30. Declan
DECLAN
Rian, still wrecked, sits on the couch like a fucking lump on a log, his face in his hands, his hair messed up from dragging his dirty hands through it. “He used her to start a war with the Valacchis.”
Kellan leans forward, elbows on knees, voice trembling. “No, he doesn’t care about that. He wanted her to die, and he wanted someone else to kill her. He knows the Valacchis will make it painful. We can’t let him do this. She was supposed to be safe.”
“Safe? She’s here because we abducted her,” I remind him, cold and blunt.
He doesn’t respond. The room falls quiet except for the tick of the old clock on the mantel. It’s loud in the silence.
Kellan mutters, mostly to himself, “We turned her into one of us. We’re no different than him, are we?” The puppy dog look on his face kills me.
“You knew what this was,” I tell him with a sneer, cracking open a beer and pouring it into a glass. I add a shot over it until it froths over. “Why are you acting so surprised now?” I look over at Rian with open contempt. “Either of you?”
I don’t say the rest of it. I should be the one surprised. I thought Da told me everything, and he lied to me and used me.
“How can you say that? I never planned for her to do anything but stand there. She’s tasted violence, and now it’s all over her like a contagion,” Shéaghdha spits out bitterly, his index finger pointing at me like I dipped her in it, like it was me that put that gun in her hand.
“You were right there with me, egging her on. You didn’t mind so much then,” I point out, taking a swig of my drink and wiping my mouth with the back of my hand. I point the glass at him.
“I was trying to help,” Shéaghdha mumbles, looking at me but without any resolve.
I slam my drink down and spit back, “You always want us to think of you as just as much a man as any of us, but you can never handle the fallout.”
“Declan, stop. Everyone feels bad, but you don’t have to take it out on us,” Rian comes to Shéaghdha’s aid, looking up wearily from his hands.
“I don’t feel bad,” I tell him, staring into his eyes. I hate when they get like this, when they’re more self-pity than man. They wanted Caroline to do something big to prove to our athair that she would. Now that the bad man has been bad, they want to take it back. That’s not the way of the world.
“Not even that Da lied to us? That she shot someone so important that we can’t even save her?
” Rian asks, trying to get me to admit to feeling the same way he does.
That’s all either of them ever want. They need me to be as meek as them.
They can’t stand the reality that I’m just not like them and never will be.
Killing your own mother will do that to a person.
I liked seeing Caroline stick up for herself.
I liked knowing what she was capable of.
It turned me on to see her breathing hard, face red, staring into the face of a screaming man who had threatened her kids.
I don’t feel bad that Da lied to us, because he won’t get away with it. I deal with my problems.
“Speak for yourself,” I retort, pushing my sleeves up. “I can save her from anything.”
“Oh, can you?” Rian asks sarcastically, crossing an ankle over his knee and holding his leg, letting it shake lightly and lifting his eyebrows at me.
He’s challenging me. He thinks I’m kidding. I would crush every Valacchi between two fingers if they tried to hurt her. Especially now that she’s starting to impress me.
“Yes, I can.”
“How are you going to do that?” he asks, leaning against the back of the couch, antagonizing me with his casualness.
The front door opens with a loud bang, and Caroline stands in the doorway like she owns the fucking place.
Her chin is high, arms crossed, hair messy.
She’s breathing heavily, the twins in her arms like paperwork, their thumbs tucked into their mouths, their cheeks sweaty and stuck to her as they sleep gently.
When she has them, she’s a mother above all, above a torturer, above a captive, above a mafia member to-be.
“You’re back,” Shéaghdha breathes, turning his entire body to her.
“You knew,” she replies stonily. An accusation. Simple. No one answers. “You all knew.” Despite the intensity of her words, she sways back and forth, patting the twins’ backs. We could be talking about anything—the mail, the trash route. In another life, we are.
I chug my beer and watch my brothers try to defend themselves.
