Queen of Quarantine (Brutal Boys of Everlake Prep #4) - Caroline Peckham Page 0,112

orders were barked by one of the sergeants.

“There won’t be another like Mary,” he sighed.

“Mary would have wanted you to move on,” I whispered, not wanting him to lose it entirely.

Niall O’Brien was seriously volatile and who knew what he might do if he had an emotional meltdown over Mary. I needed to get him to that boathouse because he was my ticket out of this city and back to my men. And more than that, he was important to Kyan. The only member of his family he really loved. So I wasn’t going to risk anything happening to him for that reason alone.

“She made such a beautiful sound when she hit a skull, it was music, lass, music,” he lamented.

“She must have had a few bad points,” I tried, my nose wrinkling at the unwanted mental image.

“Well…” he started thoughtfully. “Come to think of it, her head got loose from time to time. Bitch let me down at the crucial moment of death once. She made it a real dirty job that day.”

I tried not to picture him smashing skulls in, but it was pretty hard. Niall really was a freaking psycho, but I wasn’t gonna complain about that when he’d risked his neck to save me. “See? You can do better.”

“You’re right,” he growled. “I deserve a weapon I can depend upon.”

I caught sight of the boathouse through the trees and we quickened our pace a little, my heart pulsing out of beat as the helicopter sounded in the distance. But it was nowhere near here luckily.

We hurried over to the stone building, finding a thin chain and a padlock holding the door shut. Niall took a screwdriver from his belt, jammed it into one of the chain links and twisted it hard, using brute force to break it. He pushed the door open, shoving me inside and following after, bringing the broken chain with him and closing the door. He grabbed a paddle for a canoe and used it to bar the door as I gazed around the interior. The place was cold and full of little pedalos and canoes. A shutter was pulled down which stopped anyone accessing the boats from the jetty that led inside so we were completely isolated in here. And that was perfect.

“We’d better wait here ‘til dark,” Niall said as he moved to sit in a rowing boat on the concrete beside the water and jerking his head for me to follow.

I stepped in after him, sitting at his side and he wrapped an arm around my shoulders, patting me awkwardly. It was weirdly sweet, especially as I got the feeling the guy didn’t do affection often. I couldn’t help but think of his wife, the woman he’d lost and avenged all those years ago. Had something cracked in him after losing her? Or had he always been like this? Somehow, I sensed it was a mixture of both, but I wasn’t dumb enough to ask him anything about the woman he’d lost. I was guessing he’d find that kind of triggering and he was not the sort of guy I wanted to set off. Hell, he made my Night Keepers look like upstanding pillars of the community. And if he’d been upset about Mary, then mentioning his dead wife seemed like a seriously dangerous idea. It made me sad though, to know he’d experienced such pain and I wondered if he’d ever opened up to Kyan about it. I hoped they were close enough to talk to about the hard things, because if Niall didn’t have him, I had the feeling he’d be all alone in the world. And no one deserved that.

“Did I ever tell you about the time I skewered a barber on a pitchfork?” he asked conversationally.

“No,” I said with a little laugh. “We’ve spoken like twice in our lives, so…”

“Well lass, it’s quite the story. It all started on a day when I woke up tied to radiator dressed as a Moomin…”

W e drove east for several hours, bumping along in the back of the army truck with countless other vehicles just like ours all going in the same direction and just as many empty ones heading back to the city as well.

It was cold in the back of the open sided truck, the flimsy canvas overhead offering only the smallest amount of protection from the rain which had been drizzling down on us for the past hour. I guessed the weather was just mirroring how