by Fiona Keane
“Thank you, Liam.” I looked up at him, rewarded with his charismatic smile. He reached for the towels and wrapped one around my hair, although he was without a clue and it fell immediately onto my shoulders. With his help, I climbed from the tub and peeled off my bra and knickers before slipping into a plush white bathrobe Liam extended to me with his head respectfully turned.
“Who did you kill, Liam?” I inquired as he stepped around me, my hands in his, and we walked into the hotel room. He helped me settle into a leather chair and lifted my feet to the ottoman before turning his back to me and fixing a drink.
“Do you remember me telling you how Julian got shot? Why Malcolm shot him?”
“Yes. Lucy.” Our eyes met as he turned to hand me a glass of water. Liam sat across from me, swirling a glass of amber liquid in his right hand while he spoke.
“Her dad was in the building with you, on guard, so to speak.”
“I take it he isn’t anymore?” I eyed him, still adjusting to the ease he and his brother lived with taking lives. Liam shook his head, as though it was that simple of a reply.
“Him, their thug Dylan, and some mindless goon on patrol.” I let his comment settle, its weight heavy in my heart. There were to be consequences to his skills that night, the hurry with which he took me from the building suggested that enough, let alone the fact he killed Charles Foley. The name was tossed around in conversation with Julian and Liam enough times that I understand Charles wasn’t a soldier, although he also wasn’t much more. Liam’s casual divulgence lacked emotion; his statement was simple fact compared to the elusive details protected by his brother.
I ached with the thought. If I pretended, I could still feel his lips on me, the moment he kissed me before leaving my apartment, the pressure of his fingers against my skin, how incredible he smelled…
“When did he leave, Liam?” I inquired, stroking the side of my water glass to keep myself focused.
“What?” Liam was a damn idiot. Savior, yes, but entirely stupid to assume my soul wouldn’t absorb the memory of Julian left lingering with his cologne.
“He was here and now I’ve replaced him as your companion.” I bit my top lip, willing the tears to remain behind the barricade of my swollen eyelids. “Does it have something to do with you killing those men?”
“No, bird,” Liam cut me off, “it doesn’t.”
“You sound like him.” A smile met my tears before I succumbed to a sob. “He’s…alive.” The thought of Julian alive, and the desperation my soul felt to see him, was debilitating. The torture of his cologne lingering around in a painful mockery, a tease at our forbidden love, was destructive. Liam eyed me from the side, almost painfully avoiding me, before speaking.
“He’s marrying Noelle. We met with our grandfather. It’s the only way to keep you alive and…Julian will do anything to keep you that way,” Liam remarked, quick to return to the glistening cubes of ice in his scotch glass.
“You think I’m a fool, don’t you? You think I’ll believe you, that I won’t interfere with this disaster of a plot? You think I’m just going to go away?”
“No.” He laughed. “I don’t think any of that. I know it, Aideen. It’s really simple. You die or you live.”
I was lost. Words, thought, priority—they hung so far away from me that I couldn’t latch on to anything. I stared at Liam, tears dried, and watched him. I studied his bare chest and the etchings of his heritage covering his skin, wishing I had the strength to stand against him and reciprocate the pain his honesty caused my soul. He swallowed his scotch, further speech left to our imaginations, and stood from the chair. My gaze stuck on his empty seat, unable to silence my rapid breaths, while Liam walked to the bed.
He can’t marry her. I didn’t want to live if it was without him, nor would I die without him at my side. Yet where was I but a temporary haven with his brother and without any sign of permanency, no figment of a solution, no suggestion of security. Liam was my key, but I couldn’t break three hearts.
“I would’ve taken you from there anyway.” Liam’s quiet words broke our silence, and his eyes lifted to mine before he continued. “You didn’t need to pretend you want me. Don’t break my heart any further, bird. I knew you’d never give yourself to anyone else. It’s Julian who has your heart, your wings. It always has been.”
“I’m sorry, Liam,” I muttered, overcome with guilt as I comprehended how he interpreted my every move before the thought even formed in my mind.
