22. Rian
RIAN
She doesn’t know I’m watching her.
Her friend is gone, getting ready at her hotel room and leaving Caroline alone with her children before their coffee date.
Caroline kneels in the living room in front of one of the boys.
She’s half laughing as she tries to clean jam off his face.
He keeps dodging her hand, giggling wildly, and the other one is shouting about a Hot Wheels that needs saving from an imaginary fire, a toy courtesy of the friend who arrived looking wary, with eyes like a caged animal. Caroline had that look once.
But now her eyes are soft and alive in a way they never are around any of us. She throws up her hands and says dramatically, “Fine! I guess you’ll go to college with jam on your face!” and when the boy finally relaxes, she grabs him around the middle and wipes him off, smothering him with kisses.
It isn’t lost on me that I don’t know which boy is which. Isaac or Joshua. It isn’t lost on me that they’re nearly in kindergarten, and this is the first time they’ve seen their father. That they don’t even know it.
“Excuse me,” I say, standing from the couch and slipping out of the room. I can’t stand to be in it, to be surrounded by all of this and know that I’m supposed to kill her. I can’t. Caroline looks up at me for just a moment before returning her focus to her sons.
As soon as I’m in the hallway, I dial my father, my fingers shaking.
He’s still out of the country, hiding from the feds, but just the thought of him instills fear into my heart.
He’s not a large man except in height. In fact, he resembles Kellan most of all—thin frame, bright blue eyes, strawberry blonde hair.
They even have the same dimples and smattering of freckles.
But that’s exactly how he disarms his victims. Underneath all of it, he’s an abyss.
The ringing of the phone is distant, like it’s coming from down the hallway, and I press my hand against the wall and loosen my tie. Sweat beads up on my forehead. Finally, he answers, “Aye?”
Swallowing, I glance out the doorway into the living room at the small gathering, the kids on the floor with a happy Caroline, her legs open and her arms holding some part of them at all times.
Her friend has returned, sitting on the couch, looking wary, smiling with no light in her eyes.
Kellan is making snack tray after snack tray.
Declan is showing the boys whatever they want up close—first, his collection of knives, then his home theater.
It’s a setting I never expected, and one I don’t quite understand.
Declan glances at me and sees the phone against my ear. His face hardens and he says something quick to everyone in the room, then barrels toward me. I turn quickly to the wall, making a shield with my hand, and say, “ Da , we’re not going to kill this woman.”
A pause. A pause in which all of time stretches toward me, a pause in which Declan gets closer and my throat gets drier. “And why’s that?” I hear something clink on my dad’s end. Alcohol opening or a flint lighter being flicked or one of his spinning tops being twirled.
Or a gun being loaded. Or a knife being tapped.
“She has kids.”
“And? Don’t tell me you’re getting soft now.”
Getting soft. As if it were ever an option. “And…we think they’re ours.” Declan is at the doorway, looking in on me, and I press the phone tighter to my ear and shrink against the wall.
“What do you mean they’re yours?” my father asks, a chuckle in his voice. Then he repeats it with a hiss, “What do you mean…they’re yours ?”
“They’re…” I look up at Declan, who is stony-eyed while he watches me tell our father something that could get us all killed. “They belong to one of us. From…that night. She got pregnant.”
I look back through the doorway. Alaina is looking right back at me.
There’s no way she can hear my conversation, but she has a look like she knows it isn’t good.
I avert my eyes and look back at Caroline tickling one of her sons.
He’s trying to get away, and she has him by the ankle so she can tickle his foot.
The other one playfully jumps on her back to protect his brother.
This is the kind of play we were supposed to do.
The thought disappears as soon as it enters my mind. My father’s voice brings me back to awareness. “Rian,” he sighs, like I’m calling him about needing a new car battery. I hear him shuffle. “Son. You don’t have many other options.”
I grit my teeth and say again, “I can’t kill her.”
“Then she has to become one of us. I’m not risking a witness. Feds are breathing down my neck. I’m not doing it. I don’t raise bastards who live like ghosts.”
I close my eyes. Nod like he can see it. Declan must see how sick I am over it because he takes the phone and says, “ Da , she’s nothing. She’s barely five foot… Aye , aye, I know… Right so… Understood.”
He hangs up and hands me the phone. I stand there for another minute with my brother, the brother that the woman in the other room almost killed.
She almost killed me too, and yet I feel like I would give my life up just to save hers. Is this really all about those boys, or is part of it about her?
Caroline is telling the kids a story, her voice animated and soft, and her fingers thread through their hair like she’s been doing it every night for years. She laughs at something Joshua says and kisses his forehead.
