Chapter 45
45
FIONA
H is hand lands on my bare ass, harder than I expect. The jolt sends a lance of fire straight to my clit. I moan, and his cock presses into my belly. I arch my back, trying to feel more of his length.
I didn’t realize my motion would force my ass higher into the air. “You’re a naughty girl,” he rumbles, and each word ripples through my core. He smacks my bare flesh again, fingers spread wide, gripping hard before he pulls back.
I’m panting now, breathing through my teeth. Part of me is trying to bleed off the pain, to cool the hand-shaped brand he’s set on me. But part of me is trying to ease the muscles tightening inside me, trying to keep from coming. I clutch the fabric of his pants with both hands. “Please…” I beg.
“Please spank you again?”
Before I can lie, before I can deny that I’m asking for more punishment, he does it. This time, when he pulls his hand away, he dips one finger between my thighs. He glides through my wetness, and his cock twitches with his wicked laugh.
“You’re a dirty girl, aren’t you?”
I am a dirty girl. I dressed for him, because I knew it would drive him wild. I’m pressing against him, because I want to feel his cock. I want to suck him off until precum leaks onto my tongue and then I want to ride him, our mouths locked, my fingers tangled in his hair, until he explodes deep inside me.
“Little girl?” he says. “Answer Daddy when he asks you a question.”
“Yes,” I say. “Yes. I’m a dirty, dirty girl.”
That earns me another spanking, the hardest one yet. I balance on the knife edge of pleasure and pain. I pound my fist against his thigh. I squeeze my eyes closed.
“You’re so, so red,” he says, brushing his hand against my stinging flesh, barely feathering me with his palm. “So beautiful…”
I unravel.
Every fiber in my body comes undone. I can’t breathe, because I don’t have lungs. I can’t scream, because I don’t have a mouth. I’m nothing but a hollow of pure sensation, an endless, timeless stretch of ecstasy.
When I come back into my body, I’m lying on my back. My arms are flung out to either side. My ass hangs off the edge of the bed.
My legs are splayed, and the backs of my thighs rest on Patrick’s bare shoulders as he kneels on the floor. He’s taken off his clothes, which makes a distant part of me sad, because I wanted to watch him do it. That sadness, though, disintegrates when he buries his face in my pussy.
“No,” I moan as his tongue thrusts between my fluttering folds.
But Patrick and I have a language of our own. He’s my Daddy. I’m his little girl. The first night we fucked here, he gave me my safeword. So no means yes. No means more. No means don’t stop, don’t stop, don’t stop, don’t…
I break around him, great heaving breaths ripping my throat as I come.
This time, I’m conscious when he shifts my body. He eases my legs onto the bed. He runs his hand over my corset. He pinches my nipples where they’re framed by chains, but all my nerves have fired, and I don’t stir.
He settles his lips by my ear. “Little girl,” he whispers.
“Daddy.” I shape the word with my mouth.
“Do I need to wear a johnny?”
He’s telling me he knows how much we hurt each other. He’s saying he trusts me to tell him the truth. He accepts me, whatever I’ve done in the time we were apart. He understands.
I shake my head. “No,” I say. “You don’t.”
His fingers are nimble on the hook and eye closures that fasten the back of my corset. He sighs as he pulls away the leather. He traces the imprints of the chains like a blind man studying the Venus de Milo .
Finding the zipper on my skirt, he peels the vinyl from my body. The top edge dug into my hip bones; there’s a bruised red line like an angry bikini. He traces it with his tongue.
He licks my navel. My sternum. My throat. He sucks on my left nipple, and then my right. His mouth finds mine, and our tongues lock. As he drinks me, as I drink him, his cock comes home.
I shift my hips to give him a better angle. I gasp when he glides inside me, because he’s bigger than I remember. “I want everything ,” I whisper. “Don’t hold back.”
He fills me. And when we’re as close as any two humans can be, when my thighs tremble against his, when my breasts quiver under the weight of his chest, he begins to move—long, slow strokes that slay me, leaving me helpless beneath him.
“Sweet Jesus,” he groans as his fingers close around my wrists, pinning my hands above my head. And then he says, “ You’re incredible, little girl.” His voice is low and steady, like he’s reciting some sort of truth he memorized a lifetime ago. “You were so brave, reaching out to me with that phone call. You showed so much trust, tying yourself up for me. You took your spanking like a warrior queen. You’re my strong girl. You’re my good girl. You’re perfect.”
I break before he does— perfect does it. He slides deep as I fold around him, as I bury my face in his shoulder and mew, mew, mew with an orgasm so hard I literally see stars.
And when he starts to come, the stars turn into snow-white leaves, raining down on both of us, burying us in light. I hold him, and he holds me, and my Daddy’s right—we’re perfect, together.
