Chapter 11
11
FIONA
W hat the fuck have I done?
I could have left the wake without saying a word. Moran said it in the hotel: he had my back. He proved it, kneeling beside me in front of Da’s casket.
But I had to make a scene. I had to promise ten million dollars to the fucking Corman Museum. Ten million dollars my father will never know about. Ten mill he’ll never respect me for.
I wait for Moran to tell me I’m a fucking idiot. But he only starts the Land Rover’s engine and says, “Got your phone? Pick out a hotel for us.”
“Us?”
“I’ll stay through the funeral,” he says.
“Why the fuck would you do that?”
His shrug doesn’t shift his grip on the wheel. “Because it’ll piss off Aran Dowd. Because Rivers called me Cujo. Because you need someone keeping an eye on you, before you spend a billion dollars getting Fenway Park renamed for your da.”
My father would have sold me into slavery to own the Boston Red Sox. But I don’t want to talk about Da. Or about how easy it was for Uncle Aran to manipulate me back there. So I settle on asking, “Cujo?”
Moran’s lips part on a puff of disgust. “It was a book. Horror. Came out about twenty years before you were born. It was about a?—”
“Rabid dog. I know.” If he’s surprised that I’ve read Stephen King, he doesn’t show it. So I push: “Why did Rivers call you Cujo?”
“The whole clan did. When I was a soldier.”
I can just make out the white scars on his knuckles beneath the passing streetlights. “You were an enforcer for the Old Colony Crew?”
He grunts, in a way that confirms my question even as it shuts down conversation. Still not taking his eyes from the road, he gestures toward me with his elbow. “Phone?” he asks. “Hotel?”
I ignore him. “What happens after the funeral?”
“We need a place to stay tonight.”
“After the funeral?” I push.
“ You figure out some scheme to raise ten million dollars. I go back to Philadelphia. I’m Warlord for the Fishtown Boys. My captain needs me.”
I need you too .
The words are right there, heating up my lips. My fingers are already moving toward the buttons on my jacket. My right knee bends, bringing my foot to rest on the seat.
I know how to do this, how to make a man give me what I want. God knows I’ve had plenty of practice in the last eight years.
I need Patrick Moran to put his arm around me at night. I need him to give me blinding orgasms. I need him to hold me tight enough that the nightmares stay away.
But I’ll clean the dark-tinted windshield of this Land Rover with my tongue before I’ll say any of that out loud.
So I take out my phone. I pretend to look for a hotel. I tap an address, because Uncle Aran made up my mind for me the second he called me “little Fee.”
I know where I’m living while I get back the Crew.
My phone’s mechanical voice tells Moran to proceed to the route. I wait until he’s made the first turn before I say, “You can go back to Philadelphia now. I don’t need you babysitting me until the funeral.”
“I want to make sure your father’s in his grave. Tough old fecker like him… He might change his mind about this dying shite.”
I snort. Da changed his mind about plenty of things. But even he can’t cheat death.
We’re well after rush hour, but the streets are still crowded. Fortunately, we don’t have far to go. We pass a couple of public alleys. Turn left on Beacon Street. My phone announces: “Arrived.”
Moran taps the brakes and sighs in disgust. “Forget about GPS. Just tell me the hotel, and I’ll get us there.”
“There’s no hotel.” I gesture toward the red brick building with its gleaming black door. “We’re staying here.”
“I’m in no mood for games.”
I point down the street, where an SUV is pulling out of a space. “You can park there.”
He clearly wants to argue with me. But instead, he negotiates the parking space flawlessly, even though there’s less than a foot of extra space. When he takes my suitcases out of the back, I grab his duffel.
A metal mailbox is mounted on the brick wall to the left of the door. I enter the four-digit code for Unit 4. The box is stuffed with mail, which I hand off to a mystified-looking Moran.
A magnetized box clings to the top of the mail compartment. I pry it loose and enter another code, six digits this time. Two shiny brass keys wait inside.
I use one to open the building’s front door, which swings back on silent hinges. “Ready?” I say to Moran. “It’s a walk-up.”
He grunts a non-answer. I reach for the larger suitcase, because I don’t want to be responsible for his heart attack, but he bats my hand away. Shrugging, I take the smaller one and lead the way.
I’m more out of breath at the top than he is. That must be because he’s wearing more sensible shoes.
The second key opens the condo door. I let him enter first. I see the way he automatically twitches his jacket out of the way so he’ll have easy access to his gun. But he doesn’t have his pistol in its holster. He packed it, because he was going to the dún .
Inside the apartment, everything is just the way I left it. The air smells like dust, but with a hint of cinnamon, a touch of lavender and leather. The kitchen and living room are to the right. The bedroom is to the left, with its en suite bathroom.
I lead us toward the living room. One wall is exposed brick, backing a flat, black TV screen. Another is floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, filled with everything from novels to essays on economics. The huge windows have a southern exposure.
