Home / Mafia / Bought By The Irish Mafia Boss / Chapter 191 - Chapter 200

All Chapters of Bought By The Irish Mafia Boss: Chapter 191 - Chapter 200

211 Chapters

Chapter 72 - Declan

Chapter 72DeclanI've known Ronan Gallagher long enough to recognize when something is wrong with him.Most people don't. They see the jokes, the arrogance, the ridiculous amount of pleasure he takes in irritating everyone around him. They see a man who laughs when someone points a gun at him, who walks into fights as if he's looking forward to getting hurt, and who treats almost everything in life like one big fucking joke.They don't see what happens when the laughter stops.I've seen it. Cillian has too. And the expression on Ronan's face when he looks at his phone is something I haven't seen in years.I'm standing near the dining room when I notice him heading toward the garden. At first I don't think anything of it. Ronan has spent most of the evening making inappropriate comments about my engagement, and I assume he's stepping outside for a cigarette or another excuse to avoid listening to Elena talk about wedding plans.Then I see his shoulders. Rigid. His phone is still in his

Chapter 1 - Ronan

RonanDead women aren’t supposed to send text messages.That’s my first thought when I look at the photograph on my phone. My second is that I’m going to kill whoever sent it, and not quickly or cleanly, and certainly not before they tell me where the fuck she is.I’m standing in Cillian’s dining room with a glass of whiskey in one hand and my phone in the other, surrounded by people celebrating the fact that Declan has finally lost his mind enough to propose to Maya. Five minutes ago, I was laughing with them. I was telling Hayes he’d officially become a domesticated bastard, and he was telling me to fuck off, and everything was exactly the way it’s supposed to be.Then my phone vibrated, and the whole fucking world stopped. Aoife.I stare at the screen until the room blurs around the edges. Auburn hair, longer than I remember, falling loose around her shoulders. Pale skin. A bruise darkening along her cheekbone. She’s thinner than she should be, and there’s an exhaustion in her face

Chapter 2 - Aoife

AoifeI take the photograph in a cracked motel mirror at half past one in the morning, because I can’t bear to look at the phone while I do it.The woman in the glass doesn’t look like me. She has my hair, and my mouth and the freckle beside my lip that Ronan used to kiss when he wanted me to stop arguing with him, but her eyes are wrong. They’re flat and careful, the eyes of someone who checks every exit before she sits down. The bruise along her cheekbone is turning yellow at the edges, and the scar through her eyebrow is pale and neat, the way scars get when nobody bothers to stitch them properly.I don’t know her. I’ve spent years being her anyway. My thumb hovers over the screen for a long time before I press it. The shutter clicks, too loud in the tiny room, and I flinch as if someone has fired a gun.Then I sit on the edge of the bed with the cheap burner in both hands and try to write the message.Ronan, it

Chapter 3 - Ronan

RonanLiam opens his door at ten past three in the morning wearing grey tracksuit bottoms, no shirt, and the expression of a man who’s already decided whether he’s going to shoot me.“You’ve got ten seconds,” he says.“I need you to trace a number,” I tell him.He looks at me for a long moment, taking in everything the way he always does: the whiskey I haven’t drunk, the shirt I haven’t changed, the way my hand won’t stop moving at my side. Liam O’Connor notices everything, and he says about a tenth of it.Then he steps back and lets me in.His flat is exactly like him, clean and quiet, with nothing out of place and three screens glowing on a desk in the corner. He sits down in front of them without asking another question, holds out his hand for my phone, and I give it to him.He looks at the photograph for a long time.“Jesus,” he says softly. That&

Chapter 4 - Aoife

Then - Aoife, thirteenI know it’s going to be a bad night the moment Mr Gallagher’s car comes up the drive too fast.It’s nearly nine o’clock, and Mam and I are alone in the kitchen, scrubbing the last of the roasting tins from a dinner he didn’t come home to eat. The guests left an hour ago, polite and confused, after Ronan sat at the head of the table in his father’s place and made small talk with men three times his age as if he’d been doing it all his life. I watched him through the crack in the dining-room door. He was charming and funny, and he made a fat banker laugh so hard that wine came out of his nose, and not one of them noticed his hands shaking under the tablecloth.I noticed. I always notice.Now the gravel crunches outside, and a car door slams hard enough to rattle the windows, and Mam goes very still with her hands in the sink.“Upstairs, Aoife,” she says quietly, without turn

