CHAPTER FIFTEEN #2
I don't know how long I stood there. Seconds. Minutes. Time stopped working. I remember my legs giving out. Remember hitting the floor. Remember the sound I made, this noise that came from somewhere so deep inside me that I didn't recognize it as my own voice.
Then I was on my feet again. Moving. Not thinking, just moving, because thinking would mean accepting what I was seeing, and I couldn't do that. Not yet. Not ever.
I tried to lift him. Grabbed his legs and tried to take the weight off the rope. His body was cold. Not recently dead cold, but cold cold. Hours cold. He'd been hanging there while I slept in my bed two floors above him. While I dreamed about nothing. While my father died alone in the dark.
I should have come sooner. Should have checked on him. Should have known something was wrong when the door was unlocked. Should have been a better son. Should have been enough to make him want to stay.
But I wasn't. And he didn't.
I called for help. Someone came. Security, I think. Then Aidan. Then more people. The Gardaí. The ambulance that came too late. Men in uniforms asking questions I couldn't answer because the only words in my head were: I should have come sooner.
They had to pry my hands off him. I wouldn't let go. Wouldn't stop holding his weight even though it didn't matter anymore, even though he was gone and nothing I did could change that. I held on because letting go meant it was real.
They cut the rope. I held him as they lowered him down. Felt the full weight of my father settle against me. The last time I'd touched him, he'd gripped my shoulder outside his office and told me I was a disappointment. That I'd never amount to anything. That he wished I'd been born different.
That was three days before he died.
And I've carried those words and his body weight and the smell of that room every single day since.
The tears are falling before I realize I'm crying. Not the violent, wrenching sobs from earlier. These are quiet. Steady. Grief that isn't new but is still sharp enough to cut.
I close the journal. Hold it against my chest.
William Murphy found his father hanging in a dark office. Held the body. Blamed himself for not coming sooner. Believed his father chose to leave them. Carried that guilt like a stone in his chest.
And the whole time, it wasn't suicide at all. Alex killed their father and staged it. That much I know. Everyone knows. It's the reason Alex left. The reason William is sitting in a chair he never wanted.
But this journal was written before any of that came to light. These words belong to a man who believed his father chose to die. Who blamed himself for not being enough to make him stay.
I can't imagine what it did to him when the truth finally came out.
I open the brown journal. Flip through pages. This one is different. Less personal. Numbers. Diagrams. Notes about operations and rivals were scrawled in the margins. I don't understand half of it, but I understand enough to know this isn't the work of a man who's falling apart.
This is someone thinking. Planning. Paying attention.
I close it. I'm not ready to sit here all night decoding his business strategy. But the image I had of him, the reckless addict who can barely function, doesn't survive what I've just seen.
I know this because I do the same thing. Not with drugs. With control. With cataloging details and analyzing information, and turning every moment into data, I can manage. My coping mechanism is tidier than his, more socially acceptable, but it serves the same purpose.
We're both trying to survive minds that won't let us rest.
I reach for the navy one. The smallest. The most worn.
This one is older. The entries go back years. The handwriting is younger, less controlled. I flip to a random page.
Aidan told me I need to get my shit together. He's right. He's always right. That's the worst part about Aidan. He's so fucking reasonable that arguing with him feels like arguing with a wall that also has a degree in psychology.
A laugh escapes me. Small and surprised. Even here, even in his darkest moments, that dry humor surfaces.
I flip further back.
I wonder sometimes what Father actually thinks of me. Probably the same thing he's always thought. That I'm not Alex. Not Jason. Not even Aidan. Just William. The spare. The afterthought. The one who was born last and mattered least.
The thing is, I think he's right. Not about mattering least. About being different. I'm not Alex, who can look Father in the eye and match his coldness. I'm not Jason, who can absorb Father's cruelty and still love him. I'm not Aidan, who can reason his way around Father's rage.
I'm the one who felt it all. Every insult.
Every dismissal. Every time he looked at me and saw nothing worth keeping.
I felt all of it, and instead of building walls or finding exits or applying logic, I burned.
Just burned and burned until there was nothing left but ash and the desperate need to not feel anything at all.
That's what the drugs are. Not escape. Survival. The only way I know to keep existing inside a body that feels too much in a family that feels too little.
I close the journal.
Set it down on the bed beside the others with careful hands, as though it might break.
My chest aches with something I can't name.
The man who wrote these words is not the man I've been dealing with. Or maybe he is, and the version I've been dealing with is the act. I don't know. I've known him for days, not years.
