss a few shorter pieces that jutted out in random directions from her scalp—she pulled at the band that held her dark hair and watched as it fell around her shoulders. The curls bounced around her shoulder blades, forming into loose ringlets. Lifting her fingers up into her hair, Grace spread them out against her scalp and massaged at the sore patches of her skin. Turning back to the table, Grace stared down at the materials that she and Kilian had gathered for their mission—the journal and map that Kilian had attempted to steal from her father’s office, a collection of short stories that Grace had written down from memory when she was younger, and a series of road maps that covered most of the region.
She took a deep breath in, using her fingers to spread out the materials in front of her. They slid over the surface of the table, fanning out into a wide arch. She tapped on the front of the maps, pulling them to one side of the table to get a closer look at each of them. Grace unfolded the map they’d retrieved from the office, overlaying the regional maps they’d found in Kilian’s hunting gear to compare them. Just as Grace had suspected, the handwritten map looked strikingly similar to that of Ireland and its surrounding landmasses. If she didn’t know better about the map’s origin, she would have thought that someone had traced the regional map. As she layered the paper map over the top of the mass-produced, glossy map, Grace was better able to compare the exact markings on each of the pages—the highlighted locations on the map for the legendary book matching up with existing cities in Ireland. With a triumphant smile, Grace felt her chest swell with pride as she reached for a pen.
From the kitchen, Kilian perked up at the sound of movement. He appeared from behind the cabinets, holding up a wooden spoon that, from the looks of it, had just been submerged in a red sauce. A small droplet from the spoon splattered on the checkered flooring underneath him. “Are we getting started?” he asked, watching Grace’s pen-wielding hand with a start. His brow arched while he stepped forward. “Are you writing on the map?”
Grace scoffed, not wanting to admit that the thought had occurred to her. She had only just stopped herself from writing the modern names of the locations on the surface of the map, permanently marking the surface of an heirloom. She surprised herself by nearly doing so. Normally, she’s so careful that it verged on crippling, but when she was around Kilian, she acted out of impulse because of all the anger he managed to pull out of her.
“Of course not,” she shot back at Kilian, already growing tired of his presence since he’d walked back into the room just moments ago. She wondered if it was possible to despise someone enough that just their presence was enough to drive her mad—if it was, she knew exactly what it felt like for someone to light her skin on fire with rage. As he stepped closer, she picked up the smells of his cooking from the spoon he held in his hand—the hearty smell of garlic and tomato, the strength of a rich mozzarella cheese, the warmth of freshly-baked bread. Whatever he was making, it smelled good enough to cause her knotted-up stomach to rumble quietly with hunger. “I know better than to do something like that. It’s priceless.” She wanted to reinforce the fact that she knew better because she knew that she had only been moments away from making an irreversible mistake.
Kilian only stared at her. His slight smile didn’t give away whether or not he believed her words, but this time, she didn’t feel the trickle of irritation that normally dripped down her spine like autumn rainfall. He turned his attention to the table in front of them, choosing to move past the obvious tension in the air. “Of course, you wouldn’t,” he agreed quietly. It was uncharacteristic for him to be so agreeable, and it confused Grace, but she was more grateful for it than anything. Viewing him from the side like this, Grace could make out the spiderlike veins that ran up the side of his temples. She watched as he studied the maps on the table, his eyes scanning them with precision as he clenched his jaw, sending a strong current of blood through the veins on his temple. They disappeared into his dark hair that hung over the front of his forehead after such a long day—if she didn’t think that Kilian was incapable of resting, she would have thought that he needed to sleep.
“The map only has a single clue, to go to the Ring Kerry, and there we will find our next clue,” Kilian said, and read a small note inscribed on its edge. “It mentions the wishing bridge. That’s quite a way from here,” he said, cocking his head at her.
When he turned to look at Grace, she felt judgment in the surfaces of his eyes. It looked as though he was trying to gauge whether or not she’d be able to manage such a long trip, sizing her up as a travel partner. Determined to show him that she wasn’t going to put up with him treating her like a hindrance on the journey she proposed for them to take together, Grace placed her hand on her hip and gave him a challenging look while she held her tongue in between her teeth. She quietly hoped that he’d be able to see her eyes brimming with all of the things she truly wanted to say to him in that moment—or in any of the moments where she’d had to bite her tongue to be polite. “It’s going to feel even longer with you there,” Grace said, giving him a taste of his own medicine with a confident smile on her face.
Kilian placed his hand over his heart in a display of feigned hurt, but there was a flash of something beyond his eyes that told her that he’d genuinely felt something in that moment.
Whether or not what Kilian had felt was pain, Grace would never know—but it caught her attention. Forcing herself to reconnect with the job at hand, she stepped closer to the table to get a better view of the map. She pointed her finger to the islands just to the left of Kilian’s finger. “These here,” she tried her best not to focus on the heat that radiated from Kilian’s arm. There were only a few inches in between their arms—a small amount of space that separated their bare skin from touching.
As soon as Grace picked up on the waves of heat, it was as though she could feel the same heat coming off of his entire body, feeling a swelling of his warmth with each of his small movements. Feeling as though she might overheat just standing there, Grace tapped on the map to refocus herself on the trip ahead of both of them. She didn’t have time to think about anything other than bringing that book back to her family—and she especially didn’t have time to think about anything involving Kilian in that way.
Surprised, and partially disgusted with herself, Grace circled the corresponding location of the islands on the glossy map. Now circled with a thick ring of black, permanent marker, the islands stood brilliantly against the rest of the indicated tourist locations on the country’s map. Even if Grace wasn’t sure that the islands were the final destination for their trip, she was confident that they would be moving in the right direction. She had never been to the islands herself, but had seen plenty of pictures of the coastline from her time in her father’s office—he’d spent much of his young adult life traveling around Ireland and most of Europe and had taken pictures throughout most of it. She could recall the photographs easily; the large burst of sea foam that splashed up against the dark blue rock. In the background, rain-filled clouds rolled.