And I realize I don’t know how to do this. Not without breaking her. Not without losing something I haven’t even gotten to have yet.
And I’m starting to care about that.
Caroline is quiet strength and softness all at once, the way she fakes a smile for her sons while her captors sit near. The mafia will take that strength and shine a microscope on it until that’s all she has?—
“There won’t be any gentleness left in her,” I say out loud.
Declan’s hand claps my back roughly, and he sighs, saying, “ Aye , she’ll be someone different.”
“I can’t turn her into someone like us.”
“You won’t have to do a thing. She won’t have a choice but to change,” he says gruffly, leaning against the wall next to me casually, like he doesn’t care at all what happens to her or to anyone.
“And the boys?”
“What about them?”
His cavalier attitude about it all infuriates me, and a blanket of cold slides in under my skin. “Will they be like us too?”
“What do you want me to say, Rian? Life’s a bitch, and then you die.” Declan shrugs. He looks at his watch. “It’s almost showtime.”
Showtime. As in, time for us to threaten Caroline and remind her that she’s ours, that she’d better not get any bright ideas about freedom or honesty, that she’s being watched.
That we’ll slit her boys’ throats while she sips coffee.
That’s the kind of thing Declan lives for—fear, threats, insidious kindness.
He claps his hands, a gesture of finality, and walks back into the living room to pretend to be a regular man, someone who doesn’t instill fear in people.
“God willing,” I mumble, wishing that car wreck had taken me out.
When I return to the living room, the boys have commandeered the rug with their toy cars—one red, one blue, both streaked with scratches.
They’re building a racecourse out of coasters and books, and Kellan, of all people, is crouched next to them, carefully lining up a row of dominoes to be “buildings” they can knock down.
He doesn’t look like a killer right now. He looks like someone’s uncle. Like someone good.
Caroline’s curled up on the couch with a book in her lap, but she’s not reading. Her eyes keep drifting to them, a soft line between her brows, like she’s afraid it might all vanish.
“Watch this!” one of the boys shouts—Joshua, I think—and launches the red car off a folded-up napkin. It flies two feet and lands under the coffee table.
Declan, stretched out in the armchair like a lion on a throne, chuckles. “Reckless driver, that one.”
Isaac runs up to him, all toothy grin and sticky fingers. “Can you help me fix the wheel? It’s broke.”
Declan glances at Caroline, then back down at the boy. “What do I look like, a mechanic?”
Isaac just blinks at him.
Declan sighs, leans forward, and takes the car with surprising gentleness. “Right, let’s see what we’ve got here.” His fingers are far too big for the tiny toy, but he frowns in concentration, fiddling with the wheel like it’s a puzzle he intends to beat. “You have to be gentle with your toys.”
The sentiment surprises me, and I laugh absurdly at it. At Declan of all people promoting gentleness.
Joshua scampers over to me, crashing into my knee like a battering ram. “You wanna see my car? It’s a Lamborghini!”
I crouch beside him, surprised by the tightness in my chest. “A Lambo, huh? Would you want to see a real one?”
Joshua’s eyes seem to expand, like he makes more room on his head for them, and he inhales one giant gasp, clutching the car to his chest. “A real one? Where?” he whispers.
“Right here,” I whisper back, pointing to the ground. “In the garage.”
“You have a Lamborghini ?” he asks with reverence, but he can’t quite pronounce his r’s. It comes out “lambowghini.”
“I do.” I glance toward Caroline, but she doesn’t meet my eyes. She’s pretending to read again, but I see her hands, clenched in her lap. Like she’s holding on to something she doesn’t trust us not to break. “I’ll show it to you when your mommy and Alaina go out for coffee later.”
He beams at me and looks back at his mom. “Mommy, when are you and Alaina going?”
She puts her book down, and I see the hidden fear that she’s pushed back. It’s like a shadow behind her real self, screaming from beyond her pupils. She chuckles, a fake laugh, and chides him, “Oh, now that you’re going to see a fancy car, you’re done with Mommy?”
He looks at me sheepishly, and I realize that his hands are resting on my knees. It’s an innocent touch. He doesn’t know he’s touching someone holding his mother hostage. He doesn’t know he might be touching his father. All he knows is that I have a Lamborghini.
I look back at the boy and reach out for his toy. “Mind if I take this for a test drive until then?”
He beams and hands it over.
I roll the toy between my fingers, feeling the weight of it, the dust in the wheel well. Something about it feels sacred. Something about all of this does. Like I’ve stumbled into someone else’s memory and I’m not supposed to be here.
But I want to be.
For the first time ever, I want something that doesn’t come with blood.