I pull the shades before I flip on the lights and set Moran’s duffel bag by my feet.
“What the hell is this place?” Moran asks.
“My home away from home.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I stay here when I want to get away from the dún. ”
He looks toward the bedroom with an edgy frown. I can tell he wants to make sure no one’s lurking with a machete .
“Relax,” I say. “No one in the Crew knows about this place.”
“And you know that how?”
I point toward a framed photo on the counter that divides the kitchen from the living room. It’s Aunt Siobhan and me. She’s wearing Tory Burch couture, a ruffled white top so sheer it’s immediately obvious she isn’t wearing a bra. I’m in my first-ever leather bustier, the one with the straps that barely cover my nipples. I was sixteen when she bought it for me. I could still smell gunpowder on my hands when I smoothed the leather over my breasts.
Moran squints at the photo. “Who’s that?”
“Aunt S.”
“That means something to me?”
“Siobhan Dowd. My father’s sister. Uncle Aran’s wife.”
Now he looks at the photo more closely. I can practically see him scrubbing off Aunt S’s smoky eye and contouring makeup. He pulls her hair back into a respectable messy bun. He puts her in jeans and a long-sleeve T. Maybe a frumpy dress.
And then he looks around the apartment more closely. “So this is, what? A hideout?”
“Aunt S got tired of my uncle’s cailíns , of cleaning other women’s lipstick off his underwear. So she bought this place. Sort of an escape pod. Her lawyers hired lawyers who hired lawyers. She sold some jewelry and paid in cash.”
His chin juts toward that Tory Burch declaration of independence. “And now she comes here to turn tricks?”
“Fuck you,” I say. I’m surprised by the sudden heat of my anger.
His eyebrows barely twitch. “I’m just saying… It looks like she knows her way around a bedroom.”
He doesn’t say anything about me. He doesn’t have to. But I drip acid over a single word: “Knew.”
“What? ”
“Aunt Siobhan knew what she wanted. And that was a place where her husband didn’t micro-manage her every move.”
He gives the apartment one more look, suspicion narrowing his eyes once again. “Until Dowd found out.”
“Uncle Aran never knew! Aunt S just got sick.” It’s harder for me to say the words than I expect it to be. “But when she was here, she dressed the way she wanted.”
I don’t tell him about the trench coat she kept in the closet, the one that still hangs in front of the wall safe. She covered up, even for a walk around the block. She never, ever got to live the life she deserved. Not before the cancer. And definitely not after.
But she taught me how to be the woman I am. Never afraid. Or ashamed. If not for Aunt S, I might have listened to the nightmares. I might have carried a sharp razor into a hot bath…
Moran’s looking toward the bedroom again. “And we spent last night in the smallest hotel room in Boston because?”
Despite his judgmental, patriarchal comments about Aunt S, he deserves an answer. “Until ten minutes ago, I was the only person on earth who knows about this place.”
“Except the tax assessor. The real estate clerk. The utility companies and all your neighbors.”
“Everything’s hidden, six layers down. Aunt S took care of it before she died. My name is a million miles away from any of this.”
“And you live here.” His voice twists with disbelief.
I correct him. “I visit. When I can’t stand being in the dún for one more minute.” When there are too many men. Too much testosterone. When I can’t stand my father’s lies and his rules and his double-crossing?—
Da’s gone. It’s time for me to claim what’s mine.
Moran still looks skeptical.
“You have to trust me,” I say.
“I don’t trust anyone. ”
“I’m good at what I do.” It’s important that he understands that. “Very, very good.”
He looks at the photo again. “I can see that,” he says. My nipples get hard at the tone of his voice, and I’m glad he can’t see beneath my blue jacket.
“Now you really can fuck off.”
“The mouth on you,” he says evenly.
For about ten seconds, my response echoes inside my head: Want to fuck it, Daddy?
But I wait too long.
He takes my large suitcase and rolls it down the hall to the bedroom. I hear him open the closet door. Shuffle through the hangers, presumably making sure no Crew enforcer is hiding among my shoes. He goes into the bathroom and checks the linen closet there.
He comes out with one of my extra pillows and a blanket. Kicking aside his duffel bag, he deposits his makeshift bedroll on the couch. “Are you washing up first, or am I?”
I don’t trust any of the things I want to say.
Don’t sleep out here.
Let’s take a shower together.
How the hell did you do that to my body, make me come while you were inside me, and why haven’t you done it again?
“You go ahead,” I say.
I pretend not to see him shrug out of his black jacket. I don’t watch as he takes his well-worn Dopp kit out of his duffel. I tell myself not to think about the chain of foil-wrapped condoms I know are inside.
He heads back down the hall and closes himself into the bathroom. I ignore the running water, forcing myself to sort the mail I took out of the box downstairs.
It’s junk, all of it. Bills are paid through the complicated system Aunt S set up, and no one knows to reach me here.
