Thug: The Doyles: A Boston Irish Mafia Romance

by Sophie Austin

  I’m shocked to hear my mother talking like this. It makes me wonder about her indiscretions.

  “Your father would lose his mind,” she continues, rolling her eyes. “You know how he feels about the Doyles. Personally, I could not care less about that silly feud, especially once their slut of a mother died.”

  My head jerks up. “That’s an awful thing to say. What did you have against Kathleen Doyle?”

  My mother examines her French manicure for a long moment.

  “Did you know she and I were friends?” She waits for my reaction. I’m taken aback and she nods. “It’s true. When we were girls. The Fitzgeralds were the right kind of people and my family wanted me to make good connections. Move up in social standing.”

  I lean forward, folding my arms across my lap.

  “We spent the summers here, at that big house her family owned. The one her drunk of a brother let go to rot when he inherited it.” She rolls her eyes again. “He was a big goofy ginger then, not my type, naturally. But your father also summered on the Vineyard. Not in Oak Bluffs, of course, but the island isn’t that big, especially if you’re spending your time with quality people.”

  She takes out her compact and looks in the mirror as she presses the tip of her finger against her lip, making sure her lipstick isn’t smudged for some unknown reason.

  “Anyway, Kathleen and I met him at a dance, and I knew immediately that he was the one for me. Of course, even though she was a bit carroty herself, there was something about Kathleen.” My mother puts her compact away and stares into the middle distance. She shivers, and then waves a hand as if dispelling ghosts. “She was charming, well-bred and rich. An artist. Your father was smitten. It was absurd, really. He needed someone far more sensible than Kathleen. Still, she strung him along until Murphy Doyle came into the picture.”

  My mouth opens into a small “o.”

  “Oh, Siobhan. You didn’t think his hatred of the Doyles was purely based on business, do you? Why do you think he wants to buy that disgusting house?”

  I’m too shocked to respond.

  “I have failed you in so many ways,” my mother says. “You’re so naïve, Siobhan. Business riles men up, certainly, but not as much as rejection.”

  “And not women?” I ask. “I’m sure you didn’t like Dad chasing after Kathleen?”

  “He was just being stupid,” she huffs a little laugh. “Once she bedded down with that street rat, he realized that he had a much better option right in front of him.”

  But she doesn’t sound fully convinced.

  And it explains the coldness in my parents’ marriage.

  It explains so many things.

  “Siobhan, I want you to come to Chilmark. Things are going to get ugly, and I don’t want you near the mess. I don’t want you near Kieran Doyle. I don’t believe the nonsense your brother has been spouting about this being some plan to insult him—men always like to believe everything’s about them, don’t they? But you had your fun, and so did he, but it’s over. Understand?”

  I want to defy her, to scream in her face that it’s real with Kieran and me, but is it? Is it possible to make something work with him? Given my brother’s reaction to finding him in my room, it seems unlikely.

  Feeling defeated, I nod wordlessly.

  “That’s a good, smart girl,” my mother says. “Lord knows I can’t count on your sisters for a good marriage. Go upstairs and pack now.”

  When I get to my room, there’s a text message from Kieran. It’s a gif of a dog pulling another dog in for a hug. It’s so him.

  I choke back my tears and start packing my suitcases.

  20

  Kieran

  Siobhan lets me know that her family is taking her back to Chilmark.

  It’s hard not seeing her. I don’t want her getting in trouble because of me.

  But I guess it’s better this way too, for both of us. Less complicated.

  I have to focus on helping my family. On turning my idea into reality.

  We’d dodged James Carney’s land grab before by setting up the fish shack, and I had the idea of doing the same thing here by turning the house into an inn.

  It’d kill two birds with one stone—save the land from the Carneys and keep my uncle from being alone.

  Vinny painted up a sign that said “Inn.” Seamus is filing the paperwork. He said it’s crazy, but it just might work.

  And Danny likes the idea of the house living on in a way that people can enjoy.

  Spending the summer with Siobhan has left me a mess of feelings. It’s not that I don’t like feelings.

  They tell you you’re alive.

  It’s just I prefer the uncomplicated ones.

  And the reality of me and Siobhan is messy as hell.

  Her brothers will be out for my blood.

  Still, that doesn’t stop me from going into a shop to buy her a gift. I’m passing a small jewelry store when something catches the light. It’s a rose gold Claddagh ring. It’s delicate, and it reminds me of her.

  Some part of me can’t fathom giving a woman a ring; but what can I say?

  An Irish romantic half-in-love with a redhead that would look perfect in a rose gold Claddagh band?

  Yeah, like I’m going to resist.

  It’s days before I see her.

  I want to give her space, but I can’t let that moment in her room be the last time I see her.

  I wait outside the theater door before her show. That cool veneer is back but drops a bit when she sees me. She looks around carefully.

  It makes me hate her family even more. I didn’t know that was possible.

  “Let me store my violin, and then let’s go for a walk.”

  Maybe we can talk: about our families, about ourselves, about what’s coming and what’ll happen when we go back to Boston.

