Thy Kingdom Come (Deliver Us From Evil Trilogy Book One) Read online

  “Harder,” Aoife demands, bouncing on my cock as I fuck her without remorse. I come only after she does, hoping that I’ll forget the face and body I really want. But I don’t.

  It only makes me want her all the more.

  Once I’m done, I clean away the mess I’ve made on Aoife’s back and get dressed.

  She shyly slips on her uniform, and I wonder if I’m the first person she’s broken the rules with. But I’m not naïve, I’m no one special.

  Aoife sews me back up, since my stitches split open while I was riding her hard, and slips me some prescription drugs when she’s done.

  “Naw, thanks.” I refuse the offering because they are the reason my life turned to shite.

  “Maybe I can see ye next week?”

  She surprises me, but I nod. “If I’m still alive, then aye.”

  I’m not being melodramatic. I live each day, not knowing if I’ll wake come morning. That’s my life now.

  An officer comes to get me, cuffing my ankles and wrists before we commence a walk to my cell. “Y’ve got more letters,” he says stiffly. “That’s twenty this week. Who’s writin’ ye?”

  With a shrug, I reply, “I can’t say I know who.”

  And I mean it because since being here, I’ve not read one letter. Nor have I seen one visitor. There’ve been many of each, but I’m not interested in either. Nothing they say, nothing I read will make a difference.

  “What d’ya want me to do with them?”

  With nothing but firm resolve, I state, “Burn them. Burn them all.”

  Five Years Later

  Days and nights, nights and days, I don’t know what’s real anymore.

  I’ve been locked in solitary confinement now for a hundred, or maybe it’s two hundred days? I really don’t know. I don’t mind the quiet. It’s here where I can lose myself to fiction, a life where I live happily ever after.

  I barely remember their faces anymore, the faces which shaped my past. I cling onto small memories, my fragile mind filling in the blanks because I haven’t seen another human being in months. The door whines open, blinding me as the light fractures the darkness.

  “Get up and shower,” an officer demands. “Someone is here to see ye.”

  I try to speak, but no words come out. Maybe I’ve lost my voice. The scratching on the walls I made with my fingernails is the only way I communicate; it was the only way I could speak all those years ago. Chief Constable…I’ve forgotten his name, forbade me to have any paints. He said a murderer doesn’t deserve any luxuries, and he’s right.

  When I think I can speak, I hoarsely utter, “Just leave me be.”

  Letting prisoners “out” for an hour a day for exercise, access to showers and phones, and receiving visitors is seen as the officers respecting us as human beings, but when they remember, we’re made aware that they’re doing us a favor—a favor they’ll call in on in one form or another.

  But this officer is different.

  I’ve forgotten his name, but he’s different because he cares.

  “Come now, ye surely don’t want to see yer sister lookin’ and smellin’ the way ye do.”

  Sister?

  “Will ya do me a kindness and tell her to fuck off?”

  He laughs, standing in the doorway as I curl myself into a ball on the hard floor. “We’ll get ya sorted. Come on.”

  This arsehole won’t take no for an answer, but I don’t want to see Babydoll. She is the last person I want to see.

  “Tell Camilla—”

  “Camilla?” he says, interrupting me. “She says to me her name is Hannah.”

  Hannah? This is the first time an officer has told me who’s come to see me.

  But Hannah is a chile. Why would Fiona allow her to come here?

  Confusion pounds at my temples, but I push past it because Hannah can’t be anywhere near these animals. I know what men in here would do to a wee girl like her.

  Coming to a shaky stand, I use the walls as support as I stumble out. The officer helps me stay upright as he leads me down the long corridor. I suddenly miss the confines of my cell. It’s too open…too real. I don’t want real.

  The officer tosses my arse into the shower where I clean myself, scrubbing the filth from my skin. Once I’m dressed, I look at my reflection in the mirror, looking over my shoulder because the reflection I see isn’t mine.

  This aul’ lad…is this me?

  My hair is long, as is my beard. There are creases around my eyes, probably from constantly squinting in the dark. I don’t recognize this man, this man who looks so much like the man I killed.

