25. Darragh
Chapter 25
Darragh
I keep my gun trained on the blond shitbag while I steer my boat one-handed. He’s lying flat on his belly at the bottom of the boat. On the off-chance that someone sees the boat out here tonight, no one will know he’s in it.
I allow myself a glance at him – just a glance. If I spend too long looking at him, rage will take over. I’m trying to keep this clean. If I want to keep the cops away from questioning Valentina, I’ll have to make this look like yet another tragic, self-inflicted ending. Just like Dario.
Even if I don’t want to. Even if everything inside me is screaming to slice this man up while he’s still fucking breathing.
“So, Connor,” I bite out as I direct the boat into the choppy middle of the bay.
He flinches at the sound of my voice.
“How do you know my name, sir?”
Sir. Fucking sir. What a worm.
If you’re going to be a piece of shit, just be a piece of shit right until the fucking end. Go down fighting and biting and spitting and swearing.
The way I would.
The way I think Valentina would, too.
How do I know his name? Same way I know everything important about him. Same way I know all the shit about the other two couples who were staying in that cottage.
Connor McNair. Twenty-seven years old. Works for a small financial firm in Toronto. Has a long-term, twenty-five-year-old girlfriend named Diana who couldn’t make it to this sunny little retreat because she’s studying for the bar exam. His parents are Shelly and Robert McNair. They live in Kingston. They have a new laberdoodle puppy named Peanut.
And they’re about to be very fucking sad.
I leave Connor’s question hanging unanswered in the air. When I decide we’re far enough from shore, I kill the engines and leave the driver’s seat. I sit in one of the back seats, right beside the place where Connor is dutifully digging his forehead into the floor.
“Sit up.”
He scrambles to do it, his gaze flicking to the gun I’ve still got on him. He’s shaking. The wind out here is cold. And he’s afraid.
I fucking bask in it. My mind goes back to where I heard him. Saw him.
Saw him grabbing Valentina. My vision goes briefly black with rage.
I breathe unsteadily, trying to clear it. With my free hand, I pop open a small cooler built into the boat. There’s a bottle of rum in here, presumably belonging to the previous owner. I toss it into Connor’s lap.
“Drink that.”
Connor looks down at the half-full bottle in his lap.
“All of it?”
“All of it.”
I need him good and fucking drunk so that if they bother with an autopsy, they’ll see the death was his own fault. Same reason I used a rock to break his wrist instead of shooting a hole through it. There are a lot of rocks out here in the bay. And by the time he’s found, his body will likely be even more battered than it is now.
“I’m so sorry, sir,” he babbles as he struggles to open the bottle with his one good hand.
The apology combined with the shaky show of incompetence makes me imagine smashing the bottle across his face. Over and over and over again.
“I swear I didn’t know she had a boyfriend.”
Jesus fucking Christ. I’ve never been somebody’s boyfriend in my entire goddamn life.
“I’m not her boyfriend.”
“Oh. Sorry. Her brother?”
I snort darkly at that. If I had a sister and wanted to do to her what I imagine doing to Valentina on an hourly basis, I would be one rather fucked-up individual.
I nudge his forehead with the gun.
“Start drinking.”
He’s breathing so hard and fast now I wonder if he’ll even be able to do it. He might puke before he even takes a sip.
If he pukes in my fucking boat, I’m going to make him lick it off.
But he doesn’t. He starts drinking. Slow sips at first, but then faster chugs when I press the gun meaningfully against his forehead.
He struggles towards the end, but manages to drink it all. By the time he’s finished, he’s weeping, tears and snot running down a face I am once again longing to smash the bottle against.
I huff the cool air, trying to keep the writhing hate under control. Keep this clean. Don’t cut his fingers or his ears or his balls off. He has to be mostly intact.
There’s a smaller watercraft tucked into the side of this larger boat. It’s something between a kayak and a paddleboard. I don’t know the name of the precise design. I didn’t grow up with a fancy house on an Ontario lake doing rich kid watersports the way Connor probably did.
Whatever the bright yellow thing is, I turn my attention towards it, untying it and yanking it out of its place before turning back to my prisoner.
“Get up.”
He tries, but the rum along with whatever he drank earlier has already made a mess of his coordination, and all he can do is collapse heavily to the side. I put my gun down. At this point I’m not even close to needing it anymore.
I take the kayak-board-thing and drop it down into the ice-black water. Then, I grab Connor by his preppy fucking shirt.
And I hurl him over the side.
He lands awkwardly on the yellow board, his good arm loosely grabbing for purchase as most of his body slides sideways into the water. I take out my boat’s spare oar – the same one I used to haul Valentina closer when she was floating out here on her tube, like a little lost gumdrop – and I place its paddle beneath the board Connor clings to.
“May the waves rise up to meet you,” I tell him, a twisted reimagining of the traditional Irish death blessing. “And may they be cold upon your face.”
I flex my arms and send the oar’s paddle jerking upwards. The watercraft flips and takes him with it.
I watch with a grim, palely beating sort of satisfaction, knowing I’d be feeling a whole lot better right now if I could have done more than just let him drown. Anger is like a living thing inside me. This doesn’t soothe it.
