“Fine. But tell him to call me from now on. If he’s got something worth hearing, I’ll decide what to do with it. But I have some bigger shit to deal with right now.”
“Is there something I should know?” Ronan frowns.
Before I can answer, Ciara lets out another cry upstairs.
The sound cuts straight through me, and my body tenses.
I don’t know how the hell Ronan can bear hearing the woman he loves in pain like that. Though from the look on his face, it seems like he’s barely hanging on.
“I need to get back in there. Can you handle this?”
“Go. Stay with your wife. I’ve got this under control.”
He claps my shoulder once, then disappears upstairs.
I wait until he’s out of sight before throwing open the door and stepping out into the night.
By the timeI arrive at the bar, the cleanup crew is already hard at work. Broken glass crunches under my feet as I wade between the overturned tables and splintered chairs. Dark pools of blood seep into the floorboards, and the air reeks of smoke and spilled whiskey.
Brennan walks beside me, his jaw tight, as we watch body bags being zipped up.
Our men make quick work of sweeping up the shell casings and mopping up the blood, making sure to erase every last bit of evidence.
“You should talk to Iain,” Brennan says under his breath, nodding his head in the direction of the bar. “He’s the one who called me.”
Iain looks up as I approach, his eyes wide. “Boss…”
He’s nursing a pretty bad split lip, and his eye is swollen shut, but those are surface-level wounds. They’ll be gone in a few days, though I can’t say the same for the men being carried out in body bags.
“What happened?” My voice is flat and sharp, and Iain swallows hard.
“We were having a few drinks. Nothing heavy, just winding down. Then they stormed in, Sean’s men, completely out of nowhere. We didn’t have time to react before they just started firing.”
My teeth grind together as I take another look around the bar.
“One of them grabbed me, put a gun in my face,” Iain continues, his voice hoarse. “Said to tell you something.”
“What?”
Iain doesn’t reply, so I slam my fist down on the bar.
“What did he fucking say?”
“T-that Sean won’t stop until you’re both rotting in the ground.”
“Who, me and Kieran?” Brennan asks, but Iain shakes his head.
“Me and Riley,” I finish.
“Yeah.”
“Of course, he did,” I hiss through my teeth. “You’ve still got two hands, so I suggest you help clean up, seeing as your lack of reflexes caused this mess.”
I stalk away before the rage boiling inside me spills out, and I end up putting Iain in a body bag myself.
But that rage only intensifies when my phone buzzes in my pocket with a call from a withheld number, though I have a sinking feeling I know who it is.
“This better be good.”