  “Ya feelin’ all right?” the officer asks.

  “Happy days,” I reply, prodding my cheeks.

  “We’re away to the visits room,” he explains like I’m supposed to know what that means.

  Once he cuffs me, he leads me through the prison while I keep my head down. I’m not interested in knowing where I am. I just want this done and over with. Once we get to a room surrounded by bars, he stops and goes to uncuff me.

  “Naw, leave them on,” I say. I don’t trust my hands. I don’t trust they won’t reach out and throttle Fiona for bringing Hannah here.

  He nods and unlocks the door.

  There are a few families speaking with their loved ones. Tears are being shed as they catch up on what’s happening outside these walls. I search the room, but I don’t see Fiona. The officer leads me to a table where a young woman is sitting, obviously uncomfortable being here.

  When he stops by the table, indicating she is here to see me, I arch a brow, confused. “We should head. I don’t know her.”

  But when she turns over her shoulder, when I lock eyes with her, I realize that I do know her. I just don’t know this version of her.

  “Bout ye, Punky?”

  I stare at her, words escaping me because there is no way this is Hannah. She’s a wee chile. But this girl sitting before me is no chile.

  “Will ye sit?”

  All I can do is slump into the hard seat, placing my cuffed hands on the table as I try to get comfortable. The cuffs make her uncomfortable.

  The officer nods with a smile and leaves us alone, but he stands close by.

  “Hannah?” I ask, utterly shook.

  She nods slowly. “Aye, it’s me.”

  “But yer so grown.”

  “That’s what happens when ye get older. Ye grow,” she sarcastically says, rolling her eyes. “Maybe if ya bothered to see me, or answer my letters, y’d know it was me.”

  “How old are ye?”

  Her lips part, and pity overcomes her. “I’m sixteen. Almost seventeen. Y’ve been in here for ten years.”

  Shaking my head, I refuse to accept this future. The Hannah I know was scraping her knees and fighting with Ethan…

  “Ethan?”

  When tears fill her eyes, the truth slaps me the fuck awake, and after ten fucking years, I see clearly. I see the life I’ve missed.

  “What’s happened to him?”

  She wipes her nose and sighs. “Why wouldn’t ya see anyone? Why did ye push us away? Ya promised me ye’d come back, but ya never did.”

  “Yer coming back?”

  “Of course, I am.”

  Those words were spoken a lifetime ago.

  “We wrote. We visited. Ya didn’t even want to come to Dad’s funeral. How could ya turn yer back on us, Punky? Ye were all we had.”

  Connor’s funeral. I’d forgotten about that. I hope he and Uncle Sean had the sendoff they deserved.

  “And that’s the reason so. I’m nothin’. I offer ye nothin’ but trouble. Yer better off without me.”

  She narrows her eyes, and at this moment, I see her—the stubborn six-year-old I left behind without an explanation as to why. I broke her heart.

  “Ach, that’s fucking bullshit!” she spits, her anger also growing with age, it seems. “No one told us what happened. Ya just disappeared. D’ya know how that feels? The day Dad died, ya died with him
. We lost everythin’.”

  I do understand how that feels because that’s what happened to me when my ma died. And I did the same thing to the twins. I’m ashamed.

  But her comment has me arching a brow.

  “What d’ye mean?” That wasn’t supposed to happen.

  “Ma couldn’t afford the lifestyle she wanted to live, and after sellin’ all our things, we left our home so that Ma could move onto a new man. She tried to sell the castle, but she couldn’t.”

  “And why not?” I ask, none of this making any sense.

  “Because it wasn’t hers to sell. It’s yours, Puck. Da left everythin’ to you.”

  The room spins, and I grip onto the table, scared I’m going to faint like a wee pussy.

  “Here.” She offers a plastic cup of water, which I throw back as best I can while still cuffed.

  “Cian came to see ye with a lawyer. But ya kept refusin’ to see anyone. The castle now sits abandoned, a place where kids go, expectin’ to see the Kelly ghosts.”

  I can’t tell her why. I can’t tell her that was the deal I made to keep them all safe.