It doesn’t even come close.
Connor tries and fails to get purchase on the board. The water’s too cold. His limbs are too weak. His wrist is too broken.
He goes under and he doesn’t come back up.
Once I’m sure that the motherfucker’s dead, I start the engine and turn the boat around. As I approach the shore, I see a figure standing on the end of my dock.
It’s Valentina.
Rage, like the rage I just tried to drown by drowning Connor, comes frothing through my body. An acidic tidal wave.
She didn’t go home like I told her too.
“What did you do? Did you kill him?” she hisses quietly, her eyes scanning the boat and seeing Connor isn’t in it.
“Of course I did,” I respond tightly as I direct the boat to the side of the dock and secure it. “What?” I ask, my voice sharpening viciously when I see her rear back. “You’re shocked by that? With a da like yours? Not to mention I threw your fucking fiancé off that roof.”
I haul myself onto the dock, towering above her, gazing down into the haughty pride shaping her beautiful features. Where the hell does she get off being so pissed? When she’s the one who made mistakes tonight?
“You didn’t have to do anything to him,” she snaps. “I didn’t need you to save me!”
“Save you?” I almost spit the words. “Come on. I know you would have clawed that fucker’s eyes out before he got what he wanted with you.”
Some of the anger in her ebbs, melts into confusion.
“Then, why?”
“Because,” I mutter, taking her chin in my hand and lowering my face closer to hers, as if I can breathe or burn my words right into her, “anyone who touches what’s mine ends up at the bottom of a goddamn lake, Valentina. Figured you would know that by now.”
“You’re crazy,” she breathes.
“So I’ve been told.”
“Are you going to kill my next fiancé, too? Papà will likely have me marry someone else soon, you know. And a husband is going to want to do a lot more than grab my arm and whine at me.”
She says it, and even though I know it’s true, it sends my brain into a fucking tailspin. A month ago, I wouldn’t have given two shits about who Valentina Titone married, unless it affected my businesses somehow.
Now, it’s fucking inconceivable. I imagine her in a white dress, walking down the aisle to someone else.
And then I imagine slitting the groom’s throat.
I release her chin and seize her arm, pulling her forcefully towards the house. She puts her full weight against me, leaning back at a chaotic angle. If I keep going like this, I’ll pull her shoulder out of its goddamn socket. Something I wouldn’t care about doing to literally anyone else.
But I stop pulling her arm.
And instead, I pick her up and sling her over my shoulder. Her hands grapple against my shirt, yanking it up and scratching my skin with her nails. I inhale slowly, letting the burning stripes of the sensation fill my consciousness. My dick stiffens.
In the house, I dump Valentina down on one of the gigantic white couches in the living room. She bounces slightly, falling sideways into a big pile of cushions with nautical colour schemes and phrases like “Home is where the lake is” stitched on them.
“What are you doing?” she asks, scrambling into a more upright position. “I thought you told me to go home for the night.”
“But you didn’t, did you? You stood at the end of my fucking dock so you could scold me when I came back from watching Connor drown.”
Even in the moonlit darkness of the living room, I can see blood rush from her face.
“He drowned?”
“Would you have preferred the dick in a box scenario?” I growl at her, cracking my knuckles. I run my tongue along my teeth then grin. “I can probably still make that happen.”
She rips her gaze from me, staring hard at the floor between my feet.
I don’t like how much I love having her here. Inside property that I own. Never would have thought I’d be happy about having a Titone in my domain. Unless I was about to gut them like a fish.
“Why did you kill Dario?”
Tension radiates from my spine. I narrow my gaze at Valentina, trying to read her expression, but she’s schooled it into something blank. Her gaze is still aimed at the floor.
“He fucked me over on a real estate deal,” I finally say. It’s the truth. I was supposed to help finance a new commercial development project Dario was trying to get underway without his father’s influence. The Titones were too heavily invested in his father’s other projects to support it. I saw an opportunity and I moved on it.
Turns out, Dario already had financing secured from Russian sources. And the commercial leases I was promised had been promised to the bratva as well.
“Real estate,” she repeats woodenly. “A deal went bad. So you threw him off a building.”
“He got off lucky,” I scoff. “I’ve done far worse to better men.”
She doesn’t answer. Doesn’t look at me.
“You can’t possibly be upset about that weaselly fuck being dead,” I say at length. “In fact, you should be thanking me. I got you out of marrying that sad sack of shit.”
“But I just told you!” she exclaims, finally throwing her gaze against mine. “I’ll just end up engaged to someone else! And it could be to someone even worse!”
No.
The word screams from my brain, splitting my skull.
No. She won’t be engaged to someone else.
I would murder every man in the fucking country before I let somebody else have her.
Touch her.
Fuck her.
Marry her.
But then what does that mean for me?
For her?
For both of us?
My mind whirrs and stutters like a failing machine. Failing because it’s confronting something I told myself I’d never do. A computer coming up against self-destructive code.
I told myself I’d never marry.
But marrying Valentina doesn’t mean loving her. Maybe I can keep her without breaking any of my other rules.
Without losing myself to total obliteration.
“You will marry someone worse,” I agree grimly.
There ain’t much worse in this world than me.