8. Cillian #2
I have patience for this part. I know how it goes and how long the pretending lasts. I know exactly when to push and when to let the silence do the work.
I’ve done this more times than I can count. I’m in complete control.
This is a job and I am very good at this job.
Mickey starts talking nearly immediately and I fight the urge to roll my eyes at what a fucking coward he is.
Three dockworkers, the inside contact at the manifest office, dates and amounts and the name of the buyer he’s been offloading to in Newark.
He sings like a fucking canary, clearly very motivated to be cooperative.
I listen to everything, already drafting the Connor debrief in my head.
I’m almost out of here and can get back to my wife.
Then the idiot decides to negotiate.
“Look,” he says earnestly, “I gave you everything, yeah? Everything, clean. You’re gonna tell Brennan I was straight with you, right?
” He shifts in the chair and I watch with puzzlement as a gleam grows in his eye.
“Because I’ve heard things, you know? Things that might be worth something to you. About your marriage.”
The air seems to still. Doyle shifts his weight from leg to leg. I look at Mickey, my expression unchanging.
“Word on the street is it’s for show,” he continues, reading the silence as encouragement, which is a mistake.
“The Santoro girl—your wife.” He snorts, settling into it now.
“Heard she’s not exactly sitting at home waiting for you.
” He laughs a wet phlegmy sound which speaks to years of cigarette use.
“Heard she’s been seen at a hotel on the Upper East Side, couple of Tuesday nights in a row, with randos. ” He smiles. “Can’t blame her, right?”
There’s heat at the back of my neck and I breathe through it. I’m still in control.
He’s still talking and I need him to finish talking.
He’s enjoying himself now, leaning into it.
“Between us?” he says, dropping his voice like we’re mates sharing something. “Seen her picture. Few of the boys have. Someone pulled it up on their phone, one of them society pages she’s always in.” He lets out a low whistle. “Jesus. Your wife is something else, man. Like, genuinely.”
He shakes his head with this expression of pained appreciation, like he’s doing me a compliment.
“Legs up to here. That mouth on her.” He clicks his tongue.
“Waste, is what it is. Woman like that, stuck home alone while you’re out here doing this.
” He gestures at the warehouse and at me.
“Tommy on the overnight—big guy, you might know him—he said, and I’m just repeating this, he said he’d give his left nut for twenty minutes with her.
” A wet laugh. “Can’t say I argued with him. ”
I look at him. My jaw is very tight.
“Like, no disrespect,” Mickey adds, in a tone that is absolutely intending disrespect, “but Valentina—” and the way he says her name, like it’s his to use enrages me— “she seems like the kind of woman who needs a lot of”—he grins—“attention. You know what I’m saying?
And a man in your line of work, you’re not exactly around much, are you.
” He cocks his head. “Heard she’s been getting it somewhere else anyway, like I said.
So maybe she’s sorted, but I’m just saying.
” He shrugs, still grinning. “If she ever needs another option, you could pass my number along. I’d treat her right. ”
He winks.
He actually fucking winks at me.
I don’t remember moving but I do remember the sound of the chair falling over.
Twenty years of Connor’s work has buried so deep in me that my brain doesn’t need permission anymore.
Mickey doesn’t even get his hands up. My first punch catches him across the jaw before he’s fully registered I’ve crossed the distance.
The crack of it reverberates up through my knuckles and into my wrists.
I feel it and I don’t care. The chair goes sideways and Mickey goes with it.
I follow him down to the concrete floor because he said her name like it was his and he’s still got that stunned remnant of the grin on his face and I want it off.
My knee goes into his chest, pinning him.
I hit him again, harder.
This time his head snaps back against the floor and he makes a sound that isn’t a word anymore.
Good. I want him to stop making words.
I want every word he just said driven back into his stupid grinning mouth.
My knuckles split on his cheekbone and I don’t stop because the words are still in the room, her name in his mouth, like she was something to be passed around and rated and laughed about by men like him.
I hit him again.
“Cillian.” Ryan’s voice somewhere behind me, tight with something that isn’t quite alarm but isn’t far from it. “Cillian.”
I don’t stop.
Mickey’s making a low wet noise with each breath.
