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All Chapters of Bought By The Irish Mafia Boss: Chapter 201 - Chapter 210

211 Chapters

Chapter 10 - Aoife

AoifeRonan Gallagher is on his knees in front of me.He doesn’t fall. He just sinks, slowly, as though his legs have finally given up holding him, right there on the wet stone path in the middle of the dark greenhouse, with his gun on the ground beside him and his empty hands open on his thighs. The most feared man in the city. The man who walked into room fourteen and came out with blood on his hands and nothing in his face.He’s on his knees in front of me, and he’s crying.Not the way men cry in films, with one quiet tear. He’s crying the way he cried when we were eight, the night of his mother’s funeral, when I found him curled up under the potting bench in the old greenhouse. Great, wrenching, silent sobs that shake his whole body, his face twisted, his shoulders heaving, his breath coming in ragged gasps. Tears running down past the white scar under his eye and dripping off his jaw onto his shirt.“I&rsquo

Chapter 11 - Ronan

RonanShe falls asleep in the car somewhere past the city limits, with her fingers still knotted in my sleeve. I don’t move my arm for two hours. I drive east along the dark expressway with the window cracked to keep myself awake, until the towns thin out and the road narrows, and I can smell the sea.She sleeps the way people sleep when they haven’t been allowed to for a long time, curled small against the door with her bag clutched to her chest. Every time a lorry roars past, her whole body jerks. The first time it happens, I nearly drive off the road. After that, I start talking to her under my breath, about nothing. The road. The weather. The time I put a frog in the sugar bowl and her mam chased me round the kitchen with a wooden spoon.The next time a lorry goes by, she only frowns in her sleep and turns her face further into my sleeve.It’s nearly three when the headlights catch the little grey house at the end of the sandy lane, crouched low behin

Chapter 12 - Aoife

Then — Aoife, fifteenRonan Gallagher is waiting for me at the crossroads bus stop in a flat cap and the ugliest jumper I’ve ever seen in my life.It’s mustard yellow, with a hole in one elbow and a darn on the other, and it’s at least two sizes too big for him. The cap is pulled so low that I can barely see his eyes. He’s leaning against the bus shelter with his hands shoved in his pockets, trying very hard to look like a lad from the village who’s never been near a big house in his life.He looks exactly like a rich boy in a stolen jumper.“Where did you get that?” I ask him.“Paddy in the stables,” he tells me. “I gave him a tenner for it.”“You were robbed,” I tell him. “I know,” he says, and grins at me from under the cap, and my stomach does something stupid. “But nobody’s g

Chapter 13 - Aoife

AoifeI know his voice.That’s the worst part. Not the gun I can’t see but am sure he’s carrying, or the car outside, or the fact that he found us when Ronan swore no one could. It’s that when Cillian O’Rourke says my name, I know exactly how he says it. The slight drop at the end. The way he used to call it across our tiny kitchen on Sunday afternoons, when he came through the door shaking rain off his coat and asking what was in the oven.I’m standing at the end of the hallway with my knife raised, and every part of my body remembers him.“Aoife,” he says again, quieter.“Don’t,” I tell him. My voice comes out high and wrong. “Don’t you say my name.”Ronan moves. He doesn’t move towards Cillian, or towards me. He steps sideways into the middle of the hallway, so that his body is between us. His back is to me. His face is to the door. And his left arm

Chapter 14 - Ronan

RonanThe engine is coming from the north, from the road at the top of the lane, and it’s coming fast.“Get in my car,” I tell Aoife.She doesn’t argue. She doesn’t even look at Cillian. She grabs her bag from the kitchen table, shoves her bare feet into her boots without lacing them, and runs past me down the porch steps with the knife still in her fist. By the time I reach the driver’s door, she’s already in the passenger seat with her belt on, staring straight ahead through the windscreen.Cillian is at his own car. He looks at me across the roof.“Mine’s clean,” he says. “Yours is known. Go across the dunes. The track at the bottom of the garden comes out on the beach road. I’ll be right behind you.”“Cill…”“Go,” he says.I go.The track at the bottom of the garden is barely a track at all, just two ruts in t

