Chapter 6 Cayce
CAYCE
Rafferty doesn’t sit behind the desk. He meets me at the door and shoves me back two steps with a hand to my chest, not hard enough to bruise, but hard enough to remind me who taught me to square up.
It almost makes me want to remind him I’m a grown-ass man, but I restrain myself. There’s a time for everything under the sun.
“What in the ever-loving hell were you thinking?” he says, low and controlled, the way you talk in a church or a bar that could go quiet if you raise your voice.
I let the door swing shut behind me. “You want options alphabetically or by blood type?”
“Don’t be smart.” His jaw works. “You were seen. She was seen. In St. Brigid’s.
On Halloween.” He flicks a look over my shoulder.
Tiernan’s a shadow in the corner, Roisin perched on the radiator like a crow that does the books.
“Nico Moretti saw you. Two campus kids with cameras saw you. The sexton saw you go in and out. Do you hear me? This isn’t a rumor.
This is a record of you defiling a fucking Moretti princess in our city. ”
“I hear you,” I say.
“Do you?” Rafferty steps in, that same hand lifting like he’s about to jab a finger in my sternum but thinks better of it. “Because it looks to me like you were consorting with the enemy in the one place they can turn into scripture and scandal in the same headline.”
I take the hit. I let it land where it wants. “I didn’t know she was a Moretti.”
He laughs without humor. “Would it have stopped you if you had?”
I picture her palm against the lattice, the way she said yes like she invented the word for me to try. My answer takes half a breath and exactly no thought. “No.”
Rafferty goes very still. You can feel it in the room when a man decides the next thing he says better be the right thing.
“Of course not,” he says finally. “Because you saw a girl dressed as a saint and decided to pull her down out of the painting and put your mouth on her until the gold leaf flaked and you saw the ruin underneath.”
“You make me sound sloppy,” I say. “I wasn’t.” We weren’t.
“Don’t split hairs.” He scrubs a hand over his mouth. “You broke the truce, Cayce.”
“No,” I say, and my voice doesn’t rise. It digs in. “The truce is a handshake that says we don’t put holes in each other in public. I didn’t break that.”
“You spotted their daughter and—”
“I met a woman who could make up her own mind,” I cut in, and I don’t apologize for it. “And she did.”
Rafferty’s gaze slams into mine. For a beat, there’s nothing in the room but that and the slow hiss of the old radiator at Roisin’s hip.
“They’re our enemy,” he says at last, resorting to catechism.
“So is half of the goddamn country,” I answer, because I’ve done my homework since I learned to read. “But that’s a boardroom word. It’s not what happened in the confessional.”
His nostrils flare. “You think I care what happened in the confessional? I care what happens after. I care about the sit-down I now have to schedule and the mess I have to mop so you don’t start a war because you were—what—making memories?”
Tiernan’s Zippo clicks open and shut, open and shut. Roisin doesn’t blink.
“Say it plain,” I tell Rafferty. “You…they…are furious I touched their biggest bargaining chip.”
Rafferty bares his teeth. “She was valuable. Untouched. Promised to God for the optics—I don’t give a damn to be honest—she was Moretti’s prized possession.
Now she’s damaged goods.” He spits the words like they offend him in his own mouth.
“And every man in an old suit is going to ask me what I plan to do about the Shannon boy who can’t keep his fly zipped when the city’s peace is riding on it. ”
There it is. Plain.
“What are you going to do?” I ask.
“What I always do,” he snaps. “Clean up your goddamn mess, boy.”
He says it like a prayer. Like penance and bleach and everything poisonous.
“Specifics,” I say, even though I know all the definitions. “Tell me exactly what you’re going to do.”
“Pull footage from every source I can find. Lean on a dean to do our bidding. Offer a donation for amnesia where it applies.” He lifts a hand, two fingers. “Or remove the variable.”
He means the girl. He doesn’t say it. He knows better than to say that to me. I’ve already acted out of character where she’s concerned. He’ll know that.
“No,” I say. “She’s not a variable you can eliminate.”
Rafferty takes two quiet steps back and finally goes to the desk, palm on the blotter, body angling to make a point and argue.
Tiernan stays in the corner, half my conscience, half ready to jump down our uncle’s throat with a blade just to make me happy.
Roisin’s boots hook the radiator run while her eyes track between us like she’s running sums. But she’s not.
She’s gauging when and where the fists will fly and what the cost of peace will be.
“Then you tell me,” Rafferty says, voice level, “how I keep us out of a headline and out of a morgue.”
