in the rearview mirror.
“And she was sitting with the line of Vivian’s girls, now, wasn’t she?”
I feel my body tighten, my anger surging. “If you fucking touched her, Boner…”
“Swear to God, mate! I didn’t. Came straight to Keenan. I knew she was Vivian’s, though.”
I growl under my breath but let it go.
Lachlan blows out a whistle. “Mother of God,” he mutters. “Jesus, that’s terrible.”
It is.
We make it to the bunker, mostly in silence this time. The weight of what happened tonight, what I did, hangs over all of us like a storm cloud.
This is why Keenan has me coming to the bunker, the safest place we have, to make sure everything’s secured before I return home.
Lachlan and Boner leave me, and I enter the cold room underground with the dread of a prisoner entering a cell. I flick on the dim overhead light and smile to myself when the light illuminates the small room.
Someone’s come in here with a feminine touch since the last time I was here. The bed is made with a nice duvet, and they’ve even hung up some wall art. A small vase of plastic flowers sits on the bedside table. I open the cabinet where we keep the emergency food store, suddenly ravenous. I put the kettle on, and make myself a hot cup of tea, some tuna, and eat it with crackers.
Sebastian, the Clan doctor arrives, and looks over my minor injuries. He pronounces me fine, and tells me Keenan’s on his way.
“I’ll see you later tonight at home,” Sebastian says, leading me to believe that I’m likely not spending the night here.
Keenan arrives an hour or so later, after I’ve damn near worn a hole in the floor pacing.
“Hey.” I’m lying on the bed watching the news. There’s nothing on the telly and nothing online about his death. Maybe it hasn’t made the news yet.
Keenan jerks his chin in greeting. Cormac and Nolan come in behind him. They take up most of the interior of the bunker, sitting heavily on the little loveseat and folding chairs.
“Y’alright, Tiernan?” Nolan asks. I swallow hard, weirdly overcome with emotion at his concern.
“Fine. Look, I’m fucking sorry—”
Keenan holds up his hand to stop me. “You will not apologize for killing a man who tried to assault a woman who’s friends with the Clan.”
I blink and look at him in surprise. Aisling hasn’t been friends with the Clan for ages, but as I think on it, he’s right. Fiona would still be fucking crushed if anything happened to her, I know she would.
“I’d have done the same myself,” he says, but then he winces. “Might not have done it exactly at that location, but lucky for you, Carson and Tully are experts in the art of body disposal, and so far no one’s any wiser for it.”
So far.
I swallow and nod. “Thanks for that, Keenan. Lachlan lectured the fuck out of me on the way here.”
Nolan chuckles. “Of course he did. Bloody worried about you, lad.”
I’ll be sixty years old and Nolan will still call me “lad.”
My chest warms a little. He’s right. Lachlan’s worried. And even though I don’t like what’s happened tonight and didn’t like being lectured by Lachlan, I can rest easy in the comfort of this knowledge: these men are my brothers, loyal to the death.
“Tomorrow, we’ll have to form a plan,” Keenan says. “We’ll have to bury evidence and see to it his disappearance doesn’t circle back to us. Walsh is already on it, and we’ll have Sheena work on the papers as well.”
My sister’s job as investigative reporter comes in handy for times like these.
“And if we play this right, seems like none will be the wiser for it, Tiernan.” Keenan strokes the beard at his chin and shrugs. “But there are what you might call natural consequences for something like this.”
I blow out a breath and give him a curious look. “Natural consequences?”
Not out of the doghouse yet, then. Fuck.
“Aye,” Keenan says sagely. “Like telling a child not to touch the stove, and when they do, they get burned.”
I wait in silence. Here it comes.
“There’s a very angry woman in a state of deep withdrawal back at the compound.”
I blink. “State of withdrawal?”
Bloody fucking hell.
He nods. “Sebastian says she’s strung out and coming down from a high, will be looking for a fix in the morning, if not sooner.”
“Yeah?”
“Aye. You killed a man for her tonight, Tiernan. It’ll be your job to keep her. She’s your responsibility now.”
“Keep her?”
“She fucking witnessed