Rian shakes his head too fast. I can feel him unraveling as he stands from the couch, just short of begging. He keeps opening his mouth and closing it again. I know that look. It’s the face of a man watching his future walk away in real time. “No. Caroline, please, I didn’t know. I swear to God?—”
“You can’t,” she cuts in, sharp as a blade, “swear to a God you don’t believe in.”
“We believe in God,” I cut in, my eyes narrowing.
She looks at me with utter disgust dripping from every pore. “What’s it matter what you believe ? Everything about you is unholy.”
I set my drink down on the kitchen counter with a loud clang and slink toward her.
She doesn’t take her eyes off me, fire blazing in them.
When I reach her, our noses are touching, and I growl, “You think you’re so much better than us because you just got here, so your hands are clean, right?
We already know what you’ll do to live, Caroline. Maybe drop the pretense.”
My jaw is set, anger undulating under my skin. She and I both know that no one forced her to pull that trigger. That’s a simplistic narrative, but it isn’t quite true.
When I saw her take a bat to that man’s knees, I liked it. I liked seeing that side to her, the side that was vengeful and took no shit. But now that she wants to get out of it, wants to push that back in, I need more than ever for her to acknowledge that I saw it, that it was real.
“Fine,” she relents, her eyes sliding away from mine.
She crosses the room to lay her sleeping boys on the couch and holds her arms out in surrender.
“You all saw it. Your plan worked. You got my hands dirty.” She shakes her head.
“I was willing to bend if it meant we’d be safe, but…
I was never going to be one of you, was I?
” The last sentence is whispered, a broken request.
She wanted to be one of us.
“We thought you were,” I murmur, my voice steady even if I feel my heart pounding so hard it strains against my chest. I wanted her to be one of us too. I still want it. I want it even more now, maybe. Somehow.
“You used me,” she continues, not done with her righteous anger.
Her voice is quiet now, but it’s worse that way.
She sounds tired. Hollow. Not angry anymore.
“You let me believe this was about love. About family. But it was all a fucking game. He wanted me to fire the first shot so Emilio Valacchi would retaliate. You let him.”
“We didn’t let him do fuck all,” I say, and my voice comes out low and colder than I mean it to, the last words more like a growl than spoken. “You think I wanted this? That I like this? That I’m taking pleasure in knowing I let it happen?”
Her round, hazel eyes turn molten with rage, and she walks over to sit next to the boys on the couch so she can rub their backs.
So she can make sure they stay asleep if I go crazy.
I can see it on her face, her fear that I can’t control myself.
“You didn’t let it happen, Declan. You helped.
You stood beside me while he guided my hands. You told me I had to .”
I swallow hard. I deserve that. Every word of it.
I look away from her, at Isaac. His cheeks are bright red, the same way his mom’s get.
One cheek is smushed against the couch cushion into his closed eye.
His curly hair is matted and sweaty. I want so badly to push it out of his face, to be a father to him and to Joshua, for Caroline to know that I’m more than a loose cannon.
But maybe I’m not.
“Caroline,” Kellan murmurs from his corner of the room.
He’s standing against the mantle of the fireplace, looking like a piece of furniture himself.
He looks up at her with wide, boyish eyes, and licks his bottom lip furtively.
“We didn’t know. It’s not fair to be angry about it now just because it didn’t go our way. ”
A small, wry laugh escapes her, and when she looks back up at him, her eyes are wet, the hazel shining in the dimly lit room. “Fair?” she whispers, stroking Joshua’s cheek. “I was bait. You set me up.”
My jaw flexes. I look at her and see not just what she’s become, not just what we’ve made her, but that she hates it about herself. I wish I could make her see herself how I see her.
Strong. Capable. Powerful.
“No,” Rian argues, his voice sharp. “He set us all up. Not just you, Caroline. He’s been doing this since we were old enough to hold a knife. It’s how he controls us. He breaks us down and makes us think there’s no other way but his. He did it to us, and we turned around and did it to you.
“Our athair told us that Tino was disloyal, responsible for all of this. We thought he ratted us out. Ratted you out. We were willing to let you stay gone, but our athair —well, you saw how he was about it all. We thought it would help you earn your place and that he would let it go. We aren’t tricking you.
