Page 70 of Dublin Beast

He hands it to me and I run a hand down her smooth body. “She’s a thing of beauty, all right.”

Kieran grins and opens up the second case. “Mick says they’re fresh off the books. Unmarked. Soviet surplus, still in prime condition.”

I take it, the weight familiar. “These are single-shot and preloaded, aren’t they?”

“They are.”

“Point. Click. Boom.”

I check the sights, my fingers brushing over the cold metal. It’s solid. Clean. No scratches, no rust. It’s the kind of weapon you don’t use unless you’re damn sure of your target—which, sadly, we’re not.

Kieran lifts the second launcher and sets it on his shoulder, peering through the sight. “As much as I’d love to fire these girls off, this whole thing goes sideways if we light up that farmhouse and the bitch isn’t in the fucking building.”

I grunt in agreement, keeping my eyes on the shadows beyond the fence line. “Sad but true, mate.”

Kieran lowers the weapon and sets it back in its case. “Did you see anything this afternoon that indicates who’s being guarded?”

I stiffen.

The truth is—I didn’t see shit.

Not because the mercs were careful. Not because the farmhouse is impenetrable. But because I spent most of the day not watching the camera feed, losing myself inside Harper.

And fuck me, even now, out here with cold steel in my hands and the stakes of this mission hanging heavy over my head, Istillfeel the drag of her nails down my back. Still hear the sounds she made when I?—

Kieran’s expression hardens and I snap out of it. I exhale through my nose. Hard.

“I didn’t see anything conclusive, no.” I glare at the burst of orange and red bodies on the main floor, willing one of them to go back upstairs to be guarded by another at the top of the stairs.

Then we’d be no closer to figuring out if it’s Siobhan, but we’d be no further away, either.

Kieran turns and frowns at the screen. “Are they having a fucking tea party?”

I grunt. “Seems so.”

There’s a small part of me—a dark, gnawing whisper in the back of my skull—that’s worried I missed something important. That while I was inside with Harper, tangled in sheets and heat and the kind of pleasure I haven’t let myself feel in years... Siobhan slipped through our fingers.

Wouldn’t that be a fucking twist?

But I don’t say it out loud because doubt is like blood in the water—it spreads and draws the sharks.

And out here, that gets people killed.

I place the launcher back into its foam nest and latch the lid of the case closed. “Let the drone run its course. If nothing new comes up tonight, maybe tomorrow night we move in closer. No more watching from the trees.”

Kieran nods, packing his RPG back into its case. “And if we see her?”

My fingers curl into fists. “If we see her, we do what we were sent to do. We end her.”

That thought brings the warmth back to my bones as I imagine all the ways I’d like to put that woman down.

My father was a great man and even his enemies respected him enough to offer their condolences when he died. That Mattie McGuire was behind an assassination plot to kill him is no surprise.

That Siobhan Daley—a woman who grew up in our home, who was Tag’s first love, who worked for our family for years—was the one who accepted the mark?

Well, that betrayal goes well beyond the pale.

I take a walk down the graveled shoulder of the road, my da front and center in my mind. His death stole him from us too soon.

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