Page 52 of Bad Bishop

Besides, I never missed a chance to suture.

It was my first time stitching a human. Not that he needed to know that. All my other experience was with pig bellies and chickens. Imma was a nurse back in Naples before she joined our family. She’d taught me some useful skills to help me pass the time, since I didn’t go to school.

But the most dangerous thing of all wasn’t Tiernan finding out, beyond any reasonable doubt, that I wasn’t intellectuallyimpaired. It wasn’t even the fact that he frightened me with his even pulse and dead, abrasive stare the entire time I worked on his wound, unmoved by the pain.

No. It was the complete and utter chaos that swirled in my body at our briefest touch.

On our wedding night, I thought I needed to hurt him to feel the gooey, warm honey in the pit of my stomach. Now, I realized, I simply needed totouchhim.

His body felt good. All lithe, sculpted muscles. Inked with tattoos I wanted to trace, and study, and maybe even kiss. Warm. Alive.Safe.The latter was stupid, I knew. The man promised he’d force himself on me if he found out I was a spy.

But he had so many chances.

So many opportunities to take what our world deemed was his.

Yet he didn’t.

The hatred I wanted so badly to cling onto was slipping between my fingers like quicksand. Maybe it was Stockholm syndrome. Or maybe I realized my ire should be directed at my father and my rapist.

Either way, Tiernan “the Deathless” Callaghan was no longer the man I hated the most.

Worse still, he no longer felt like the enemy.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

TIERNAN

Three days later I sat in Fermanagh’s back office, surrounded by Luca, Achilles, Fintan, and Sam Brennan.

The latter was Boston’s most formidable ex-mobster. Now retired in Switzerland with his doctor wife and their frankly demented number of kids.

I pulled him out of retirement because he could find a grain of salt in a pile of shit. Figured I could use reinforcements in my search for my wife’s attacker since I had my own plate full.

He cost a pretty penny, but I considered every dime well spent.

“I cropped the raw CCTV footage into the twenty minutes during and after Lila took off from the ballroom.” Sam swiveled his laptop toward me, flicking his finger to the screen. My wife appeared in grainy resolution, hurrying toward the exit. “My IT guy did a body count of the room and all the other wired locations on the premises. All eight hundred guests and staff were accounted for. All, aside from fifteen men that disappeared within that timeframe. I compiled them into a list.”

“And you caught them leaving through the main entrance?”

Sam shook his head. “She slipped through a side exit, probably the secret passage in the wine cellar. The attacker followed her. That part’s not wired.”

“Show me the list.”

Luca dragged it across the executive desk in my direction. I stared at the names. Two in particular popped out to me.

Tatum Blackthorn.

Angelo Bandini.

“There’s also a murky shot of a man trailing behind Lila, twenty yards away.” Brennan leaned in from behind me, fingers dancing on the keyboard. He fast-forwarded forty seconds after Lila left, zooming in and clearing up the resolution.

“That’s a good start,” my brother said.

Fintan didn’t smell like the floor of a seedy nightclub this morning. A step in the right direction.

“Did we ID him?” I asked.

Sam tsked. “He never gave us a good angle. Makes you wonder if he scoped out the place in advance.”