Juliette held her breath. She prayed to God this was where they would barge in and hear a deafening scream from Molly. Then outraged cussing for barging into her house.
There was nothing.
Silence descended around them with a force that was definitely impossible. Everything from the wind snapping bare branches to the hum of traffic several streets over stopped. There was nothing but the murmur of her own prayers repeating inside her head.
“Sir?” Frank glanced at Killian. “The backdoor is open. It looks like forced entry. Would you like us to proceed?”
Killian didn’t move. He didn’t utter a word. Had his coat flaps not been trembling under the wind’s vicious attack, she would have thought he’d frozen to the spot. But he must have given Frank some kind of signal, because Frank brought his wrist to his mouth and gave the command.
The front door was kicked in and the team charged.
Chapter 21
Sixteen years ago…
“I told you to get the hell outta my house!” Desperation cracked his voice, making him sound as young and ridiculous as he felt trying to be something he had no right being. “Your services are no longer required.”
The steady chopping continued without pause. Whole bushels of parsley disappeared under the knife and came out perfectly minced. It was scooped up by capable hands and dumped into the pot.
“Did you hear me?”
Molly sighed. “Darling child, I’m old. Not deaf. Of course I heard ya. I just chose to ignore it.”
Irritation prickled the back of his sweaty neck. The kitchen was a sauna, sweltering and nearly unbearable thanks to the four pots boiling steadily on the stove and the red hot oven baking bread. She’d been at it since dawn, cooking and baking as though preparing some lavish feast for a king. All the gleaming pots and platters lined neatly along every available stretch of space perfumed the air with their delicious aroma, and all Killian wanted to do was upend the lot of it across the floor. He wanted to stomp everything into the ground. But he refrained, not because he was better, but because, despite his rage and need to tear that entire day to pieces, Molly would be upset and he couldn’t destroy all her hard work.
“I’m your employer,” he shot back. “And I am ordering you—”
Molly scoffed. “Orderin’ me? Don’t forget, it was only yesterday I was cleanin’ your nappies. I don’t take orders from the likes of you.”
A mortifying truth.
“I pay your salary—”
“You haven’t paid me a shilling in your sixteen years, boy. Now quite wastin’ my time. I’ve got guests arrivin’ within the hour.”
Heat swelled beneath his cheeks. “My parents hired…”
Molly looked up for the first time and only when his voice had cracked. Her stern features softened.
“Go get your clothes on like a good little lamb, eh? You’ll want to look your best.”
The hands he’d set on the counter between them balled. The whitened knuckles blurred behind the tears he’d been fighting for the better part of the day. All he kept thinking was how he wasn’t ready. He was supposed to have years before becoming the master of the McClary Organization. He didn’t know how to be an adult and that was what all those people were looking for.
“They only want to come and gawk,” he muttered. “They don’t care. None of them. He hasn’t been buried a day and the vultures have already started picking at whatever part of him they can get.”
“That’s the way of things.” Molly went to the pot and quickly stirred whatever was bubbling over the rim. “Only people who will mourn ya are the ones who have stood in the fire by your side. Your da was a good man. Plenty will miss him for that alone.” She wiped her hands on her apron and faced him once more. “Where’s the girl?”
He hadn’t seen Maraveet since the afternoon he’d come home covered in his father’s blood. She’d taken one look at him and ran from the room. He hadn’t seen her since and that was nearly a week ago.
“Still refuses to leave her room.”
Molly sighed. “Well, let her be. You go on and get out of those clothes. I want you here in ten minutes looking like your da would want.”
His feet began to take him away. He made it all the way to the doorway before remembering why he’d been there in the first place.
“You’re still fired,” he told her.
She speared a loose fist against her hip. “And you’re still not dressed. Be gone with ya before I get the spoon.”
Damn woman refused to listen to reason, but he would make her. He would get her out of that house one way or another. He couldn’t risk losing her too.
Present day…
He never could get her to leave. Even when he’d threatened her with Frank, she’d rolled her eyes and told him to stop wasting her time, or Frank’s. Damn woman had wedged herself into his life like burrs in his hair, getting herself tangled and embedded so deep that he’d given up trying. He’d reluctantly accepted her presence, had accepted that if he limited her presence in his life to one day a week, nothing bad could possibly happen to her, that she would be safe. And she had been. For twenty two years, she had walked into his home with her cloth bag of precooked meals and he had let her. He had let her because she had been his anchor, the glimmer of light keeping the darkness at bay. She had kept the walls from closing in on him and the nightmares from consuming him and, God help him, he had been too weak to say no. Now, his reckless selfishness had taken away yet another person from his life.
“Sir?” Frank’s deep rumbling tone snapped through the cold, jolting Killian back. “The backdoor is open. It looks like forced entry. Would you like us to proceed?”
Yes. It stayed lodged in the torn muscles of his esophagus, caught in the sticky paste collecting at the back of his throat, but it didn’t need to be said. Frank knew. He always knew.
Against his side, Juliette’s shoulder brushed his lightly. The quiet whisper of fabric sounded much too loud, but the subtle reminder that he wasn’t standing in the cold alone had his body shifting closer. In his hand, hers felt so delicate. The fingers little sticks of ice clinging to his. An almost absent part of him had to resist the urge to pull her into his chest and shield her from the serrated edges of the cruel wind. But he wasn’t sure he could trust himself. He wasn’t sure he’d be able to let go again.
In the distance, the men pushed into the house, a well-oiled machine trained by Frank himself. The pounding of their feet echoed through the distance, somehow deafening. It was several seconds later that he realized the drumming was his own heart and it had taken residence between his ears. He muddled past it, needing to focus. His eyes burned, but he refused to blink. Vaguely, he was aware of Juliette setting her other hand over top of the one she was already holding. Her body turned into his side. Still, Killian couldn’t move.
“Killian…”
Her quiet whisper was interrupted by the figure that bolted out of the house at a near run, stumbled down the steps and vomited all over Molly’s junipers. The sheer force of his stress echoed all through the street.