I needed to wash away Achilles before I started my new life.
Chapter Nineteen
Tierney
Despite nurturinga reputation as a high-maintenance hellion, I was still the same girl who grew up in a modern-day gulag. It took me less than five minutes to shower and brush my teeth. I slipped into a pair of jeans, sneakers, and a black top before screwing on a baseball cap and calling my bank on my way downstairs, notifying them I’d be withdrawing $10,000 in cash—the maximum most people are allowed to extract. I needed more than that, of course, but I had a good idea how to get it.
While at the bank, I asked the teller to transfer the rest of my funds—$30,000 and some change—to Tiernan’s account. My brother had plenty of cash handy, and while I wasn’t a big fan of asking for favors, this wouldn’t even register as a loan because the full amount I was about to ask him for had already been deposited into his account.
Forever the control freak, my brother’s name flashed on my phone screen before I fully stepped out of the bank, heading toward the nail salon across the street. I slid my finger along the screen, tucking my AirPods into my ears.
“The fuck have you gotten yourself into now?” he greeted, sounding more tired than angry.
To be fair to him, I did, in fact, veer off-script. Three days ago, he’d left me at a private airport, thinking I was off to live my best mobster-wife life. I was supposed to be in Naples now, choosing new curtains for my mansion.
“I undid the catastrophe you got me into,” I said unapologetically. “I’m a single woman now.”
The silence that followed told me he acknowledged he was wrong in handing me off to Coppola.
“Tier—” he started.
“I don’t have time for a heart-to-heart. I need thirty K in cash, but I guess you already gathered that.”
“Why are you in theStates, Tierney?”
“Change of plans. Achilles decided to let me go if I promise to move away and leave everyone alone.”
“And Coppola?”
“Don’t know, don’t care.” I pushed the rolled cash into my waistband. “He’s Achilles’s problem, not mine.”
“What did you do to make him change his mind?” The edge in Tiernan’s voice told me he already knew and wasn’t above killing both of us for it.
“You’re a red-blooded male. I’m sure you’ll figure that out.”
He groaned. “Do you need anything else? Other than cash and some fucking self-respect?”
“No, I got it all covered.”
Knowing better than to ask me for any specifics on the phone, he said instead, “I’ll have the money ready in thirty minutes. Meet me at my house.”
“Give me a couple hours.”
“I’ll call Dad to come say goodbye.”
I rolled my eyes, biting back a snarky reply. Tyrone was one person Tiernan and I had never agreed on. While he’d sired us, I’d never felt close to him.
After Tier and I ran away from the camp at age fourteen and found our father, Tyrone explained he thought we were dead when his archenemy, Igor, had kidnapped us, carving my late mother’s belly open when she was thirty-eight weeks pregnant. But I always thought it was peculiar that Tyrone knew his babies were taken—dead or alive—and hadn’t ripped the world apart to find us.
And considering our so-called brother, Fintan, had betrayed us last year, resulting in Tiernan slaughtering him in a gruesome manner, I couldn’t understand my brother’s fixation with the Callaghans. As far as I was concerned, Tiernan was my only blood-related family.
“I’ll try and get there before six,” I said.
“Lila will be heartbroken.”
“You’ll come visit me once I settle down.” I killed the call, spotting Jessa across the street. She waited for me outside the salon, holding two iced coffees and gossiping in a high-pitched voice on her phone. I waved at her with a wide smile. “Ready to be pampered?”
“Girl,always.”
