He couldn’t believe his luck when he’d spotted the boy on the pier, then cursed in every language he knew when the Irish pub owner appeared out of nowhere to take him away. Parker’d lost them in the thick rush-hour traffic, nearly biting the dust when a metro bus ran a red light when he turned up a street. Hours later and in possession of a new rental car, he’d been back to square one.
The cops lingering around his first kill site were pretty much cleared out, but according to the boy’s neighbor, Mitchell hadn’t returned to the flophouse. Parker knew he’d have to flush the man out somehow, and he couldn’t think of anything better than to make Mitchell run.
“Only way to do that is to shut down the places a rat can hide,” Parker reminded himself. “Time to light up a few holes.”
He’d taken the morning to finish the job his boss sent him on, and walked out of the house just as his contact texted him with the Jeep Cherokee’s registered information. He threw his kill into the sedan’s trunk, punched in the address, and headed over to Sionn Murphy’s place, intent on causing mayhem.
He’d wanted to storm the building, damn everything and everyone around him, but a slow drive through the area turned up empty of red Jeeps, and calling up to the apartment using the lobby intercom only made his index finger hurt.
“Shit, look at this place. Murphy’s got some bucks.” He whistled when the elevator opened on the top floor. He dragged the dead weight out of the lift, stretched, and cracked his back as he looked around. Donning the long clear rain poncho he’d picked up from a street vendor, Parker grinned at his lifeless victim. “Okay, let’s find someplace nice we can put you, so when the fire department gets here, you’ll be all pretty for them.”
SHIELDED from the rain by an overhang, the widow’s walk remained one of the few places a Morgan male could flee and not be disturbed. Sionn would have thought it was an unwritten rule of some kind, but Donal quietly informed him the Morgan women weren’t too fond of heights, and an open wooden deck perched on the three-story house wasn’t their idea of a picnic.
Despite the cold, the walk was a haven from the storm of questions brewing inside the house. When Brigid and Ryan came home, the questioning became a tempest. Sionn bore the brunt of the pounding, with flashes of furious prying hitting Kane with lightning-quick accuracy. Fleeing seemed like a good idea. Fleeing with a bottle of Donal’s Midleton Barry Crockett was inspired genius, especially when Kane’s father pushed the whiskey into Sionn’s hands while whispering for them to head up while there was a lull.
Cowering in one of Connor’s old parkas, Sionn leaned against a dormer and took the now half-empty bottle from his cousin’s hand. The whiskey had lost its burn a few mouthfuls ago, but its sweet honey, smoky taste lingered on his numb tongue, and he welcomed the heat it poured into his belly.
He kind of wished that heat would find the cold lump of his heart, but so far, nothing seemed to thaw out the icy fear that had frosted through him when he realized the man in the middle of the Morgans’ kitchen was Damie’s Sinjun.
“Fecking hell and shite.” Sionn knew he was slurring.
They’d been on the walk for over an hour and had made a good dent in the bottle, or at least he had. Sionn suspected his cousin was doing more brief sipping than swigging, and the consumption of amber fire was nearly all his own doing. He could feel his tongue peeling up against the roof of his mouth, but he took a swig anyway, still hoping the next hit of whiskey would be the one to disconnect his brain. He waited a moment and discovered he could still feel the warmth of Damien’s fingers leaving his, and he rubbed his hand against his jeans, desperate to take away the itch in his skin.
Cocking his head at his cousin, he mumbled, “What are they doing now?”
Another reason to hie off to the walk was Kane’s insistence he could see into the garage apartment from a certain angle, providing the drapes were pulled open. Someone had to lean over the edge of the platform and crane a bit, but it was possible. Sionn’d planned on getting too drunk to trust his motor functions and balance to spy on the pair. Kane, a master at spying on his siblings whether he was drunk or sober, took up the watch.
“They’re getting naked.”
“What the fucking hell?” Sionn clambered over his cousin to get a look, only to be shoved back.
“They’re not screwing. It looks like they’re comparing scars. Get back over,” Kane muttered, sliding back under the overhang to get out of the rain. “Guess that answers my question about you and Damie.”
“What question was that, cuz? If I’m fucking him?” Sionn tried to hold up a finger, but it seemed to blur into multiples. “Once. Just once. This morning, even. After he scared the fucking shit out of me, but it was enough. God, hell and gone, it was fucking enough. I’m gone over.”