“You don’t erase her,” I say. “The Church loves a fallen woman story more than God. If you scrub it, they’ll write a worse one. If you threaten, they’ll pray louder. The only way out is through.”
“And your solution?”
My mind races for a half a second. Then a flash of a face and a story I heard every night as a child. “I have to claim her.”
The room gets very, very quiet.
“At the sit-down,” I add, because the how matters. “The same way Pops claimed Nan back in the day. Take a wife to prevent a war.”
Tiernan whistles once, low. Roisin’s mouth doesn’t move. Her eyes, though—there’s a flare of something there that reads like it’s about time.
“Claim,” Rafferty repeats. He steeples his fingers, a gesture he stole from a man who died for less. “You’re gonna marry the Italian’s daughter.”
“Yes.” I should be panicking at the loss of my freedom, at the way I’m going to have to adjust and change my entire life. But all I can think about is the way she felt like she belonged to me.
“You’re twenty-four.”
I almost laugh. Almost. “I can count.”
He ignores it. “You’ve met her twice.”
“Once,” I correct.
“And you think walking into a room with Don Marco Moretti to announce you’ve fallen in—what—lust?” He waves a hand like either one is an oil spill. “You think that ends in anything but me upgrading my blood pressure medication?”
I breathe through the urge to put both hands on the desk and push the past off it onto the floor.
“I think it ends in a truce the families and the Church both understand: rings and optics that aren’t able to be denied.
Moretti’s daughter stays out of the convent and he doesn’t lose face with any of the powers that be.
We keep Boston from turning into fireworks and funerals and no innocents die. ”
“And the girl?” he asks, like he’s checking if I remember she’s a person.
“She knows our world better than any outsider might. She’ll make a powerful queen for our family.”
Tiernan scratches his jaw. “You’re drafting a life where she’s happy about this, before knowing anything for certain.”
“Someone has to.” I unclench my fists. “Someone who knows what a locked door is for.”
That lands where I want it to. Rafferty’s eyes flick to the crucifix and back. He remembers the brochure on this very desk, the one with the sunshine and the mountains and Blackvine Ridge written like a vacation instead of a lesson with teeth.
“Careful,” he says, voice roughening. “Watch your tread.”
“Why?” My voice stays even, the way the chaplain at Blackvine taught me to answer the question he wanted and not the one he asked. “Because the last time I did as I was told you and my father put me on a plane to Colorado and called it making me a man?”
Rafferty’s breath leaves him like it got shoved. He grips the edge of the desk hard enough to pale his knuckles. “I’ve apologized—”
“To the mirror,” I say. “Never to me.”
“It was supposed to be a place that made our boys hard,” he bites out, each consonant a clipped bruise. “Give you what this world requires. I didn’t know what it was.”
“But you knew enough,” I answer. “You knew the doors would lock and I wouldn’t escape.
You knew men would come out different. You hoped different meant useful.
” I let that hang, the way the cold hung in those dorms before dawn.
“Don’t talk to me about cleanup like it’s a noble thing you do for love.
You clean so you don’t have to live with the guilt of the monster you’ve turned me into. ”
He looks at me for a long time. His chest rises once, tight, like the air’s cost him extra. “It worked,” he says at last, flat as a shut drawer.
“Sure,” I say, and let my eyes go as empty as they learned to be at Blackvine. “It worked. I’m even more ruthless than you or my Da could ever have imagined.”
We stand in that for a beat. Tiernan’s Zippo clicks, open-shut, open-shut. Roisin’s heel taps the rung. The radiator hisses like a snake swallowed a pipe.
No one moves for long, tense seconds.
Roisin hops off the radiator first, breaking the toxic taste of masculine energy around us. “What do you need?” she asks me, as if the rest of it can be shoveled into a hole we’ll seed with daisies later.
“A ring,” I say automatically, then tilt my head. “I want her to know that she’s mine, and that I’ll take whatever bullets come our way as long as she remains in her place at my side.”
Roisin’s eyes brighten. “I know a woman in the North End who works in dark silver and Irish charm—Ogham marks and all. She has stock and she owes me a favor. I know exactly what you need and can have it here in twenty.”
Rafferty exhales like a man being dragged toward sanity. “If we do this, it’s not a pub crawl we can control. It’s linen and quiet expectations and five courses that we can’t turn away from. You will not posture.”
“I’ll be a gentleman,” I say. I’m good at war, but I’m good at the other stuff, too.