Chapter 5 - Aoife

AoifeThe diner across the road from the motel never closes, and the coffee tastes like it’s been stewing since the night I arrived in New Jersey.I drink it anyway. I take a booth in the far corner, with my back to the wall and a clear view through the greasy front window of the car park, room fourteen, and the silver saloon sitting outside it with its headlights burning. I keep my hood up and my bag on the seat beside me, with the strap wound around my wrist, and when the waitress comes over with the pot, I tell her I’m waiting for my boyfriend to pick me up.It isn’t even a lie, exactly. It’s just a very old one.“Long night?” she asks, topping me up without being asked.“Something like that,” I tell her, in Claire Walsh’s flat, careful voice.She looks at the bruise on my cheekbone for a second too long, then looks away. “Take as long as you need, honey,” she says, and leaves the pot on my table.People always look away. I’ve stop

Chapter 6 - Ronan

Then — Ronan, fourteenMy mother’s library is the only room in this house that still smells like her.Nobody comes in here anymore. My father had the door locked the week after her funeral, and the key put in his desk, and he hasn’t set foot inside it in six years. The housekeeper dusts it once a month because she’s afraid of what he’ll say if she doesn’t, and other than that, the room just sits there at the end of the west corridor with the curtains half drawn, waiting for a woman who’s never coming back.I found the spare key when I was eleven, taped under the bottom drawer of his desk, and I had a copy cut in the village with money I stole from his coat.He doesn’t know. Nobody knows, except Aoife.“Ye’ve been in that chair three hours,” I tell her.She doesn’t look up. She’s curled sideways in my mother’s reading chair by the window, with her shoes kicked

Chapter 7 - Ronan

RonanThe message arrives at ten past six in the morning, while I’m still sitting on the end of her bed in room fourteen with her hair wound around my finger.My phone buzzes against my thigh, and I nearly drop it, scrambling it out of my pocket. Unknown number. My heart slams so hard against my ribs that it hurts.It’s a photograph, and four words.Our greenhouse. Midnight tomorrow.I stare at it until the screen goes dark, and then I tap it awake and stare again.It’s a picture of a glass building at dusk, taken from a path somewhere below it. White iron ribs curving up into a great glass dome, the panes catching the last of the evening light, and dark shapes inside that might be palm trees. It’s beautiful, the way old things are beautiful, and it’s nowhere I’ve ever been.And then I look at it properly, and every hair on my arms stands up.The old greenhouse at th

Chapter 8 - Ronan

Then — Ronan, fifteenI’ve been practising what to say for three days, and I’ve forgotten every word of it before she even gets through the door.The old greenhouse sits at the bottom of the kitchen garden, behind the rows of cabbages and the crumbling brick wall, where nobody from the house ever comes. Half the panes are cracked, and a couple are missing altogether, and the door is so rusted on its hinges that you have to lift it and shove it with your shoulder to get it open. My mother used to grow orchids in here. There are still a few of her old clay pots stacked under the potting bench, green with moss, and a wooden sign in her handwriting that says Please don’t touch the babies, hanging crooked on a nail.Nobody’s touched anything in here for seven years. Nobody but us.It’s been our place since we were nine. We’ve hidden in here from my father, and from her mam’s chores, and from the rain. We

Chapter 9 - Aoife

AoifeI’ve been sitting in the dark for four hours, and I’ve changed my mind about running eleven times.The glasshouse closed at six. I bought a ticket at half past four with almost the last of my money and walked slowly through the long galleries, past the ferns and the desert plants and the pools of floating lilies, the way any tourist would, until I reached the great dome in the middle. Then I waited for the security guard to turn his back, and I slipped through a door marked Staff Only into a narrow storeroom full of watering cans and bags of compost, and I sat down on an upturned bucket in the dark to wait.At ten o’clock, I came out. At eleven, I unlocked the side door from the inside, the way I’d watched a gardener do it that afternoon. Then I came back into the middle of the dome, where the palms grow so tall that their leaves brush the glass, and sat down on the low stone edge of a planter behind a curtain of ferns, wit

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