I sit down on the same barstool I’d been occupying only minutes earlier and pick up my beer mug. Raising it to my nose, I take an inhale.
“Smells as bad as it tastes, I bet,” I drawl. I hurl it against the mirrored wall behind the bartender. He flinches as it streaks past his ear and shatters into a million glistening pieces. The mirror goes with it, huge shards collapsing to the ground.
The man’s hands are still raised. I can see his fingertips trembling.
“Can we dispense with the pretense now?” I ask conversationally.
The bartender looks at me with fearful calculation. I know exactly what he’s thinking. He’s wondering if he’s going to live to see another day.
“Who the fuck are you?” he asks in a hushed voice.
I remember the words I roared over the ravine after I built Cillian’s makeshift grave.
I am death.
But I want this poor sap to be cooperative, not to piss his pants in terror. So I save the theatrics for another time.
“Does it matter?” I ask instead.
“Well, what do you want?”
“A better question,” I agree. “But first, you need to answer me.”
“You didn’t ask a question.”
I raise an eyebrow. “Yes, I did. And you lied to me, which better men than you have lost their lives for. So, do you wanna try this again?”
He nods. I note the panicked swallow of his Adam’s apple.
“Excellent. Did you know Cillian O’Sullivan?”
“Not personally,” the bartender stammers. “But I know… of him.”
“Fair enough.” The gun in my hand is still aimed at the bartender. “I assume you know his father.”
The bartender stills and his pale deepens. Then he nods.
“Also excellent. Where do I find him?” I ask.
“Listen—”
“Just so you know, I don’t take kindly to excuses,” I tell him. I tap the butt of the gun on the countertop to remind him who’s still in charge here.
“He’ll gut you. Ronan O’Sullivan is not a man to be trifled with.”
“Clearly, neither am I.”
The bartender looks past me at the bodies of the thugs littering his pub floor. “I know where you can find him,” he sighs, with resignation and defeat in his tone.
“There’s a good man.” I tuck the gun back into my waistband. The man droops with audible relief.
“I’m reaching for a pen and paper,” he calls to me as I stand up from the barstool. “I’ll give you the address.”
I laugh and shake my head. “Oh, no, friend. I’d rather you just took me yourself.”
“You… you want me to take you?” His pallor is back and sicklier than ever. I just killed three men in the blink of an eye, right in front of this sorry bastard, and yet he’s still almost as scared of Ronan O’Sullivan than he is of me.
The Irishman’s reputation is impressive.
A lesser man might be afraid of that, of him.
But not me.
I’m the most dangerous man on the planet, and I have nothing left to lose.
The bartender closes up and we head out onto the street. He leads me to a pretty nice car, certainly one that’s above the pay grade of a simple bartender in a podunk pub on the outskirts of Dublin.
But I don’t question him as I fold myself into the passenger seat of his car.
We drive through the town, but I can’t seem to concentrate on anything. My mind is racing.
This was Cillian’s home. He grew up on these streets. He got into fist fights and chased girls down these streets. He loved these streets up—until the day they spat him out on a one-way flight to America.
And yet, I can’t picture him anywhere.
I can’t see him fitting in here.
His family’s betrayal had forced some quintessential Irishness out of him. Like a part of his soul never left his home country.
“I’ve got my blonde hair and blue eyes,” Cillian would always tell me as we stumbled drunk from one club to the next in our younger and more reckless teenage years. “Gifts from Mother Ireland. And they’re the only things I’ll keep.”
The memory stings worse than I expected.
“Do you have a name?” I ask the bartender. Anything to distract myself from the storm raging inside my head.
“Does it matter?” he snarls.
I laugh darkly. “You’re right. It doesn’t.”
He pulls to a stop outside the gates of a fancy compound. It’s sprawling, but nowhere near as luxurious as the one Stanislav owned.
I can see the smirk pulling at the corners of his mouth. He obviously thinks he’s got me cornered. Tables are turned, motherfucker, he’s no doubt laughing to himself. There are probably several dozen armed men on the inside, which will leave me indisputably outnumbered. Security cameras, armored doors, weapons hidden in every corner…
Big fucking deal.
The bartender looks at me out of the corner of his eye from the driver’s seat, probably wondering why I look so fucking calm right now.
“You’re going to just walk in there with me?” he asks as he rolls down his window and waits for the guard on duty to step out of his little hut.
I shrug. “This is what I came here for.”
“An audience with Ronan O’Sullivan?”
“That’s right.”
“Even if it costs you your life?”
I shrug again. “My life is not as important to me as you might think,” I reply. “Perhaps that’s a necessary part of being a good fighter. You can’t win if you’re scared of being killed.”
“Is that how you killed three men in a matter of seconds?” he asks.
“That,” I agree, “and I’m very fucking good at killing.”
I can see the grudging respect in his eyes as the uniformed security guard emerges from the outpost and saunters over.
The two men converse quickly. I can’t hear what they’re saying, but I’m not really paying attention anyway. I’ll end up inside one way or another.
The bartender turns to me. “He wants your name.”
“Tell him it’s Cillian O’Sullivan.”
The bartender’s eyes bulge, but when I don’t break my stony expression, he sighs and repeats the name to the guard.
I’m just hoping that the cameras won’t catch my