Chapter 15 - Aoife

Then — Aoife, sixteenMam goes to the market in town every second Thursday, and she always leaves me a list.This Thursday, it’s pinned to the kitchen door in her careful, slanting hand. Scald the milk for the custard. Peel the potatoes. Fetch two pounds of flour and the good jam down from the pantry. Don’t let the range go out. Back by four. Love, Mam.I’ve done the milk and the potatoes. I’m humming when I go into the pantry, because Ronan is in the stable yard helping Paddy with the new mare, and when he’s finished, he’ll come round to the kitchen door like he does every second Thursday, and sneak in, and steal a spoonful of whatever’s on the stove, and kiss me against the dresser while I pretend to be cross.It’s a year since the greenhouse. A whole year of secrets and stolen afternoons, and his father has never suspected a thing. We’ve been so careful.The pantry is narrow and cold an

Chapter 16 - Aoife

AoifeThe storm comes over the mountains a little after midnight, and the power goes out with the first crack of thunder.I’m lying awake in Liam’s spare room, in the dark, listening to it come. I’ve been listening for an hour. First the wind, rising in the pines around the cabin. Then the low grumble far away over the lake, getting closer. Then the rain, starting soft and then coming down all at once, hammering on the tin roof so hard that it sounds like a thousand fists.And then I can’t breathe.Because I know that sound. Rain on a roof like this, loud enough to drown out the whole world. Rain on glass, in a greenhouse at the bottom of a kitchen garden, while a boy who could barely get his words out told me he was mad about me.I get up. I’m wearing a T-shirt and a pair of thick wool socks that Liam left folded on the end of the bed, and one of Ronan’s hoodies, which I took off the back of a chair this afterno

Chapter 17 - Ronan

Then — Ronan, seventeenShe’s sitting on the potting bench in the greenhouse when I come in, with her hands folded in her lap, and she doesn’t get up to kiss me. That’s how I know something’s wrong.It’s a cold, bright afternoon in March, with the sun coming slantwise through the cracked panes and lighting up the dust in the air. My mother’s old sign is still hanging crooked on its nail. Please don’t touch the babies. There’s a jam jar of daffodils on the bench beside Aoife that she must have picked on the way down, and she’s staring at them as if they might tell her what to say.“Red?” I ask.She looks up at me. Her face is very pale, and her eyes are red, and she’s been crying. My whole body goes cold. I’m across the greenhouse and on my knees in front of her before I know I’ve moved, my hands on her knees, looking up into her face.“What did

Chapter 18 - Ronan

RonanWhen I wake up, she’s standing in the kitchen in my hoodie, burning pancakes.For a long moment, I don’t move. I lie on the sofa under the blanket with my arm still curled round the warm space where she was, and I watch her through the doorway. The storm has blown itself out, and the morning is pale and clean, with sunlight coming off the lake in wavering silver lines across the ceiling. She’s barefoot on the wooden floor, with the sleeves of my hoodie shoved up to her elbows and her hair a wild red tangle down her back. She’s frowning at the frying pan as if it has personally insulted her.Smoke is rising from it in a thin grey ribbon.“Red,” I say.She jumps and spins round, spatula raised like a weapon. Then she sees me, and her face does something soft that I’d forgotten it could do.“Don’t say anything,” she tells me.“I wasn’t going to,” I tell h

Chapter 19 - Ronan

RonanFor a long moment, neither of us moves.She’s still holding the front of my T-shirt in both fists, and I’m still on my knees beside the bed, and the room is so quiet that I can hear the lake moving against the shore outside. Her eyes are open. She’s awake now, properly awake. I watch her come all the way back into herself, and realise what she’s just said.I watch her want to take it back. “Red,” I tell her.She lets go of my shirt. Her hands fall into her lap, and she sits up slowly against the headboard, pulling the blanket round her shoulders, and the ring on its chain glints at her throat in the moonlight. She doesn’t look at me. She looks at the wall.“I was dreaming,” she says.“Ye weren’t,” I tell her. “Ronan…”“Ye said he was still breathing,” I tell her. My voice

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