  “I’m sorry, but there are things ya don’t understand.”

  “Explain them then,” she poses, refusing to back down.

  When I don’t elaborate, she shakes her head, annoyed.

  “Ya think we could all just move on without ya? Like ye never existed? Well, we couldn’t. We didn’t want to. I know Connor wasn’t yer da.”

  I shift uncomfortably. I don’t want to talk about this. But Hannah doesn’t give me a choice.

  “But neither is Brody Doyle.”

  “Don’t talk about things ya don’t understand,” I gently warn as she’s bringing up memories I wish to forget.

  Her tenacity makes me bleedin’ proud, even though I want to wring her neck.

  “Officer, take me back to my ce—”

  “No, not this time,” Hannah interrupts, sliding a piece of paper across the table to me. “Aye, these results are of that of yer da, but it’s not Brody’s DNA.”

  Looking over the paper, I see the test results I last saw ten years ago. I don’t know what’s changed. “Whose is it then? If it’s not Connor or Brody, then who is my dad?”

  Hannah works her bottom lip. “Ma didn’t get rid of everything. Cian, Rory, and…Cami, they made sure of it.”

  Why did she pause? Does she know what I did?

  “It’s taken me ten years to find this, but I knew he was still alive. At first, I thought it was a ghost. Or that I was seein’ things. But when Ethan disappeared without tellin’ me where he was, I knew there was only place he’d be.”

  “Hannah, what’s happened to Ethan?” I reach across the table, and with my heart in my throat, I touch her hand.

  We flinch as the touch is foreign to us both.

  Tears trickle down her cheeks as she passes me a leather-bound journal. There is a ribbon bookmarking the page she wants me to read.

  “Read that and tell me what ya think.”

  I have no idea what I’m about to read. I have no idea how this will change my life forevermore.

  He will find out what I did. Sooner or later, he’ll know that I killed her. He’ll know that Cara died because she found out I was dealing to the Catholics. To the Doyles. She betrayed me after she told me she loved me. After she promised she’d never leave me. That I was the one she wanted, not him.

  She was going to leave him, she told me so. But she lied. She was going to leave us both. All she wanted was to save her wain. That’s all she cared for. I couldn’t let her go. She had to die. She’d have told Connor the truth.

  So I killed her, asking the Doyles to help me. Brody knew what that would do to Connor, so he agreed. But he also knew this secret would destroy us both. If Cara told Connor the truth, he would put an end to the Doyles and to me.

  I told Connor she was having an affair with Brody, however, and that’s the reason he never avenged her death. But she never touched Brody. She never would. He believed me because their marriage was already broken long before—that’s how I managed to seduce her.

  Her secret would destroy me, and I couldn’t allow that. I couldn’t allow her to ruin everything I worked so hard for. But there is no such thing as no strings attached with the Doyles and Brody has become greedy, seeing there is profit in Northern Ireland.

  He’s threatened to tell Punky what I did, so I have to take care of it…again.

  That wee hallion is in too deep. I know it was him who killed Aidan and Hugh, he painted their faces just like his.

  He trusts me. He shouldn’t.

  I watch him when he sleeps, he looks so much like Cara. So much like me…

  I will ask Brody to lie, ask him to tell Punky that he is his father as I need Punky to hate Connor more than he already does. I’ll make sure Punky thinks Connor was the one who killed his ma. I need him to denounce his Kelly ties so that when I kill Connor, I’ll be in line to inherit everything…not him. No matter that Connor knows Punky isn’t his, he’ll still leave everything to him because he loves the boy.

  Brody will agree because he thinks he’ll benefit from this too.

  I’ve been in business with him for years. He trusts me. This won’t fail. He believes if he does what I say, he and I will share Belfast together. But there is room for only one leader.

  I was the one sending our men to Brody. They trusted me as Connor was a laughing stock when I told them I fucked his parful wife. Brody had Camilla plant the drugs the night of the party in hopes the chief constable would bring me and Connor down. But then that little whore told Punky. She then told me who she was in a moment of guilt.