“We’ve all done things we aren’t proud of.” He paused as he stood from the bed and wandered to the window. “I was utterly horrible to you back there. I abused you as they did, ripped your heart into pieces I fear won’t ever be glued together—even with Julian’s help. I don’t expect you to understand, but that’s the way it is here, in all of this.”
“In this family.”
“Yes,” he agreed, “and it isn’t excusable. It’s the only way I could get you out and back on our side.”
“You mean your side,” I realized, studying the movement of his tattoos along tensed arms as they responded to the tightening of his fists. I pondered his words, his intricate ability to play all sides and anticipate each player in their horrid game. Julian was somewhere else, protecting me with a broken heart, and I was alone in all of it with his brother. Liam turned to me once more, his eyes wicked and vast.
“He’s marrying Noelle. The hen’s got an egg, bird, and you now have a life.”
A sizzling erupted behind me as the table lamp fell to the floor. Liam jumped across the bed and pulled me by the shoulders until both of our bodies were flush with the carpet. I lost breath beneath the weight of Liam as he covered me against the ground, his pounding heart racing into my back. The door burst open behind us with a force that separated the lock from the wall. A flurry of footsteps paced the floor as Liam meticulously removed himself from me. I kept my head to the ground, curled into a ball beneath the bed.
“You’ve been a very naughty boy, Liam,” a man called from somewhere inside the room. I heard Liam move near me, his voice clear and intimidating as though he seamlessly fell into his act.
“I just wanted a taste before handing her over,” Liam sniggered, his feet stopping at my side. Our companion laughed, a sound that curdled my blood before Liam knelt and his words pierced my ears.
“Trust me, babby.” His quick, hushed use of Julian’s endearment snapped me from the terrified stupor, and I rose with ease at his command.
“Here she is,” Liam announced, and I followed his voice to observe a man I vaguely recognized, having seen him only twice—Elliott’s funeral and the hotel, the night Julian’s secrets turned to memories. I recognized him nonetheless and remembered Julian’s concern about his presence, never understanding why until he stood across from Liam and me with a loaded pistol.
Chapter Thirteen
JULIAN
I plotted his death for an entire day. Alone. No Liam, no Maureen, and still no Aideen. The only solace I could swallow was knowing Liam’s in while he played both sides and the hope he would protect her as promised. However, I wouldn’t expect anyone to risk their life for Aideen—that was my duty, my loyalty to her.
I stared out the window at the sleet, which fell like tiny bullets from the swollen, gray sky. I despised the luxury of heat, a toilet, food, because I knew she had none. I knew the sort of cage in which they held her prisoner, a victim of knowing me—of loving me. My thoughts drifted to the first time I was thrown in a cellar a decade ago, an initiation of sorts, but my body wouldn’t allow a shiver of repulsion, and instead I closed my eyes and thought of telling everything to Aideen in the hospital…
She studied me expectantly, her doe-eyes wide with a desperation for knowledge.
“They want me to run in my grandfather’s place for the next election.” I paused, feeling the weight of my words. “It’s my destiny.”
“Do you want it?”
“It’s never been about what I want,” I admi
tted. “I like to think I have a voice in this repulsively twisted world in which we live, but it seems my voice is more of an echo to those deeply under the spell of Gordon Molloy.”
“He sounds like a horrible person, Julian. I’m so sorry,” she muttered, a soft moan following as she adjusted her position on the mattress. “You should just poison his coffee one morning. I know just the roast that will cover up anything.”
She grinned at me wickedly.
“I’ll remember that.” I winked. “If it were that easy, though, I assure you I would have done it a decade ago.”
“What happened then?”
Everything. I glanced at her, hesitantly consuming the innocent expectation that painted her face while Aideen waited for my response. I could have begun with honesty, entirely divulging the truth of how he helped my father murder my mother, how I remember protecting Liam from the sight of her silk nightgown stained with blood as our father carried it through the foyer, or I could consider a way to walk around it all. It had been a lifetime of covering up the errors of my family name, pretending I agreed with and valued the fictitious honors it brought me, and I suddenly found myself caught between the desperation to scream the truth only to Aideen’s ears and wishing my heart didn’t long so desperately for her to hear my sound. But I did; the longing was incessant, beautiful, and unsoiled.