I don’t know how much time passes before I feel him stir. He slides open the nightstand drawer, and he reaches for something far in the back. I hear the sound of plastic on plastic, but I don’t have the energy to open my eyes.
The smell of rosemary and sage reaches my nose as his hand smooths the cream over my ass. His touch is firm enough to keep me from squirming, light enough to spare me pain.
“Arnica,” I say, and my voice is rougher than I expect it to be. The scent of the cream carries me back to that first night, after he found me in Madden’s apartment. “So, we’re back to where we started.”
“Not exactly, Scáthach .”
“Now will you tell me what that means?”
“That depends. Are you ready to open the cigar box?”
I groan as I stretch beside him.
We lie there for a few minutes. But then I realize I want to ask him a different question. I need to. So I trace the outline of the lighthouse on his biceps and say, “That night on the golf course. Kevin Joyce said you’d end up dogshit. Like your father.”
He stills, and the air in the room suddenly feels dangerous. But I want to understand him. I need to know everything about him. So I fan my fingers across the storm clouds on his arm and ask, “What happened to your father?”
“He betrayed the Crew.”
“I know that. How?”
It takes Patrick a century before he decides to answer. “The feds got Da on a heroin rap. Distribution. A high-school kid ODed in the jacks so Da was looking at a mandatory twenty to life. He sold out his clan instead.”
“What happened?”
Another century passes. But Patrick finally says, “Your father caught mine wearing a wire. Rivers worked Da over, in the basement at the dún . In the tile room?”
I nod to let him know I’ve seen it.
“After, your da sent me downstairs to find him. Told me to bring up a case of Guinness. To hurry.”
Patrick stares at something I can’t see in the distance. His muscles turn to steel beneath my palm. Finally he says, “Da was still alive when I got there. He was tied to a chair. Both his legs were broken, above and below the knee. His arms were shattered too. His face was chopped meat, and a dead rat was shoved between his lips.”
I catch my breath. I’ve always known what happens in the basement at the dún . I’ve never seen it myself.
I think Patrick won’t say anything more then, but I’m wrong. “I took the rat out of his mouth, and he said my name, as best he could without a tongue. He begged for help. Even after the worst Keenan Rivers could do, he wasn’t ready to die.”
Patrick closes his eyes. Now I’m sorry that I asked him. I want to take back my question, even though I know I can’t. But more than that, I want Patrick to know I understand. I care. I trace the jagged heartbeat tattooed across his wrist.
And finally he says, “I took out my feckin’ phone. I punched in 9, 1, 1. And I stood there without placing the call. I held the phone in front of him and then I watched him die. ”
I feel Patrick’s pulse under my hand, steady and strong. “There was no way to save him,” I say.
He shrugs, like he doesn’t believe me. “I brought the Guinness upstairs,” he says. “Your da told me to go back down and butcher that hunk of meat in the basement. To grind it into dogfood.”
I can hear my father issuing orders. I can see the cruel glare in his eyes as he waited to be obeyed.
Patrick says, “I had to prove he could trust me. That I was different to my da. And nothing I did was going to hurt my father any worse. So I fed Tommy Moran to the fucking dogs.”
I think that’s the end. I think it can’t get worse. I’m wrong.
Patrick’s voice gets softer. More strained. “When I got home, my wife knew all about it. Aran Dowd had phoned. Told her she should be proud of me, and why. Jenn wrapped our car around a tree that night. She died, and our unborn son too. And two days later, Mam had had enough. She jumped off the Longfellow Bridge. Hit the water head-first, a witness said. They had to drag the Charles to bring her up.”
It sounds like some dark fairytale from centuries past, the type of stories told to little kids when they won’t eat their vegetables or refuse to go to bed. I half expect him to say, “And the moral of the story is…”
But there isn’t any moral to the story. There’s just my uncle’s cruelty and my father’s rules and decades of pain bleached gray by time.
I don’t have any words to comfort him. But I want to give him something. Tell him something. Share, the way he just dared to share with me.
So I say, “There were two of them.”
He gets very still.
I hurry on before I can chicken out. “In the chapel at my school. One held me down on the cold stone floor while the other tore away my panties. He shoved his way in like I was some plastic doll, and I kept thinking it hurt so much because it wasn’t my wedding night, because he wasn’t my husband, because I was committing a sin.”
“Little girl…” Patrick says, but I shift my fingertips to his lips. I need him to know this about me. I need him to understand.
“After the first one finished, there was blood between my legs. I felt so fucking ashamed, like I’d started my period in public. My legs were shaking so hard I couldn’t stand, but I tried to crawl away. And that’s when the second one grabbed me. He choked me. Put both hands around my throat.”
“Jesus,” Patrick breathes, and I know we’re both thinking about Bunbun , about how I used my safeword.