  We walk the winding path along the seashore. Normally, being by the ocean calms me down, but today harsh waves crashing against the rocks seemed to echo my mood.

  “Is everything okay with your brothers?” I ask, touching her elbow gently. She smiles ruefully, tilting her head.

  “Finn thinks you slept with me to get to him.”

  “That slimy son of a bitch,” I growl, clenching my hands.

  Her brother. Right.

  “Sorry, Siobhan. You have to know that’s not true, right?” I stop and put my hands on her shoulders. “Tell me you know that’s not true?”

  “I know. Finn’s projecting—he’s the one who uses women.” She sighs. “It’s fine. Let’s go back to not talking about my brothers.”

  I’m still going to punch that motherfucker in the mouth, but Siobhan doesn’t need to know that.

  I ask her about her show—it’s either the last or second to last one—I can’t remember. This past week has been a blur. She lights up at my interest in all the technical details, and then tips her pretty face to look up at me.

  "Kieran, why didn't you become a professional musician?"

  The question takes me by surprise.

  “Maybe if you were a musician instead of, you know, it’d be easier.”

  Oh. I see.

  Her expression is so earnest, and I feel compelled to answer.

  "Not all of us had that choice." I try to sound gentle.

  We walk a few more steps, when she stops short. She turns her slender body toward mine.

  “What do you mean?”

  "I'm just saying that not everybody had the option or the resources to pursue their passions as a full-time career. I'm very glad you got that opportunity."

  The last piece is honest, but I can also tell that it's lame. It probably sounds tacked on.

  It feels tacked on.

  "Do you think that what I've achieved has been easy for me?" There’s a sharpness to her voice.

  What’s happening here? Her anger seems to be coming out of left field. I don't think I've ever seen such fire in her eyes. The force of it blows me back a little. But it also sparks of matching an
ger in me. Does she think I had any kind of choice in my life? That I could be anything other than a Doyle?

  Who wouldn’t prefer an uncomplicated life? But it’s not the hand I was dealt.

  “Not completely, but in some ways it was,” I say. “You’re talented, and you’ve worked hard. But you were given that shot too. I was never going to have the choice to go professional, not when my father needed me helping with the family business.”

  Her eyes are blazing, her cheeks bright red. She's beautiful in her fury and terrifying in her focus.

  "No choice, Kieran? You’re not the only one who didn’t have a choice. Are you really so naïve to believe that the daughter of James and Rose Carney had it easy becoming a violinist? I'm sorry, do you have any idea how quickly they were to glom onto the slightest hint of talents."

  She's so angry she's practically spitting.

  "How relentlessly they drove me to practice. How mechanically they stripped the joy out of each and every facet of music, of the violin, of voice. I bet you don't know that I can sing. I'm a classically trained soprano. I promised myself that I wouldn't sing again, because it was the one thing that I would keep just for me."

  Those words hit me like an unexpected blow.

  I had no idea. It makes me wonder what else I've missed about Siobhan Carney during this magical summer of ours, as much as I’ve tried to see the truth.

  But that doesn't absolve her of my anger, and it doesn't keep me from saying the next thing the blasts into my head.

  "Do you know how badly I wanted to play? Do you know how many times I got in trouble, sneaking out so that I could play guitar? Or how many people told me I had to get a job?"

  I didn't know these depths of anger existed in me still. I thought I'd left them behind, on the floor of my dad's office that day, as Murphy had sent me to the Coast Guard. That set me on the path to what became my life now. Not my choices, but life and my family’s needs carving out a path for me.

  "You've heard me play. You know I have the talent. I just never had the shot."

  Something like empathy touches her eyes, but she doesn't back down.

  She shakes her head. "Kieran, don’t try to tell me that your family didn’t have the resources to invest in your talent. You go on about how my father is cutting poor people out of their homes, and maybe he is, but let’s not pretend that your family isn’t elite too. Your beat-up truck isn’t fooling anyone."

  I’m pissed now. Not because I think I’ve had it so hard, but because I thought she’d see that I’d fought to get where I am. Because I thought I’d recognized a kindred spirit in this woman, and because I’m terrified I might have been wrong.

  Her eyes are bright with a fervor so strong that it holds me arrested.

  "Listen, Kieran, let me get one thing straight. My family might have money, and you might come from more humble roots. You didn't exactly grow up in the gutter. That giant house down the street says otherwise."

  I don't want to get angry at this moment. I don't want to raise my voice to her. Don’t want to prove her shit brothers right about me. But I know she's dangerously close to some fuse, some hidden landmine of anger that I didn't even know was there. I don't want to detonate this in her direction.

  “I was bussing tables when I was eight," I bite out the words. "Every day after school, every weekend, every summer. If I wasn't working in the bar, I was working construction. If I wasn't working construction, I was doing other things for my father that I don't want to discuss with you."

  The worlds seem ugly. She seems a little taken aback, but something has come into her face. A calmness and a clarity.

  “Because you had to, Kieran? Because otherwise your father couldn’t pay the bills? Or were you being forced to learn some kind of blue-collar lesson so you could pretend to be the man of the people? Do you remember what you said to me that night on the beach, about the stories we tell ourselves? About the things we tell ourselves about our lives, and about the world to make that make sense?"