But I know what I've read. And the person on these pages is not falling apart. He's holding on with everything he has, and no one around him seems to notice.
I gather the journals carefully. Stack them in order: black, brown, navy, the way I found them. I carry them back to the dresser, place them in the third drawer beneath the blanket. Slide the drawer closed.
I stand there with my hand on the wood, breathing slowly.
Everything has shifted.
Not the situation. The situation is the same disaster it was an hour ago. Russians plotting our destruction. A mole feeding them intelligence. My father fighting for his life. The families scattered across safe houses while Viktor Tarasov thinks he's won.
But the man at the center of it all, the man sleeping on a couch fifteen feet from me, the man who saved my life and broke my heart and kissed me like I was the last good thing in his world.
That man is different now. In my mind, at least. Rewritten by his own words in his own handwriting.
William Murphy is not the disaster everyone sees.
He's the most self-aware person in this entire war. And he's been fighting it alone, inside journals no one reads, in a safe house no one knows about, carrying the weight of a dead father and a fractured family and an intelligence he has to dull with chemicals just to survive.
I won't tell him I read them. Won't let him know what I've seen. That knowledge is mine now, and I'll hold it close. Not as a weapon. Not as leverage.
As understanding.
Understanding that changes the way you see someone. The way you stand beside them. The way you fight.
I return to the bed. Pull the covers up.
But sleep still doesn't come. Not because of the explosions this time. Not because of Reilan or Father or the fear that's been my constant companion since that bullet shattered the drawing room window.
It doesn't come because I'm thinking about my mother.
She died when I was fifteen. Cancer, the doctors said. And that was true, technically. The disease was real. The tumors were real. The slow wasting that stole her from us over six months was brutally, medically real.
But I remember her funeral. Standing in black beside Reilan, watching mourners file past, accepting condolences from people who barely knew her.
Father stood at the front, composed and controlled, shaking hands, accepting sympathies with the practiced grace of a man who understood that even grief was a performance in our world.
And then I heard it.
Father's uncle, Declan. Old and weathered, with a face like cracked leather and a voice that carried further than he realized. Standing near the back of the church, speaking to another man whose name I never learned.
"Stress causes cancer," Declan said. "Sure, the doctors won't tell you that. But everyone knows it. And no wonder the woman was black inside, with how much of a handful that one was." He'd nodded toward my father. "She married the Mafia, and it ate her alive. Same as it does to all of them."
I was fifteen. Standing ten feet away in a dress that was too big because I'd lost weight from not eating. I heard every word.
And I never forgot.
Black inside. That's what he said. Like the stress of loving my father, of living this life, of carrying the fear and the violence and the constant threat of loss, had turned her organs to coal. Had poisoned her from the inside out.
I'd pushed the memory away for years. Told myself it was a cruel old man's ignorant opinion. That cancer doesn't work that way. That my mother died of biology, not heartbreak.
But lying here in this cold room, in a safe house belonging to the man I'm supposed to marry, with my father in a hospital bed and my brother scattered to some other hiding place and my entire world reduced to survival, I can't push it away anymore.
Because I understand now what Declan meant.
Not that stress literally causes cancer.
But that this life, this world of violence and strategy and constant threat, it consumes people.
Eats them from the inside. Turns the parts of you that are soft and human and capable of joy into something harder.
Darker. Until there's nothing left but the armor and the ash beneath it.
My mother was soft. Kind. She planted flowers and sang when she thought no one was listening and held my hand when I had nightmares.
She wasn't built for this world. Wasn't designed to carry the weight of being married to a man like my father, a man she loved desperately but who brought war to her doorstep every single day.
And now I'm lying in William Murphy's bed, wearing William Murphy's shirt, reading William Murphy's journals.
Walking the same path she walked.
Except I'm not my mother.
I don't know what William Murphy is. Not yet.
A few journal entries in the middle of the night don't give me that right.
But I know he's more than what he shows people.
And I know that my mother walked into her marriage blind, loved my father without ever seeing the full picture, and it hollowed her out.
I won't do that.
Whatever this arrangement becomes, whatever William and I become, I'll go in with my eyes open. That's the only promise I can make myself tonight.
I close my eyes.
The explosions are still there. Father's blood. Reilan's name torn from my throat. William's mouth on mine and the desperate fury of it.
But underneath it all, something quieter. Not understanding. Not yet. Just the sense that there's more to find.
I breathe in through my nose. Out through my mouth.
And finally, somewhere between one breath and the next, sleep comes.