“Stay with me.” His mouth is moving, but the sound takes too long to reach me. “William. Stay with me.”
Aoife. I need to get to Aoife.
I try to say her name. Nothing comes out.
“She’s okay.” Aidan again. Reading it on my face. “Jason’s got her. She’s okay.”
The sky above him is black and orange. Smoke and stars. My body is shutting down, and I can feel it happening, system by system, like a building going dark floor by floor.
Viktor is dead. Face down in the grass ten meters from where I’m lying. The man who terrorized us for a year. Who shot Dillon. Who burned my house. Who sent a missile into a car carrying the woman I’d die for.
And he was just a middleman.
A small fish in a pond we haven’t even seen yet.
Volkov. The name sits in my skull like a splinter. A man I’ve never heard of. Already here. Already watching. And Viktor, the man who brought an army to Ireland and nearly destroyed everything, was just the one they sent because he was expendable.
That’s the last thought I have before the dark takes me. Not victory. Not relief.
Just the cold understanding that we killed the puppet, and the hand is still out there.
And it knows our names.
Chapter Thirty-One
Aoife
THE FIRST THING I hear is beeping.
Steady. Rhythmic. The kind of sound that belongs to a hospital, and the realization sends a spike of cold through my chest before I've even opened my eyes. I know this sound. I've spent too many hours listening to it while sitting beside my mother's bed to mistake it for anything else.
My eyelids are heavy. The light is wrong when I get them open, too white, too flat, and for a moment, everything is shapes without names. A ceiling. A curtain on a metal rail. A window with blinds pulled shut.
Then the pain arrives.
My head first. A deep, nauseating throb behind my right eye that pulses in time with the beeping. My shoulder next, stiff andhot under bandages I can feel but can't see. My feet, wrapped in something soft. And underneath all of it, something else. Something bone-deep that doesn't belong to any single injury but to the accumulated cost of the last forty-eight hours catching up with me at once.
I turn my head on the pillow, and the room swims.
William is in the chair beside my bed.
He's asleep. His head tipped back against the wall, his mouth slightly open, one arm across his stomach, and the other hanging off the armrest. His knuckles are wrapped in white bandages, spotted through with old blood. There are stitches above his left eyebrow, a neat black line against skin that's bruised yellow and purple around the edges.
The IV in my hand pulls when I reach for him. I stop. Let my arm fall back.
He's here. He's breathing. That's enough for now.
The door opens. A woman in scrubs steps in, checks the monitor, checks my IV, then looks at me and stops.
"Oh, good, you're awake." She keeps her voice low, glancing at William. "How's your head?"
"Terrible."
"That's honest." She shines a penlight in my eyes, and I flinch. "Follow the light. Good. Your pupils are evening out. That's a marked improvement from when you came in."
"How long have I been here?"
"Two days." She writes something on a chart. "You had a significant concussion. Some swelling. We kept you sedated to let it settle."