She was watching me waiting, with a kind, expectant smile on her stunning face. A gentle pink kissed her cheeks, her alabaster skin returning from its grayest of days, exposing who I imagined Aideen truly was. She twisted strands from her ponytail. I was suffocating with the truth of my identity, unable to consider how or when to best include any of that information with her.
Swallowing thoughts of my family, quickly seeing my mother’s soiled nightgown once more being carried through our home, and overcome with guilt that Aideen might face a similar fate, I leaned forward and began revealing what I could.
“Shortly after I found out the truth about my mother’s death, I graduated from Harvard. To celebrate, my father and grandfather took me into a cellar beneath a pub owned by a family friend. I can still taste the sour whisky and the scent of the wooden crates left saturating the concrete floor when my grandfather shot his pistol right at my head and missed. I learned that my grandfather truly is the devil, but my life was bound. These…this filth…” I pulled my sleeves back, exposing the ink that decorated my skin. “…that enamors you, the painted eulogy to my life, what you so enjoy studying with such innocent curiosity, is far more than a tattoo.”
“You’re branded.”
The words left her lips with barely a whisper, a muted realization floating between us. Beneath a furrowed brow, I eyed her wearily, consuming the sense of knowing—acceptance.
“After he told me the precise definition of our name, its demand and secrecy, its power and menace, my life changed. This switch flipped in my world: always wondering, finally aware, and all the while I was lost. They trained me like a soldier, brainwashing me into believing their wrong was my right, abusing my soul, and further cutting my heart into fragments. It’s become routine, who I am and what I do. It’s me. It’s part of me. This scar, this hole left where there once was a soul…no, that’s not true. My body never held potential to have a soul, Aideen. My destiny was carved the moment my mother made the mistake of looking at my father.”
“Then what do you do with yourself every day? You sit in the shadows of Satan, waiting to kill him? I know I would.”
“Pretty much.” A scoffing laugh tumbled from my throat, nervously realizing how dangerously simple it was to tell Aideen my story, to let her in, all the while knowing just how lethal that decision could be.
“He’s a marvelous politician,” I continued, aware of the risk that came with divulging this truth. “Nobody would know he spends his life robbing, murdering, and corrupting a world beyond the boundaries of Boston, but for those who follow the profession beneath my family’s name. Nobody would assume I’m next in line to carry that burden. There isn’t a soul out there who wouldn’t end up bound to concrete at the bottom of the Mystic if they would even think such a thought.”
“I just wanted to know who you are,” Aideen whispered coolly. “Not the things that are going to get you murdered.”
“This is my life, and like it or not, you’re in it. Whether through Malcolm, or my heart desperate for yours, we’re now branded too.” Her head rolled to the side, a soft moan of resistance in the fabric of her pillow, and she faced me expectantly while I spoke with both hands painfully scouring my scalp.
“Why are you telling me all of this?”
I looked at the ceiling, demanding powers from a being I’d questioned since my mother’s death, willing my heart and mind to fluently compose a thought, hoping my truth would be Aideen’s. With an anguished exhale, aching to breathe in all that was her, I dropped my hands to my lap and caught Aideen’s eyes.
“Because I’m actually someone when I’m with you. Even contained in the suffocating walls of this room, I’m someone beyond my destiny, and it’s because of you. Around you, with you, I can be me.” Aideen fell silent; the only sense of security was her unflinching gaze. She was contemplative, with a small glimmer shining at my terrified soul while she watched me. What the hell did I just say? I hadn’t been that nervous to actually tell her who I was when I hardly knew her. Why isn’t she talking?
The involuntary twitch of my fingers against my thighs was painfully distracting, a pathetic way for my mind to remind me I was alive, anchored in nervous fidgets. I pushed up the sleeves of my sweatshirt, looking once more at Aideen and catching the flicker of her eyes to the canvas of my arm.
