Page 104 of Possessive Mafia Vows

“Stay where you are.”

“Or what? We both know that you won’t shoot me. You don’t have it in you. Little goody-two-shoes Sienna.”

My arms are shaking. I slide my finger onto the trigger. “Try me.”

He closes the distance between us with two strides. I don’t even see his fist arcing towards my face until pain shoots through my jaw and fills my skull.

It feels as if I’m flying away from him. My feet leave the ground, and my skull collides with the wall behind me. I feel something warm and wet trickling down the back of my head. But all I can hear is the gunshot that went off when he punched me.

The world is spinning. Tiny silver stars spiral behind my eyelids, and I can’t tell which way is up. I force myself to open my eyes. I need to get back on my feet before he hurts me again.

The gun falls from my hand, and I don’t try to stop it.

I can’t see clearly. Feeling my way across the floor with my hands, I use the wall to keep my balance and drag myself upright. My brain is pulsating inside my skull, my eyes are heavy, and I’m scared to move my bottom jaw.

I can see the doorway. The door is still open. He hasn’t closed it.

“Sweetheart…” His voice penetrates my foggy thoughts.

Dazed into moving in slow-motion, I turn around. My eyes find him sitting on the floor, propped up against the side of the bed. He’s sitting in a puddle of dark liquid. The scene gradually comes into focus, and I realize that his hands are clamped over a wound in his thigh, blood oozing between his fingers.

“Sweetheart…” His breathing is shallow. His skin is deathly pale. “Help …me.”

It takes several long, slow beats for me to understand that the bullet must’ve hit a major artery. He’s bleeding out. And he wants me to help him.

“Sienna…” He tilts his head back against the bed. “Get … help.”

I swallow. It looks bad, but he would kill me to save himself.

That’s what pulsates through my pounding head as I shuffle through the doorway and lock the door behind me.

24

KYLE

Patrickand I switch the rental car we took from the airport with another vehicle parked outside a railway station. Patrick drives. An hour later, we’re pulling up outside a secluded property buried deep within the countryside of Donegal.

We’re gathering a team. Apparently, it’s more than Patrick’s life is worth if he lets me out of his sight and I end up getting myself thrown off a cliff in the process. His words.

The property belongs to an Irish mob that have a reputation for smashing kneecaps first and asking questions later, and they’re already aware of the cliff-top mansion purchased by Sasha Bogrov.

“The man who built it was a mad fecking scientist.” The speaker, a man called Damon O’Hara, has thick silver hair and a walrus mustache that twitches when his lips move. His accent is stronger than any I’ve heard before. “Ye’d have to be to build a house on the edge of a fecking cliff.”

“The place gives me the heebie-jeebies,” his brother, Aiden, says. “Says a lot about the fecker who bought it.”

“What do you know about them?” I ask.

We’re in a secure underground room that contains an arsenal of weapons: pistols, revolvers, shotguns. While the women are upstairs watching TV in the kitchen and preparing dinner, chatting about their favorite shows and the Christmas gifts they’re yet to buy, the men are choosing ammunition to raid the mansion where Sienna is being held captive.

“New mob. They’ve not been active in Ireland, until now. But their rep doesn’t exactly fill me with confidence. They’re thieves, and no one likes a fecking cheap, nasty crook.”

I fill the men in on the bratva’s demands for the Titan.

They don’t react, but I spot the tic pulsing in Damon’s temple. “I don’t care who the feck they are, they don’t get away with stealing a good man’s work.” He opens a canister of bullets and tips them into the palm of his hand.

A younger lad joins us. He looks like Damon, but with a mop of strawberry-blond hair and golden stubble on his chin and upper lip.

Cillian hands his father a drawing. “I downloaded the layout of the property. There are three levels, but I’m guessing they’re holding the woman captive in the basement.”

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