My fist comes back anyway because he winked, he said her name and then he winked at me like it was funny, like she was a joke he was letting me in on—
“Boss.” Ryan’s hands lock around my shoulders from behind and he hauls me up with his full body weight. He’s six-three and two-twenty and he puts all of it into it, but he still barely gets me back on the first attempt. “He is done, Boss. He is done, come on—”
Second attempt. I plant a fist into the concrete beside Mickey’s head instead of his face, which is as much self-control as I’ve got right now.
Third attempt.
Ryan gets me up.
I let him, because I realize three things: Mickey’s still making noise, which means he’s breathing.
Ryan’s hands on my shoulders are the hands of a man who is trying to help me not do something I can’t walk back from.
And my hands are screaming at me.
I stand there. The concrete is cold through my shoes and I’m breathing hard. I didn’t notice it until now.
The warehouse smells like blood layered over the seawater, sharp and copper.
It’s dripping everywhere, some of it’s Mickey’s and some of it’s mine running down my own fingers.
Doyle and Ryan are both very still.
They’ve put themselves against the far wall, the way experienced men do when something has gone sideways and the smartest move is to not be near it.
They’re looking at me with a look I’ve seen on other men’s faces when things have gone further than expected. I’ve never had it directed at me before.
I find my jacket on the floor. That’s odd. I have no memory of it coming off.
Mickey is on the concrete in the wreckage of the chair, one eye swollen shut, jaw sitting at an angle it wasn’t sitting at an hour ago.
His breathing is shallow and he’s not smiling anymore.
I crouch down. He looks up at me with the one eye that still works, and whatever he sees in my face makes him flinch even though I’m not touching him.
“The names you gave us,” I say, conversationally. “Doyle’s going to verify every single one of them. If one comes back wrong, or if I hear—from anyone, anywhere—that you’ve said her name again”—I hold his gaze—“the jaw is going to be the interesting part of your story. Nod if you understand.”
He nods quickly. The smell of urine invades my nostrils and I wrinkle my nose. Bastard’s pissed himself.
I stand up and look at Doyle. “Get the names to Connor. I’ll debrief him myself.”
I walk out without looking at Mickey again.
The cold air hits me outside. I stand there for a moment with my hands at my sides looking at what I can see of the Hudson between the buildings.
My knuckles burn. Good. It gives me something to focus on while the rest of my brain finishes doing whatever it’s doing, which appears to be arriving at a conclusion I’ve been putting off for weeks.
What I keep coming back to isn’t the jaw. I’ve done more damage and I’ll do it again and I’m at peace with what I am.
What I keep coming back to is the wink.
The easy, relaxed wink of a man who thought he was buying goodwill with my wife’s name.
Like he had my permission to shape the words of her name around his lips.
He doesn’t even deserve to look at her.
I hiss.
Damn it.
I’m in love with her.
That’s what this is. That’s what it’s been. I just beat a man half to death without a single care because he dared to say my wife’s name. I’m in love with her.
I take a deep breath and shove the thoughts away into my mental box, locking them back. Connor is waiting and I need to be someone else for the next hour.
I drive to midtown. The lobby is quiet and it hits me that it has never once felt welcoming.
Tonight is no different.
The elevator opens onto the executive floor and I can hear Connor before I see him.
His voice comes through the closed office door, hard and clipped, the tone that means someone on the other end of that call is being made to understand something they’d rather not understand. I wait in the hall.
His assistant, also always at Connor’s beck and call even this late, stares at his desk.
My knuckles drip onto the marble floor. I watch the small red drops appear and don’t do anything about them.
The call ends and there’s a beat of silence. “Send him in,” Connor says, and his voice is very quiet, which is worse than loud.
The office is dim except for the desk lamp. Connor is standing, not sitting. He’s facing the window already, which means he skipped the pen-capping and the calibration entirely.
I inwardly sigh.
This means he’s been waiting for me specifically, which means someone called ahead. Doyle, probably. Or Ryan.
I don’t blame them.
He turns when I come in.
When I see his face, I know immediately that whatever version of this conversation I was preparing for on the drive over isn’t this one.
Connor Brennan has two modes of anger: the cold, contained version he uses on people he wants to manage, and the other one, the one I’ve seen maybe a handful of times in twenty years, the one that means the container has cracked.
His face is tight across the jaw and his eyes have gone to that flat, colorless pale that signifies danger.
“Sit down,” he says coldly.
I sit.
He doesn’t.