Page 5 of Her Irish Savage

Which would be a hell of a lot easier if I hadn’t just delivered another blow.

It means your da is dead.

Really, Moran? That’s the best you could do?

Christ, I’m an eejit.

I take another boxed breath—in for four, hold for four, out for four, hold for four—and I’m focused again. Braced to handle the girl’s grief. Ready to manage her tears. Prepared to do the job my boss sent me here to do.

Something shifts inside her, as if her bones are settling under the weight of what I said. I expect her to start shivering again. To wail. To sob.

Instead, she blinks hard, like she’s a downed robot coming back online. “How’d he go?” she finally asks.

The old man died reading the Riot Act to my boss. He choked on seventy years of bile, on thinking he was always the smartest man in the room. He coughed up whatever tattered excuse for lungs he still had after smoking three packs a day for sixty years.

“I don’t know,” I lie.

She looks at her phone, out of reach where I tossed it on the couch. “No one’s called me.”

Of course they haven’t. Her father’s men are plotting war against my boss. They’re gathered somewhere in Boston—in the old Ingram house in Southie, if I had to take a guess. They’re figuring out how to get back at Braiden Kelly, how to turn disaster into triumph.

I’ve been at my share of tables like that. I watched Braiden settle the Boys after his father died, taking charge and putting dogs like Madden in their place. I watched Braiden’s father before him, red-eyed and mourning the Old Man, but making sure every last soldier in the clan knew he was in charge.

No one’s called Fiona because she doesn’t matter. The men are pulling all the wagons ’round without her. They’re fighting for the reins, bulling after the crown. She’s been left behind. Forgotten.

“That’s not right,” she says, as if I lectured her out loud. And then, “I need to get home.”

She’s all elbows and knees as she tries to stand, but her legs don’t cooperate. Something about slumping back to the couch hurts her side, and she closes her grass-green eyes, her apple cheeks stretching in a wince. She thinks I don’t see her arm tuck close to her ribs, but I do. I see everything.

“You’re not going anywhere,” I say.

She starts to bite her lip but changes her mind when her teeth graze the nasty split that’s still oozing blood down her chin. Gingerly, she touches the back of her hand to her mouth and hisses when it comes away red.

It takes her a moment, but then she fetches her phone without my help.

“Who the fuck are you calling?” I’m annoyed by her persistence. And touched with a bit of admiration too.

“My father’s pilot.”

Fucking princess.“He won’t?—”

She shakes her head to cut me off. I’m pretty sure shedoesn’t realize she’s smearing blood on her cell. And somehow, that only feeds my anger.

She has the volume set high enough that I hear each ring, crystal clear, and then the pilot’s recorded message, telling her how important her call is and asking her to leave a voicemail. The gobshite’s probably staring at his own feckin’ screen, pissing his pants and wondering who will win the war of bloody succession.

“Fucker,” Fiona mutters, ending the call without leaving a message. And then, as if I’ve challenged her out loud: “I’ll go commercial.”

Christ. She won’t let it rest.

She wipes the screen clear on a sofa cushion, leaving a stain Madden Kelly deserves. Then her fingers flash over the glass, paging through information faster than I can follow. Her scarlet-tipped fingernails don’t stop her from making plans, but my taking the phone out of her hands leaves her stranded. I toss it halfway across the room, onto a leather recliner with cupholders built into the feckin’ arms.

“They’ll never let you board, looking like that,” I say.

“They don’t care?—”

“Commercial airlines don’t want customers dropping dead in the middle of a flight.”

“I won’t?—”

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