” He looks at her and whispers, “You have to trust us this once.”
She scoffs. “Trust you,” she repeats bitterly. “You made me ‘earn my place’ by committing murder. By making me into one of his soldiers.”
Rian takes a step forward and drops to his knees in front of her on the couch, his voice raw. He strokes her thighs with his hands, and I watch hungrily. “That’s not who you are.”
“No,” she agrees. “It’s who you are.”
That stings. I can see it hit him square in the chest. He falters.
“ Ní hé ár n-athair sinne ,” I whisper to Rian.
Caroline snaps toward me and asks sharply, “What did you say?”
I repeat, slowly and cautiously, “We’re not our father.”
She looks at me, like that’s almost funny. “Aren’t you?”
“No,” I snap, too quick, too harsh.
“It’s not who I am,” Kellan blurts out, pushing off against the wall with one foot and stepping toward her. He runs a hand through his blonde hair and sinks to his knees next to Rian. “I’ve spent my whole life terrified of turning into that man. I won’t let my sons grow up the same way.”
Caroline looks at him, and something shifts. She softens, barely.
“It ends with us,” I tell her sharply, and she looks over at me. I meet her stare, holding it like a vow. “Whatever we have to do.”
“What are you saying?” she asks carefully.
Kellan rubs Caroline’s forearm. “We take the kids, and we disappear.”
“He’ll hunt you down like he did to me,” she replies.
Rian says, “We turn his allies against him. We show them he’s a liability. A fossil. We’ve already built something better here. Something they want in on.”
“But you haven’t,” Caroline points out.
“Then we just fucking kill him,” I snap from my spot at the kitchen, watching my brothers grovel in front of Caroline while she denies their attempts, a queen among peasants. The words feel heavier than anything I’ve ever spoken, but I mean them. “Not just scare him off. Not exile. We end him.”
Caroline crosses her arms tighter. “And what if he kills you all before you get the chance?”
“How is it any different?” I ask.
Her voice is hushed. “Do you mean that?” She looks at Rian and Kellan. “Would you two…?”
“Absolutely,” Rian says.
“Kellan?” she asks gently, pressing her palms against his cheeks.
For a flash of a second, I find myself wishing she would be so gentle with me.
She sees that normalcy in him that makes her want to nurture him.
But what about me? A two-time parent murderer?
Does everyone just expect it will come easily to me?
Maybe it will, but her warm palms on my face might ease it even more.
She looks between us, eyes glistening, and lands on me. “You’re insane.”
I smirk. “ Aye, a wee bit.”
Slowly, she nods, sucking in her cheeks, mulling it over like a glass of wine with ambiguous notes. “Okay,” she says. “Okay. Let’s burn the whole goddamn thing down.”
Rian takes one of her hands and interlaces their fingers. When he looks at me, there’s blood in his eyes now. “If we do this, we have to be prepared to lose everything.”
“Just a legacy of blood, nothing serious,” I reply with a grim smile.
Rian breathes out, like he’s been underwater and only just broke the surface. “I mean that we might lose our lives.”
Caroline shakes her head and looks down at her sons. “So long as they have theirs. So long as they never have to grow up in a world with Fionn Crowley.”
Kellan slides his hand down Caroline’s forearm and slips his fingers between hers, and she visibly relaxes against his touch.
She looks up at me abruptly. “Can you guarantee he’ll die? Even if we do too?”
I run my tongue along my bottom teeth. “Caroline, ní ligfidh mé d’aon ní tú a ghortú choíche . I will never let anything hurt you. Or anyone. No man can ever touch you as long as you have me.” I wait to see her relax, but she doesn’t.
So I relent, “Yes. I can guarantee he’ll die, at least.”
Only then do I see her body calm.
A smile tugs at my lips, that she cares more for these boys than her life. I have some things to learn from Caroline Johnson. We will lose a father, likely lose the kingdom.
But we might gain a soul.