“You’re religious.” Her stare fixed on the Celtic cross burned into my skin, the symbol of ancestry and authority, greed and murder, lust for power and control.
I sealed my eyes, overwhelmed with the thought of our beginning and how our history damaged her. How I let her down; her heart full of unconditional acceptance and promise, yet I failed her. Branded. This life left Aideen with a mark so raw, I would be marred with tallies, and she might still not be whole. I had her, and I lost her. Again. I couldn’t pray to a god because, even if one existed, my plea would fall on deaf ears.
I peered down at my forearm, turning my wrist to watch the movement of muscles shift along the cross. The burn that crept along each line of my etching of heritage won the battle for pain against my healing wound from the car bomb. One of the last things Aideen and I discussed in bed was the tattoo she remembered as its owner tried to suffocate her.
“Holy fu—” I pulled my hands over my face, muffling my boisterous shout as it melted into one troubling sound. The tattoo. How could I be so fucking blind? They knew about her from the moment I did. Malcolm found Aideen in the hospital, and he’s working for someone now; Regan, Regan and my grandfather. It was Regan who told my grandfather to pay his respects at Elliott Daly’s funeral, where Sheehan waited like a festering boil with his balls ready to burst over Malcolm Young. They knew. It took everything not to punch a hole through the window. I started to heave, gasping for breath that wouldn’t flow. They knew. I stumbled forward, and my forehead slammed against the frozen window. The heat from my skin melted the layers of ice, my silhouette a clear view of downtown Boston.
As the fire inside of me threatened to explode, I wondered if it had all been a trap. Did my grandfather disturb our sleep to degrade us with the recent news of the world admiring Aideen as I did, with Regan’s arrival a surprise? No. I couldn’t assume it was anything less than sinister. Those weren’t real men, not even human. Those demons spent their lives destroying the fibers of humanity for their gain. It was disgusting, made frighteningly worse by the fact I was an accomplice. It was me who tore apart the soul of my lover with my existence and inability to protect her from their evil grasp. They worked together to destroy me, her, us.
I glided my left fingers over the healing pain in my side, considering the car bomb and its consequences.
Was Noelle involved? Her entire family was at the theatre that night, but she lacked voluntary thought; she’s simply a tool at their disposal. Noelle was so disastrously obsessed with marrying me that she wouldn’t participate in my murder…but she would have no problem trying to kill Aideen. It’s her, us. The hospital, the tattoo, her memories, the car bomb, this; it was all to take from me the one precious piece of our tattered world held sacred in my heart. And how did they know where Aideen would be? Liam and I were right to dispose of her ring, but we weren’t the only ones who knew its potency. Emma Daly. She slipped up, but I was too late to catch it and shove it down her throat. I couldn’t focus on everyone in Aideen’s life lying to her, for the sake of fuck I omitted our entire relationship to protect her, with time running out to figure the intricacies of my grandfather’s involvement…and Aideen’s memories. Christ! Did that even matter anymore? I needed her now! Everything mattered. It was an intricate web of deceit I needed to tear apart to finally end their torture.
The ring, the car bomb, Elliott Daly’s funeral, the last night I saw Aideen. Who was there every time? Edward Regan, Gordon Molloy, and…my sister. It wasn’t him, them; it was her.
I glowered at the city below me, envious of the liberation and naivety of its inhabitants, while I stretched and tightened my fists. The sleet tapped the pane, its sound my only companion in the room while I considered the fact someone with whom I shared lineage attempted to murder the love of my life before I had the chance to tell her who I was, before I could even feel the softness of her mouth against mine. I leaned forward too far, tweaking a stitch in my side.
Elsewhere in his home, I heard the shuffling of footsteps and mumbled dialogue. It was my cue to drink, requiring a heavy intoxicant to numb my wrath and prevent a bloodbath before finding Aideen. Liam and I had so much left to discuss, to plot, but even breathing was a struggle for me as I anticipated their next moves.
