Page 39 of SINS & Riley (Dante & Riley #2)

ZVER

T he night ate me alive.

Hours pacing the streets of Chicago, the cold biting my skin, my thoughts hamster wheeling over and over again in my head.

Every wrong move I made in the last twenty-four hours clawing at me.

I fucked up.

The kind of fuckup you don’t crawl away from. The kind that makes enemies sharpen their knives and argue over who gets the honor of carving you open the slowest.

Soon enough, the Irish mob will be on high alert, sniffing for blood.

I laid out every last ounce of C4 I brought and lit that fucker up like a Roman torch.

Considering it was an old textile mill, packed floor-to-ceiling with fabric bolts and enough paint chemicals to choke the city, that blaze isn’t dying anytime soon. Two days, maybe more, before it even begins to cool.

They’ll sift through the ash eventually. And when they do, they’ll find Declan.

A fuckup, sure—but still a Keenan.

And just like me and my brothers, the Keenans look after their own. If only out of a sense of loyalty.

The sun rises. Time to disappear. A masked man doesn’t blend with Chicago daylight, so I take the long way back to the mansion.

Sleep-deprived. Starving. Mind frayed to the edge—one wrong word away from snapping.

My fingers have a steady rhythm along the steering wheel as I try to think.

I need Dominic and his family to get to safety, and if I know anything, it’s that he won’t go willingly.

Which is why I need to give him no choice in the matter.

And maybe I’m not thinking straight when I finally rolled through the gates.

Or when exhaustion clings to me like a second skin as I shove through the front door.

Dominic’s there. Waiting.

“We need to talk—” he starts, urgency in his words.

Shit. If I thought that little bonfire was gonna slow down the Keenan’s, I guess I was wrong. But I can’t talk to Dominic yet. Not without a plan.

“Not now.” The words cut from my throat mindlessly.

“You don’t understand?—”

No, he’s the one who doesn’t understand.

This world I’ve built is about to go up in smoke, disintegrate before my eyes. I need him and his family gone before they’re caught in the blast radius.

“Wait,” Dominic says, clamping a strong hand around my arm, which stops me cold. He’s fifty pounds heavier and could probably bench-press my car just to kill time.

Even with a 104-degree fever and the flu, the man curls dumbbells.

There’s no way I win this contest—not if it comes down to brute strength. So I rip my gun from its holster and level it at his head.

“Clear enough for you? I said not now.”

He raises both hands in surrender as I shoulder past him, tight and ready to crack.

And that’s when I see her.

Riley .

I blink hard, praying it’s just some residual chemical haze from the dumpster fire I just left—some hallucinatory side effect that’s conjured her into existence.

But no. She’s real.

Long, dark hair spilling over her shoulders.

Full, plush lips that could tempt a priest.

Curves begging to be mapped with my hands. And my tongue.

My grip on the gun tightens so hard, I almost take off my own toe.

She lifts a nervous hand, casual, like we’re neighbors bumping into each other at the goddamn mailbox. “Hi.”

That single word detonates the silence.

“Hi?”

Deranged, I snap a glance at Dominic, then back to her. “Hi?” I repeat, voice unhinged, my what-the-fuck meter shooting off the charts.

My chest caves—rage, fear, disbelief all clawing for dominance, raw and exposed. Of all the people I was prepared to face today, she’s not the one.

Can my life get fucked up anymore? Goddamnit, she and the baby should be a million miles away.

I don't even address her. I look right at Dominic. And all I can choke out is, “She needs to leave. Now.”