CHAPTER 6: HIS BLOOD
1166 Words
Valentina
The woman waiting inside looked like somebody's grandmother.
Grey hair. Green cardigan. Sensible shoes. A tiny silver cross at her throat.
She took one look at Cillian's leg and crossed herself with impressive speed.
"Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. What did you do now?"
"The wound is mine," Cillian said.
Her eyes landed on me.
I was soaked, filthy, limping, and holding a cat carrier against my chest like riot gear.
Not my best first impression.
"I'm Valentina," I said.
The woman's eyebrows rose.
"Mrs. Brennan," Cillian said, "she'll be staying with us."
"Will she now?"
"She needs a room, food, and dry clothes."
"I need my phone."
Mrs. Brennan looked from me to him.
"Room first," she said. "Revolution after breakfast."
I liked her immediately. Bad judgement seemed to be today's theme.
Cillian took one step toward the stairs and his injured leg nearly folded.
He corrected so quickly most people would have missed it.
I wasn't most people.
"Stop. You're going to fall."
He kept walking.
"You need sutures."
"Upstairs."
"That's not what I said."
"The medical suite is upstairs."
Of course it was.
Cillian started up.
I followed because Mateo was alive, every door had a guard, and the man holding my brother's life in his hands was leaving blood on white marble.
The house was obscene.
Crystal chandelier. Oil paintings. A staircase wide enough to land a helicopter on. Every man in the portraits had Cillian's eyes and the expression of someone disappointed by the invention of laws.
Mrs. Brennan carried Luna. Ronan disappeared down another corridor after telling Cillian that Declan wanted confirmation before dawn.
Cillian's shoulders went hard at the name.
I noticed.
I filed it away.
At the end of the upstairs hall, he opened a dark wooden door.
His bedroom was bigger than my apartment.
Black sheets. Grey walls. A window that looked out over gardens that had no business existing in Chicago winter. Everything smelled like him — clean, expensive, and faintly metallic from the blood.
He went through another door into what was clearly a private medical suite.
I stopped in the doorway.
The room was better equipped than some of the smaller departments at Mercy. Surgical light. Sterile tray. Suturing kits. IV stand. A cabinet of controlled medication that would have made hospital security weep.
Cillian sat on the edge of the examination table and started unbuttoning his trousers.
I turned my back.
"I need access to the wound," he said.
"I know how trousers work."
"Then stop wasting time."
I turned around.
He had pushed the ruined trousers down to mid-thigh. Black boxer briefs. Long, scarred legs. The gash high on the left thigh was deep enough that I could see the pale flash of fascia. Blood still welled steadily.
And beneath the thin black fabric of his briefs, he was hard.
Not fully. Not aggressively. But thick and obvious, the outline of his c**k pressed against the cotton like it had been waiting for me to look.
I felt my own body answer — a low, unwanted pulse between my legs.
I hated him for it.
I hated that I was wet from a man who had watched me change, watched me touch myself, and was now bleeding because I had tried to take his eye out.
"Sit still," I said.
My voice came out steadier than I felt.
I washed my hands at the sink, found gloves, and pulled a tray closer. The scissors cut through the remaining fabric cleanly. I cleaned the wound with antiseptic that made his jaw tighten.
He didn't look away from my face.
"You're enjoying this," I said.
"Watching you work? Yes."
"The pain."
"That too."
I injected local anaesthetic around the wound. He barely flinched.
"You have a high pain threshold or a death wish."
"Both."
I started suturing.
His thigh was solid under my hands. Warm. The kind of muscle that came from violence rather than a gym. Scars mapped him like a history book written in knives and bullets. One long white line crossed his lower abdomen and disappeared under the waistband of his briefs.
I wondered, stupidly, how far it went.
My gloves were slippery with blood. Every time I pulled a suture tight, the fabric of his briefs shifted and I felt the heat of him against my wrist.
He was fully hard now.
I could see the thick head of his c**k outlined clearly, a dark spot of precome staining the cotton.
My mouth went dry.
"You're staring," he said quietly.
"I'm making sure I don't sew your femoral artery shut."
"Liar."
I tied off the last suture harder than necessary.
He hissed.
"Sorry," I said, not sorry at all.
I cleaned the area again and taped a sterile dressing over it. When I finished, I stripped the gloves and dropped them in the biohazard bin.
Cillian didn't pull his trousers back up.
He sat there, legs slightly open, c**k still hard and leaking against the black fabric, watching me like I was the only interesting thing left in the world.
"If you kill me," he said, calm as ever, "my family kills your brother before I hit the floor."
I already knew that.
What I didn't know was whether the man sitting in front of me with his blood on my hands and his c**k hard for me was going to keep that promise, or whether he was going to f**k me first.
The worst part was that some dark, private corner of me wanted to find out.
I had fantasies about men who would hold me down and take what they wanted. Controlled men. Dangerous men. Men who would look at me the way Cillian was looking at me now — like he already owned every filthy thing he was going to do to me and was simply waiting for the right moment to collect.
Those fantasies were supposed to stay in my head.
They weren't supposed to walk out of a black SUV, bleed on my hands, and make me wet while threatening my brother's life.
I stepped back.
"Bandage stays dry. No weight-bearing for twenty-four hours if you can manage it. Antibiotics if that wound was dirty. Which it was."
He finally pulled the trousers up, careful around the dressing. The outline of his c**k was still visible.
"You're staying in the room next to mine," he said.
"I don't want a room next to yours."
"I don't care what you want."
The words should have made me furious.
They did.
They also made the pulse between my legs throb harder.
I looked at the bandage I'd tied around his thigh.
The cage wasn't the estate.
It was that stupid white strip of gauze.
As long as Cillian's heart kept beating, Mateo's did too.
And as long as he looked at me like that, some filthy, traitorous part of me wanted to find out exactly how he planned to collect the rest of the debt.
For now.
- Writer
