Before she can say anything else, I run up the stairs two at a time, hearing her voice behind me and feeling Elena’s sad, frightened eyes boring into my back. I know this has just made Elena think about her future wedding too, how she’ll be next after I’m successfully married, but I can’t think about that now. I can’t think about anything other than how tight my own noose has drawn, and I run past José and his confused expression, straight into my bedroom.
I slam the door behind me, hard enough to make the books and trinkets on my shelves shake, and I sink down against it, burying my face in my hands.
Hopelessness overwhelms me, and I start to sob.
4
NIALL
It’s the early hours of the morning before Liam walks out into the hospital waiting room, looking tired but happy, his hair messy from running his hands through it. Luca went in first to meet the newest little McGregor, joining Sofia, who had stayed by her best friend’s side along with Liam all night. He walks out with Liam, Sofia at his side, holding Giovanni. He claps Liam on the shoulder before pulling him into a one-armed hug. “Congratulations again,” he says. “She’s beautiful.”
So Liam and Ana have a daughter.I push myself up to stand, aching from sitting too long in the hard, uncomfortable chairs, and stride towards Liam. He looks radiant in a way I’ve never seen from him before, glowing as if with the birth of his daughter, something in him has been completed.
A family. Something he hadn’t known if he would have and then resigned himself to having when Connor left, and he was put into the position of taking over the Kings. A thing required of him to marry the right woman and produce the right heir. He hadn’t done that.
He’d done something else instead, something that made me so damn proud of him, like I was his big brother and not Connor. He’d chosen the woman he loved and fought for her. He’d done all of this on his own terms, and he’d won. Today is the culmination of that.
“Come meet Brigit,” Liam says, his words slightly choked through a throat tight with emotion, and I follow him back to the hospital room.
Ana is sitting up in her bed, looking exhausted, but her face is suffused with the same glow I see on Liam’s. Her blonde hair is pushed back away from her face, lanky with sweat, and there are visible bags under her eyes, her delicate, fragile face paler than I’ve ever seen it. But she also looks more beautiful than she ever has as she cradles the small bundle in her arms, looking down at her daughter as if her entire world has narrowed down to that tiny baby.
Liam goes to his wife’s side, bending to kiss her forehead as he looks down at his daughter, and I’m blown away by the look of absolute happiness—and more than that,peace—on his face. I’d often wondered what reaction he would have when the baby finally arrived, after the news that Connor discovered and let slip several months ago, but it’s clear all those worries were unfounded.
Liam’s daughter isn’t his, not by blood. She’s the child of an eccentric Frenchman who had purchased Ana from Alexei–a former employee of Viktor Andreyev’s, who turned traitor and attacked Viktor’s safehouse in the Russian mountains, taking all the women there captive to sell to rich clients he’d poached from Viktor’s old business. In a way, the Frenchman had saved her—Ana had been considered damaged goods, her feet ruined, and her mind broken after an old, traitorous friend of Luca’s had tortured her to get at him and Sofia. Alexei had planned to sell her to someone who would enjoy carving up the rest, but the Frenchman, Alexandre Sartre, had had a strange penchant for broken and damaged things. He’d bought Ana, and from what she’d told Liam, he’d never hurt her. He’d been strange and kept her like a pet or a doll, but in his own way, he’d fallen in love with her. And Ana had loved him too, in a way.
I’d found out all the sordid history between them from Liam, the strange fractured romance between Ana and Alexandre, the patience with which Liam had coaxed the broken pieces of her mind back together and slowly earned her trust enough for the love between them to blossom, even after the horrible thing Alexandre had forced Liam to do to Ana before Liam had rescued her. A thing he’d only been able to tell me about while drunk, a thing I don’t like to think about even now, with it so far in the past. Somehow, Liam and Ana had healed from all of it and found their way back to each other.
Ana’s pregnancy could have undone all of that. Liam had told me about the possibility that the baby might not be his, that it was likely, even, that the child was Alexandre’s. But he hadn’t cared. They’d chosen not to know, to love the baby either way without the knowledge hanging over them if it wasn’t what they wanted. But then Connor and Saoirse had happened upon the truth. In an effort to mend things with his brother and have only honesty between them, Connor had shared it with Liam as well.
Liam had come to me, half-broken with the knowledge, over a long night in which neither of us slept. But he never wavered in his love for Ana, or his determination to love and be a good father to their child no matter what. And now, as I look at the three of them together, I see that’s exactly what has happened.
It’s almost enough to make me ache for something similar, for just a moment. There’s so much love in the room, a peace I haven’t felt in a long time. My business is violence, both inciting and quelling it, and it’s been that way for so long that I don’t remember anything else. I fight the battles that Liam shouldn’t have to. I keep his peace when I can. I’m good at it, and I always have been.
My life has never been meant to be this. I tried for a taste of it with Saoirse. I begged her to leave with me and give me all of it. And I shouldn’t have.
It had only hurt in the end.
I step closer to the hospital bed, looking down at the small bundle. Fair skin like Ana’s, almost translucent, tiny clenched hands. A tuft of dark hair, and when she opens her eyes, I see that they’re crystalline blue, like her mother’s. She’s more Ana than that other man, except for the dark hair, and it relieves me to see it.
“Congratulations,” I say gruffly, looking between Ana and Liam. “Brigit, you said?”
Ana nods. “Brigit Natasha McGregor. For Liam’s mother and mine.”
Brigit.It’s a keen way of Liam putting his own stamp on the child, both to honor the mother who had been lost giving birth to him, a mother he’d never known, and to also bring the child into the family in a way that runs even deeper than the McGregor surname. A family heirloom of a name, severing any connection she might have with the Frenchman who fathered her.
I feel like a third wheel in the room, like I don’t belong here. Like all my sharp edges and hard lines, my violence and roughness are out of place. Like what I’m seeing here just throws into sharp relief everything that I’ve ever been told I lack.
Even Saoirse. She never said it aloud, but I wasn’t enough for her. I was never going to be.
“Congratulations,” I say again, feeling like a broken record. “I’m just gonna—ah—leave you to it. It’s been a long bloody night. Liam.” I nod to my best friend, who looks up at me as if he’s only half seeing me, all his attention focused on his wife and daughter.
“Thank you for being here, Niall,” Liam says. “You really kept me from falling apart.” He laughs at the last, Ana smiling as she leans her head back on the pillow, and for all the hardship and difficulty and pain it took to get them here, fuck if they don’t look like a perfect Christmas card of a fucking family right then.
“You don’t have to walk me out,” I tell Liam, my throat tightening a little. “I can find my way. Just enjoy your time.”
There’s a heavy cold to the night as I step outside, shrugging on my fleece-lined leather jacket as I walk to my bike. I’ve got an old Chevelle I drive in the worst of the Boston winter, when it’s too bloody frozen to ride the bike no matter how determined a man is. Still, as soon as there’s a day without snow, I pull the motorcycle back out. I’d rather travel that way than any other. March isn’t exactly the warmest, but the roads are salted and clear, and the cold wind while I ride will do wonders for the clarity of my mind.
The old house comes back to mind as I wind through the downtown streets back to my small apartment, nagging at the back of my brain. Empty now, kept in decent condition by someone I pay to do so, an asset that I’ll never sell. I thought about selling it years ago, but as much as I know I’ll never have a family to live there, I don’t want some strangers raising their kids there either. So it sits there, lonely and empty, and somehow that feels bad too. Like I’m letting my father down even though he’s long since gone.