  I do. I know exactly what she's saying, and I can sense the edges of where she's going. More than anything, I wish she would stop.

  "I’m brave enough to admit that the time we've spent together has let me see things in a new light. You've gotten me to reconsider some of the things that I believe are true about my father, about my family, and about our business. And if you don't think that's had an impact on the conversations I'm having with him, and on the things I'm going to do when I get home then you're very mistaken."

  She is in full anger mode.

  "But when I look at your family, I see so many things that I never had. Open, honest affection, for one thing.”

  She’s right about that. Being a Doyle exacts a price, but the love is there.

  Siobhan takes in a small, ramshackle house that sits on a windblown lot diagonal from where we stand. There’s a beater of a car in the driveway, held together by duct tape and faith.

  She looks like she’s ready to cry. "There’s real poverty here, Kieran. And that kind of poverty is what I believed my father's infrastructure projects and investments were making a difference on back home. You’re not poor. You’re an upper middle-class kid whose father has a really harsh work ethic, and who’s been too afraid to confront the reality that even though he loves his family, that sometimes love costs a certain kind of freedom.”

  It's like she reaches into my stomach and rips my intestines out.

  "I know you love your father. I know you love your brothers. I even think you're happy doing what you do. But at some point, you're going to have to face the reality that you're not just in the business you’re in because you fell into it. Nobody forced you. At first, maybe, but at some point, it was a choice. At some point you decided that being a Doyle was more important to you that being a musician."

  She's losing steam. Some of the blazing light goes out of her eyes.

  "And that's not necessarily a bad thing. You don't have to do something as a job to love it. But at a certain point, you do have to take responsibility for the life that you've lived. And you have to take responsibility for the things that you ignore. Isn't that the whole point of what you've been trying to tell me about my family?"

  I want to say something. I want to roll the clock back. But I feel like a live nerve that had its outermost layer peeled back.

  Some part of me knows that everything she said is right.

  But I also hate that she can see this about me. I hate how our names stand between us.

  “Siobhan, those might be easy things to say where you’re standing, but you’ll just leave here and it’ll be like nothing ever happened.” It’s not what I mean to say, but it’s what I’m fucking terrified is true. “You’ll get your fancy, well-connected husband and forget this summer ever happened.”

  Her eyes blaze again. “Is that what you think? That this has cost me nothing, that this has changed nothing?”

  She’s already wrapping her arms around herself. It’s one of those self-comforting gestures that tells you something’s happened too many times, that people don’t care.

  No matter what I’m feeling, I want more than anything to hold her. But she holds up a hand.

  “No, Kieran. Just leave me alone. I thought you were different, but you’re just another man telling me how I feel while also setting a future for me that I want no part of. By the way, ask your uncle about why my father really hates your family. You’ll find it enlightening.”

  Watching her walk away makes me furious. I want to hit everything in sight. I settle for going back to the house, wondering what she meant by her comment about my uncle. I know why her asshole father hates us—he’s greedy and selfish, and we’re in his way. It’s as simple as that. When I get back, I see Vinny coming down the front stairs looking concerned, I pick up my pace.

  “Carneys,” is all he says, and I’m headed inside.

  I’ve been looking for a fight.

  21

  Kieran

  It's not hard t
o find out where James Carney is staying. He's rented one of the big ocean-facing houses in Chilmark.

  Two days after I dispatch his goons, including one of his loser sons, I head over for a visit.

  It strikes me that this isn't dissimilar to when I visited their house a few months back in Boston. I don't get to the front door before it swings open and Finn, with the scar above his eyebrow and the snarky look in his eyes, glares at me.

  "I'm sorry, Doyle," he says with a sneer. “We’re not hiring. Now get out before I knock your teeth out for using my sister.”

  I want to snap his neck, but instead I give him a big shit eating grin. "Hello Finn. Daddy at home?”

  I don't know if it's the tone or the blatant disregard of him as a threat, but things start to escalate fast. Finn bristles and starts moving in my direction. I shouldn’t get into a fight with Siobhan's brother on the front porch. But I’ve had it. I am over this entire thing. Finn is just about to throw his first punch and I've just resolved myself to breaking his wrist when a cold, polished voice comes from inside the door.

  "Good morning, Mr. Doyle. I assume that you're here to speak with me and not with my son." His cold dismissal of Finn is something Murphy would never have done to me, not even when I was at my worst, most belligerent.

  Doesn’t mean I won’t rub it in. "Sorry, Finn. The adults need to talk business. But don't worry, little man, I'd be happy to teach you to fight later."

  Finn’s face is florid and it probably doesn't help that his father snorts. At least I know where Siobhan gets it.

  Carney leads me through the house. The inside is a study in tasteful, expensive New England elegance. It’s cold and boring. I roll my eyes as we pass a nautical map of the waters surrounding the Vineyard. I’m sure the owner of this place has never piloted a boat. That’s what the help is for. We walk over to a den Carney has claimed for himself off in a corner room. "Have a seat, Mr. Doyle."

  He takes his own chair behind the desk.