  She confided in me, thinking she was doing the right thing. But all she did was let me in on Brody’s plan—he wants me dead. He doesn’t trust me as I thought he did, and so he shouldn’t. He, Punky, he was always Brody’s backup plan.

  Brody has what I want—Dublin. And I have what he wants—Belfast.

  But now that I know, I have the upper hand over everyone.

  I will rule both Belfast and Dublin, and no one will stand in my way. There was never going to be a partnership.

  Punky’s loyalty will either get him killed or sent to prison. I’m fine with either outcome. The ambush will play out how I plan it. I will “die,” allowing everyone to believe the Kelly name is dead. But a smart predator awaits their prey.

  I’m pretty certain Punky will bring Connor as he thinks it’s a lesson he needs to learn, and it’s the perfect place for me to shoot my brother dead with no questions asked. Before this happens, I will convince Connor to change his will. Nothing can be left to Punky—nothing. I don’t want to rule with anyone. This is all mine.

  Punky is headstrong and smart—I need someone I can control.

  Brody will believe he’s won, but I have a plan…just how I did with Connor’s men, I plan on doing the same with Brody’s. I’m going to persuade them all, making them see I’m the better leader.

  And when I do, it’s then when I’ll strike.

  It doesn’t matter if it takes five, ten years. I’m going to build my own empire, and when it’s impenetrable, I will be king. No more coming second best.

  Connor had it all. It’s now my turn, and I don’t care who I have to sacrifice to get what I want.

  Forgive me, Cara, I needed a fall guy, and that guy is Punky…our son.

  Although I’ve seen the words with my own two eyes, I cannot believe it. I just can’t.

  “Punky?” Hannah apprehensively asks. “Please speak to me. I need ya. Ethan needs ya.”

  This journal belongs to Uncle Sean, and his sins are written on pages upon pages. My mind is racing, but one thing is clear—Sean is the puppet master. He was playing us all. He is responsible for everything.

  He made out like my mum was some whore, but in reality, she made one mistake which cost her her life. I know how charming Sean can be. Look at where I am, where I’ve been for the past ten years because of him.

&nb
sp; There was never an affair, well, with Brody. But there was one, with Sean…my father.

  Every conversation which never made sense smashes into me, and I can’t believe I didn’t see it sooner.

  “Ya have no idea who yer fightin’. This is bigger than ya can ever guess.”

  Aidan’s words echo loudly because I finally know what they mean. He never told me what he knew, thinking Sean was their friend, but they were all using one another.

  Brody merely went along for the ride as he wanted me out of the picture for his own selfish reasons. I needed to believe I wasn’t a Kelly so that he could take what is rightfully mine when he killed Sean. I may not be Connor’s son, but I am Sean’s.

  I am a Kelly.

  For ten long years, I carried this guilt with me. I thought Connor’s death was on me, and it was, but I played right into Sean’s hands.

  These ramblings are from a madman, but from what I can decipher, Sean was always going to backstab Brody, as was Brody to Sean. Babydoll was Brody’s pawn, his way to get information on me.

  “’Cause I knew it’d eventually come to this. Yer collateral, and I needed a backup plan, just in case. It doesn’t make sense. But it will.”

  Now it does make sense—Brody knew Sean would double-cross him, which is why he wanted to get there first. He used Babydoll to learn everything there is about me, about the Kellys, so he would know what Sean’s next steps would be.

  Connor said he made a deal with Brody—what was it? I need to find out what it was.

  Brody and Sean were merely using one another because both needed the other to get what they wanted. And it was a race to the finish line, where the winner would take it all.

  They never trusted one another. They played nice because they had to. There are so many things I don’t know because this story has only just begun. But there are two things I do know.

  Sean is a psychopath.

  He is responsible for everything. He killed my mum because she uncovered his dirty secret. He slandered her name to Connor, who believed him—we all did. I wonder if he ever loved her, or just wanted something which belonged to his brother—the man he hated.

  He hated me because he was jealous that my ma loved me more than him, and as punishment, he made me—his own flesh and blood—watch him kill her. Then, to punish me further, he tricked me into thinking he cared about me.