Page 47 of Steel Rain

I flinched at the attention, but stepped out of my line, and ran front and center to him.

“Well, Shiny,” he said, quietly, so that others could not hear. “It seems that we need to make things right between us.”

With a flash, he pulled a handless blade of a familiar, dark iron knife from his belt, and tipped its blunt end towards me.

“What do you need to say, before we draw blood?” His black eyes weren’t pleading, exactly. But they were asking a question. A deep one. For a moment, the psychopath in front of me looked like the boy I knew back in the day. The one I had played with when I was a young pest, and he was too old to be humoring me. But in a way, he had always wanted siblings as much as his mother had wanted to give them to him.

That was why he and Dairo had been so close, after all.

Before his mother passed, and everything changed.

His dark eyes turned cold, and burned with a rage that was hard to ignore.

“Tell me what I need to know, Shiny, before …”

Before the blood oath. Because if I kept my secretsafterthe oath, then he’d have to act. Those were the rules of the life. He was trying, and failing, to give me a free pass. He wanted me to have one last chance before … before …

But those secrets weren’t mine to tell.Hedidn’t know that. But I did.

He’d never know that women’s secrets are far more precious than he could possibly imagine.

With my eyes, I tried to tell him thanks. But I don’t think he understood it.

“Tell me, Shiny.” Those eyes were so cold, they may as well have belonged to a shark. I wondered how much of the kid he was still existed behind those black orbs. “Tell me what I need to know.”

About Kira, and where she was. About Aoibheann, and how I had offered to get her out? What I knew about his father? What I knew about him, his guards, and my own father? Of men, in general?

“We were friends, once.” That came from Dairo, standing over Eoghan’s left shoulder. The man’s second-in-command, just as Eoghan had always wanted him to be. “I would like to be friends again.”

Dairo had left and gone back to England, once. He joined the Army, and later, the SAS. It was where I got the brilliant idea to join the Army too. Though, my passport was blue, so I had joined the US Army.

How strange that we all ended up right back where we started. Right here, at Green Fields.

I looked at Eoghan and his impassive eyes.

I took the blade from his hand, and in one gesture, sliced the inside of my palm. The cut was a horizontal line from between my thumb and forefinger, all the way to the end below my pinky. Straight, and parallel with my wrist so as not to be confused with theotheroath. The blood oath between a man and a woman that went below the pinky finger, diagonally, to the meaty bit by the thumb.

The scars needed to tell a story. The line I was drawing now wasn’t one of love, or family. It was an oath of loyalty from a soldier to a lord.

“I have no secrets to tell you,” I told him, as I reached my palm out to my side, letting the blood pool and drip down to the ground for everyone to see.

I wasn’t lying. The secrets were not mine to tell him. They were Kira’s to reveal.

I was making an oath in blood – becauseI had to –but there was another blood pact that was between women. We bleed again and again, together in a pain that only we can understand. Mothers bleed as well. A pact and pain that only they understand amongst themselves, after they suffer for months, growing a soul inside their bellies.

The blood a woman spills because of her sex binds us stronger than any soldier’s oath. I knew that. But the men who stood before me? They’d never understand.

As my blood fell, warm, onto the cold ground, Eoghan opened his mouth to lead me through the oath … but I interrupted him.

I didn’t need him to tell me what to say. It was in my blood the same as his. His blood may run Green, but mine was still Irish, of the land across the sea, and also of this place. The one we now stood on.

“By my blood, I will be faithful and true. I shall fight to defend those who pledge to our family, above all laws of man.” I looked at Eoghan, who frowned. “We are one blood.”

Eoghan took his blade and cut into his own hand. A smaller one than mine, but enough to open his skin with a single, clean, red line.

He clasped my hand in his. “We are one blood.”

The wind blew through the trees, howling, as if it accepted our offering and carried it up to the sky.

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