CHAPTER ONE
Poppy
The Irish night was thick velvet around the car. A darkness so dense and plush it felt like we were being swallowed whole.
In the back seat, Eden Morelli was quiet, a small miracle, so I guessed she was asleep. All her machinations to escape the death sentence waiting for her in the States had worked and she was bringing home the missing Morelli boy and his bride.
Glad it’s working out for someone in this car.
Beside me, Ronan shifted gears, his focused gaze checking mirrors as he pushed the car faster through traffic. My husband. It didn’t just seem strange. Strange would be a relief. Strange would be something I could laugh about.
“Isn’t it wild?” I could say. “We’re married.”
But being married to Ronan was something well past strange. It was terrifying. Infuriating. Exciting.
A pig truck was in the wrong lane and going too slow for Ronan. He passed on the shoulder and the loose gravel under the car’s wheels made us fishtail. I braced myself against the dash. “Why do we have to go so fast?” I cried, my voice shaky with nerves, thick with emotion.
“The sooner we get back to New York, the sooner this is done.”
And our marriage could be annulled. And he could do what he had planned to do since the moment he started playing with me like a dangerous cat with a stupid mouse. Leave me.
“Ronan,” I whispered.
His eyes met mine in the dark. “What?”
Please. Please go back to who you were in the cottage. Please go back to smiling at me. Please give me something to hold on to so I’m not so scared. We were married. We were friends…sort of. Friendly?
He’d told me his secrets in the quiet of that cottage, revealing the wounds of his childhood. And I did the same. Though now, in the cold of this car, in the chill of his silence, it felt like all of that had happened to someone else. A different woman. A very different man. There was no softness in him now. And the secrets we’d traded were buried again.
“I want to see my sister,” I said, instead of any of that. I wanted to sound strong and impervious and as remote as Ronan—my husband—and I did. I sounded like a total bitch and I loved it. Small victories. “I need to see my sister.”
“It’s not safe.”
“Nothing is anymore,” I snarled, pushed to the very edge. “So what does it matter?”
For the first time maybe since I met him, I had the sense that when he looked at me, he was really seeing me. Not as a mouse he could play with until I broke. Not as a woman he could get to moan and beg. But a person he needed to reckon with. A person with power he could not take away. Or maybe I was exhausted and disoriented by the lights of the highway. Maybe I was only seeing what I wanted to see. Yeah, that sounded like me.
He handed me the burner phone he’d been using at the cottage and it clicked against the monstrosity that was my wedding ring. The Morelli ring, a dark sapphire surrounded by a starburst of diamonds, was heavy and too big. It looked beyond old-fashioned. Something more than a generational heirloom. It looked like a medieval museum piece, something used by ancient women to hold poison or bring on curses. It was ugly.
It suited our unholy union. “Call her,” he said, pointing at the phone I held in my hand, caught up in my own thoughts.
“What can I tell her?” I asked. “We will meet her at your apartment in London?”
“We’re flying out tonight. To New York.”
“Ronan,” I gasped, my façade crumbling. “I need to see my sister. Please—”
He closed his eyes for a second like he was just so done with me. Fine. Good. I was done with him. How preposterous that it took marriage to get us here. To build the wall between us so high there was no getting over it. I called the last number dialed and my sister answered. “Poppy?” Zilla asked. “Where are you? Are you close?”
The plan—before Eden found us and opened up the Morelli vault of secrets and changed the course of our lives—had been for me to go to London to get to my sister while Ronan went back to New York and found out why the Morelli’s wanted me dead or alive. “I’m…” I turned my back to Ronan as best I could in the small car, fighting for a tiny bit of privacy no matter how ridiculous. “I can’t come, Zilla.”
“What do you mean you can’t come? You’re on your way.”
I swallowed. “Our plans changed.”
“Are you in trouble? Are you safe?” Safe? That was painfully relative, wasn’t it? I was in a car, I was married to a killer. A killer who swore to protect me. To worship my body with his. But we’re ignoring that part. “I’m fine,” I whispered. “But I can’t come to you right now. I’m going back to New York.”