"You fell down the stairs—"
Ouch. That was why everything hurt more than it had before.
My hands dropped to my lap and I winced, saw that my leg had a massive bandage on it, which was a reminder of that bastard who’d slashed me there.
Blood peeped through the folds of the gauze, and I winced again at the solid punch to the gut that was the realization I’d almost died tonight. Because it had to be tonight still, right? It was dark out. Not even dawn.
Someone clicked their fingers in front of my face, making me jolt in surprise.
"How did you even access my helipad?"
I darted a look at Conor. So, he was the one who lived here. His helipad, huh. I'd tried to find out the legal owner of the penthouse when I’d started the motions of buying my place downstairs, but had run up against a dummy corp.
"I called someone..." I winced. "A hacker friend. She helped me."
"The hacker was Lodestar, right?"
"I can’t tell you that. I don’t want you to retaliate against her. She saved my ass. I promise you, I wouldn’t have done it if I didn’t need to be here. I’d never have called her and asked her to do what she did if I wasn’t desperate."
Conor tensed. Nothing about the man was mild, meek. If anything, he wore his strength in the lean ropes of muscles that twined about his limbs, but at that moment, with how his shoulders bunched up, he appeared even bigger than before.
His mouth tightened. "Okay, let's cut the BS. We both know you’re friends with Star." When I just gulped, he soothed, "We're allies."
Surprised, my lips parted which appeared to be all the answer he needed. Dammit to hell.
Your first attempt at subterfuge against the Irish Mob and you fuck up, Savannah. Way to go. Not.
Still, allies?
God, that verbiage alone told me they were friends.
Hadn’t I recently informed Star that she was the only person I knew who had nemeses?
Looked like she had allies too. Go figure.
"We used to be as close as sisters," I answered. My smile was sad. "Until things changed and she went away."
Conor tipped his head to the side. "She was the one who helped you break in, right?"
"She did." In less than ninety seconds. It was kind of worrying that she’d been able to break through something I’d assumed would be tighter than Fort Knox with that much ease.
I'd also been surprised at her lack of gloating.
Star was a gloater. She liked to win.
If anything, when the code to the security door had flashed green as it opened, she'd muttered, "Sorry, aCooooig."
"Wait, are you aCooooig?"
Conor grunted. "I am."
"She beat your security again, Conor," one of the men, Eoghan, mocked.
"She said it was hard, if that’s any consolation," I said with a politely apologetic smile, pinning it in place as I lied to him to spare him from the ribbing of his brothers. I had siblings too. They were fucking brutal when they wanted to be.
The guys snickered, well, all except for two of them—the eldest of the bunch.
At one point or another, I knew I’d run across them at galas, had seen them with their wives, even if we hadn’t been formally introduced, but having them all together in a circle around me? Intimidating.
"Enough," Aidan rumbled, casting glares his brothers’ way.
"How does she keep doing that?" Conor groused.
"I’m not sure," I replied meekly, all while I was wondering when the last time was that Star had hacked into a Five Points' building.
It wasn't a lie, though. I truly didn't know. I had long since stopped asking Star how she could do the things that she did. I knew my godfather, her dad, had started to wash his hands of her, but his death had stopped that in its tracks.
Part of me wondered if Star was aware of how close she'd come to being cut off from her dad, but I knew she wouldn't have changed her behavior anyway. Why would she? She was always so certain that she was right.
Until recently, I'd been the same too.
No wonder we'd gotten along so well as kids.
Both of us were pains in the ass, bullheaded, without the good sense to know when to quit when we were ahead...
Which was why the next words to fall from my lips were:
"Is there a reason you're all standing around me like this? It's kind of creepy."
"You're the one who managed to sneak into my penthouse, and breached my security. Just because Star is an ally doesn't mean your actions are consequence-free."
I was ready to deal with the consequences, especially after what I'd come close to handling downstairs. I just didn't need them standing around me like this. It was giving me ideas.
Ideas I really didn’t need to be having, not when I’d just fended off a murder attempt in my apartment.
Okay, enough time spent wasted by thinking with my ovaries; I began to process exactly how badly I was hurt instead.
I knew there were no broken bones, but that didn’t diminish how every part of me felt as if I’d been run over by a Mack truck and my shredded sweats, the hole in them even bigger as they’d torn it wider to bandage me up without stripping me down, were soaked through with blood, which was really gross.
Damn, I needed a shower.
Gnawing on my bottom lip, I decided to blank out the other brothers, and focused on the one who had gotten me out of trouble all those years ago.
I had no reason to think he would help me now, not after everything that had happened at TVGM. I’d been lucky that he’d bothered with me in the past, but as we looked at one another, our gazes tangling much as atoms might before nuclear fusion, I had a feeling he’d be my only hope.
With the Sparrows gunning for me, it hit home just how worthy my cause was. They wanted to silence me. Aidan could be my one true chance at getting out of this alive while exposing the bastards.
I just wished that my brain wasn’t still foggy. To the world, I presented a ditzy façade, because that was what people expected from Dagger Daniels’ daughter. They didn’t realize I was a shark who’d do anything for a story. But right this second, I felt like the airhead I usually projected.
"Talk to me."
With those three words, it was as if the rest of the room's occupants faded without me having to pretend the brothers weren't there.
The discordant decor that was anything but comforting, the weird diamanté-studded cat that was wearing a red-and-white 'Where's Waldo?' scarf which was propped on the sofa by my feet, the men who were crazy handsome and all dressed as if they belonged in a Quentin Tarantino movie, and the myriad pains in my body seemed to disintegrate into dust.
It was just me and Aidan.
I’d ask where we went wrong, but there’d never been anything right about us.
I’d never even kissed him, and he’d never tried to cop a feel.
We'd eaten a meal together, he'd held my hand, had pressed one of his to the small of my back. The tips of his fingers had trailed over my nape when he’d helped me put on my coat before we headed out for dinner.
That was the sum of the physical interactions we'd shared.
But in the here and now, as I looked at him and he looked at me, my body remembered him. It was hardwired to never forget him.