It’s my turn to close my eyes, because that will help me get out the rest of the story. “The second one took longer to finish. He was still inside me when Father Colin came into the chapel. Father was carrying a… what do you call it? The thing with incense?”
“A thurible.”
“A thurible. Newly polished. Father told the boys to go down to the gym. To clean up in the locker room, then go straight home. He reminded them about some paper they needed to turn in for New Testament Ethics.”
“Fucking gobshite,” Patrick says, and his fingers grip my hip so tightly I know they’ll leave a mark.
“Father Colin took me to his office. He said I was the reason the boys did what they did. I was Eve’s daughter. Sin incarnate. He gave me lines to write, one hundred times for each of the boys: I will not use my body to tempt innocent boys into sins of the flesh. I was still bleeding when I finished.”
Patrick’s hand trembles against my body. “You went to your da,” he says. “And he said a good King chooses his battles. ”
He remembers what I told him when I was feeling sorry for myself, downing my third boozy milkshake in an hour. I nod and say, “I’d been thrown out of so many schools by then. For skipping class. For fighting—girls and boys. For talking back to Sister. So Da said he was done. He wouldn’t help me. He washed his hands of all of it.”
When I fall silent, Patrick finishes the story. “So you took care of things yourself. Both boys. And the fucking priest. Your first three kills.”
I nod again.
“You were brilliant, Scáthach . Feckin’ brilliant.”
For the first time since he’s called me that, I don’t want to know what it means. I just want to lie here next to him, feeling the heat radiate off his body. He’s heard the worst I’ve ever done, and he still thinks I’m a prize.
A long time goes by before he says, “What are you thinking, little girl?”
We can’t take any more truths, neither of us right now, so I force myself to grin. “Honestly?”
“Always.”
“I’m starving. And I’m trying to remember if there’s anything left to eat in the kitchen.”
“There is,” he says.
I don’t want him to leave. I hate when he’s gone. But he’s back in less than a minute, sitting up against the headboard. I curl against his side as he shifts a white cardboard box closer.
“What’s that?” I ask.
He raises the lid. A dozen miniature tarts are lined up in three rows of four, cherry filling gleaming against rich, buttery crust. I shove one in my mouth by reflex.
“Mmmm,” I moan, which makes him raise his eyebrows. “You waited around to buy these, after I called?”
“Hannah wouldn’t let me leave without them.”
“Who’s Hannah?” I ask as I down a second tart.
“The girl at the bakery,” he says. “Careful. You’ll get crumbs in the bed.”
Still chewing, I press a third tart against his lips. He takes it between his teeth, and something flips deep inside of me .
I’m debating another tart for me when I see the black plastic rectangle folded against his palm. “What’s that?” I ask.
“Dynamite.”
I sit up a little straighter and reach for the device. It’s a thumb drive. I turn it over, but there’s nothing written on the shell, nothing to hint at what it contains. “What are you going to blow up?”
“Not what. Who.”
“Who,” I repeat, and I look into his face.
The first time I saw Patrick Moran, I thought he was old. Wrinkles fanned beside his eyes. In some light, his hair was more gray than black. He was Braiden Kelly’s Warlord. He was the Crew’s failed soldier. He was a stranger, hardened and locked down, distant and aloof.
Now, he’s Patrick.
“Who are you going to destroy?”
He eyes me steadily. “Aran Dowd. And you’re going to help me do it.”
He tells me what’s on the drive, all the evidence from the feds. I’ve spent my entire life in the heart of the Irish mob. I drank down loyalty with every bottle Oona ever fed me. I’ve watched brave men make sacrifices and cowards die in shame, all in the name of the Old Colony Crew.
My uncle’s betrayal feels like a physical wound. My stomach aches like I’ve eaten bad clams. A headache sparks behind my eyes, and I realize I’m grinding my teeth.
“How long has this been going on?” I ask Patrick.
“They turned him when he was in jail. When he was waiting for his trial.”
Seven months ago, then. Maybe eight.
I thought Uncle Aran’s stint in prison was a good thing for me. My father had to lean on me. He sent me to Philadelphia in his place. He trusted me to broker a peace between Braiden Kelly and his mafia counterpart.
But now I understand that Uncle Aran’s time behind bars might be the worst thing that’s ever happened to me. If the FBI acts on everything they know, they can take the Crew away. They can devastate the clan.
I thought I’d felt anger before. When Father Colin called me a liar. When Da refused to punish the boys who hurt me. When my father declined to name me his heir.
But those disappointments are nothing compared to the wildfire that sweeps through me now. I want to shred something into tiny pieces. I want to blow something up.
“We have to devastate that motherfucker,” I say.
“Exactly,” Patrick says, and his smile is amused. “And if you agree, here’s how we can do it, Scáthach .”