But I read all the ads for pizza delivery like they’re the world’s finest literature—which only makes me starving for an extra-large pie with pepperoni, sausage, and mushrooms. I study the flyers from real estate agents like every one is a museum masterpiece. I stack everything neatly, then sort recyclable paper from shiny cardstock.
Finally, centuries later, Moran’s back. I catch a whiff of mint as he crosses to the couch; he’s brushed his teeth. The light flashes on the gray in his hair as he picks up his pillow in both hands. “Goodnight,” he says, staring at me levelly.
“Hey,” I answer. “Thank you for what you did back at the dún .” I brave his gaze. “It didn’t go exactly the way I thought it would.”
No shit .
He’d be justified in saying that. But instead, he just nods.
So I say, “ Oíche mhaith. ” Goodnight. Just like he said last night.
Behind the bedroom door, it takes me longer than it should to unpack my suitcases. It already seems like my stay in Philadelphia was a long time ago. A lifetime ago.
I go to the safe in the closet and work the combination. I’m pretty sure I left it empty—spending the last few hundred-dollar-bills on a leather bodysuit, one with steel-framed cutouts for my nipples and snaps across the crotch.
I’m right. The cupboard’s bare.
I take out my phone and pull up a translator app. I’m not sure how to spell that word he calls me— ska-ha —but I try typing it in phonetically. Nothing comes up.
I switch to an English-Irish dictionary, but it’s no more help. I try pulling up an Irish dictionary, one that leaves the words in Gaelic, but I can’t make heads or tails out of that.
Frustrated, I throw my phone on the bed. I get undressed, and I hang up the clothes I wore to the wake. I put on one of my favorite sleep sets—a plum-colored cropped cami and matching high-waist shorts. I wash away my careful makeup, obliterating my smoky eye and exposing my bruises. I smooth on fresh arnica, and I brush my teeth .
Moran’s out there .
I can’t stop myself from thinking it. But I don’t allow myself to do anything.
Instead, I climb into bed and stare at the ceiling. I should be exhausted. My body’s still healing from the beating Madden gave me. I honestly never imagined the day I’d see my father lying in his casket. I still can’t say what drove me to make my ruthless promise to the Crew.
Ten million dollars.
I barely have ten thousand in my savings account. Most of that was birthday gifts from family. I haven’t worked a day in my life, aside from the job I just lost: Being Kieran Ingram’s daughter.
Moran’s out there.
With a good real estate agent, a better lawyer, and a lot of luck, I could sell this apartment by the end of the month. But—as high as Back Bay real estate is—I wouldn’t clear enough to meet my goal.
I could go back to Philadelphia with Moran and beg Braiden Kelly to lend me the money. But the thought of groveling in front of him, of admitting that I need help, that I can’t do this on my own… And I can’t be sure he’d even let me borrow the cash. Not after I stood by and watched his brother steal his own protection money…
Moran’s out there .
The bedroom is too hot. I toss off all my covers.
My pillow is too flat. I double it over. Crane my neck because now it’s too high.
I slip my hand between my legs, edging my fingers past the lace at the top of my shorts. But even before I start to rub, I know my body won’t cooperate. Touching my clit is as exciting as rubbing the tip of my nose.
Moran’s out ? —
When he comes into the bedroom, he doesn’t try to be quiet. He turns the doorknob hard and shoves the door all the way back to the wall. He comes to the foot of the bed, a shadow in the night. Two rings glint on the hand that grips his pillowcase.
“Are you asleep?” he asks, in a voice loud enough to wake me if I was.
I shake my head, then realize he can’t see me. “No.”
“This doesn’t mean anything,” he says.
“Of course it doesn’t.”
“I just need to sleep,” he says.
“Me too.”
He circles around the bed and places his pillow beside mine. His eyes must have adjusted to the dark, because he pulls back my tangled bedclothes without hesitation.
Only then does he climb onto the mattress. It’s higher than the one at the hotel, but my bed is only a queen. He slips beneath the sheet and the blanket and the duvet.
His chest is bare, but he’s wearing boxer briefs. His arm is heavy as he pulls me close to his body. His chub presses against the lace of my shorts until he shifts his leg, caging mine.
This shouldn’t work. I should feel too closed-in. I should be choked by the memory of incense and altar candles, by the starch that Oona ironed into my uniform top.
Instead, I smell amber and oak, the warmth of fresh-turned earth baking in the sun. I feel the velvet-covered steel of muscles at rest, even though they’ve been trained to kill. I hear the rough whisper, so soft it’s more a vibration than actual sound, “Stop worrying, Scáthach. Go to sleep.”
I want to know what he’s calling me, but not enough to risk his backing away. He has me. I’m safe. The nightmares won’t come while he’s here.
So I move my lips but make absolute sure not a whisper of sound slips free. “Yes, Daddy.”