Chapter Twenty-One
Cian
“Has Maddie remembered anything else?” Sal asked.
Caity had been living with me for weeks, and every few days Maddie came for dinner. I disguised my interrogation about her relationship with Valentinetti as dinner conversation and wanting to get to know my daughter on a different level.
And it was true. I wanted to know everything I thought I never had the right to ask. Some of it was hard. Hearing her talk about Valentinetti, knowing how much older than her he was, made me want to bring him back from the dead so I could kill him.
He was over thirty fucking years old. He had no business getting involved with my daughter, who was only twenty at the time. Hell, he was older than Maddie was even now, and she’d lived a lifetime in the past eight years.
I couldn’t help feeling like he’d taken advantage of her. I knew she loved him. Every word she spoke about him was dripping in adoration. The man could do nothing wrong in her eyes.
But I wanted to know how he felt about her. Did he really love her? The way she deserved to be loved? Or did he see a young impressionable girl he could manipulate?
I’d never know how he truly felt.
Because Kelley had given him up to Petrovich and had him killed.
Maddie had never been in an adult relationship. Never brought a date to the many galas she attended with her mother. Caity said she’d never even known Maddie to go on a date after she graduated high school. Until we learned about Henry, I’d always wondered why.
Now I knew it was because she was still living with a broken heart.
“Nothing concrete. I have to be careful about what I ask. I don’t want her to think I’m grilling her to get answers.”
“Isn’t that what you’re doing?” Mac asked.
“No,” I snapped at my best friend. “I am trying to get to know my daughter.”
“You know her, Ci. You’ve been in her life since the day she was born,” Duncan argued.
“Held her before I did,” Sal grumbled.
I smiled at him. “Damn right I did.”
As soon as we’d known Caity was in labor, I got my ass to the St. John’s Presbyterian hospital in New York.
Twenty-nine years ago...
The drive from Boston to New York City took an average of three and a half to four hours, depending on traffic. I made it in just under three.
As soon as the call came in that Caity was in labor, I left. I didn’t care what anyone thought; I wanted to be there when her baby was born. The baby who should have been mine.
I’d sat in the waiting room all damn day, waiting. And when the nurse came out and let me know Maddie was here, I walked into that room like I fucking belonged there.
Caity’s eyes went wide when I stepped through the door. I’d told the nurse I was her brother. It was the only way they would give me any information. I couldn’t tell her I was her husband. The bastard was in there with her.
“McCarthy, what the hell are you doing here?”
“I came to meet my niece,” I said, walking past Kelley, ignoring his scowl. I walked over and kissed Caity on the head. She bit her lip, afraid of what I would do or say.
We’d argued about who the father was. I told her I wanted a paternity test as soon as the baby was born.
She argued that she was already pregnant but didn’t know.
She said she’d found out a few days after our night together that she was pregnant.
Insisting the timeframe was too short for me to have gotten her pregnant.
I didn’t believe her, but looking at the baby in her arms, the fear I saw in her eyes, I let it go. I’d done the reading, spoken to doctors, and they all said the same thing: That if she’d tested positive days after being with me, she was already pregnant when we were together.
My heart broke knowing her child wasn’t mine. I’d desperately wanted to knock her up. I’d purposely not used a condom that night, hoping she’d get pregnant. Wanting the world to know she was mine.
Because, make no mistake, she might be married to someone else, but she was fucking mine. It was only a matter of time before Kelley fucked up and I could take him out.
“Can I hold her?” I asked, letting Caity see how much I loved not only her but this child. In that moment, I didn’t care that she wasn’t mine. If Caity gave me even the slightest notion that she’d be with me, I would proudly raise another man’s daughter as my own.
Caity nodded. As she passed the baby to me, Kelley huffed and stormed out of the room.
“She looks like you,” I said, not taking my eyes off the little girl in her arms. “What’s her name?”
Caity didn’t answer right away, and I looked over at her. Her eyes filled with tears as she said, “Madigan.”
I closed my eyes. Pain stabbed into my heart. Madigan was my mother’s maiden name.
“Are you sure, Caity? ’Cause if you’re not...” My voice was a harsh whisper. Anger and pain laced into my words.
“I’m sorry, Ci. I wish it was possible.”
Looking over my shoulder at the door, I turned back to Caity. “Would you leave him if it was?” I asked. “Would you walk away? Let me do what I had to in order to make a way for us?”
Caity shook her head. “There is no way for us, Ci. If he was gone. Even if she was yours, we’d never be together. My father would never allow it.”
I wanted to tell her, fuck the old man. I wanted to assure her that we could make it work. That we could leave. I’d take her anywhere in the world. Fuck, I’d call Brian and get his help.
Every word died on my lips when the doors opened, and Eamon O’Malley, the head of the Irish Mob, my boss and her father, a man who hated me and I never knew why, walked into the room.
“You should have seen your father’s face when he walked in and found me holding Maddie.”
Duncan chuckled, and Mac laughed. Sal just shook his head.
“I wish he were fuckin’ here to know the truth,” Sal said. “Caity said he knew about Morgan. Hell, maybe he knew about Maddie.”
“Nah, no way he knew about Maddie,” Mac said.
“How do you know?” Sal asked him, and I was curious about his answer. Morgan, Sal’s daughter, was born a year after Maddie. Both girls were children when he died, but because they were girls, he never said a word about either of them. It was possible that he knew and was simply biding his time.
“Because Ci’s still alive and Eamon isn’t.” he joked, tipping his chin in my direction.
“Mac’s right,” Duncan added. “If he’d known Ci was Maddie’s dad, he’d be fuckin’ dead.”
“So, the question is, when did Kelley find out and who told him?” I asked. “If Kelley had known when your father was alive, he would have told him. He was so far up Eamon’s ass I’m surprised his hair wasn’t darker.”
Mac chuckled, and Duncan scrunched his nose at my statement. Sal looked at me and tilted his head. “That’s a damn good question. When did he learn about Maddie? We know roughly when he learned about Henry’s existence. But how did he find out that Maddie wasn’t his?”
“We need to find that other office,” Duncan said with a sigh.
“Call Callum; find out how many men he lost when he cleaned house. And then dig into those men. Properties, family, everything. See if any of those men have a connection to anyone on the lists we have from the old man’s office. I want to know exactly how far up my father’s ass Kelley was.”
We left Sal’s office, each of us with a job to do. I entered my office and sat behind my desk. Going back to the memory of the day Maddie was born.
Anger suddenly took hold of me. She fucking lied to me. I stood in that room, holding my daughter in my arms, and she lied to my fucking face.
I picked up the mug on my desk and threw it across the room.
The door swung open, and Mac stood in the doorway. Seeing the anger pouring off me, he crossed his arms and leaned against the jamb.
“You want to hit the gym?”
I studied his face. “You’re not gonna ask why I’m pissed?”
He shrugged his shoulders and said, “I figure it’s got something to do with Caity and the day Maddie was born. You’ll tell me when you’re ready.”
I sat back in my chair, rubbing my hands over my face. Frustration building as I took a deep breath that was meant to cleanse but only fueled my anger.
“She fuckin’ lied to my face.” Mac didn’t say a word, knowing I would continue. “When I asked if I could hold her, Kelley left in a huff. Then she told me her name.”
Mac’s eyebrows scrunched like he was confused.
“My mother’s maiden name was Madigan.”
“Oh shit.”
“Yeah,” I sighed. “Oh shit.” I closed my eyes against the pain. “I asked her again if it was possible. She was adamant that it wasn’t. She told me she was already pregnant when we were together but didn’t know yet. Said she found out a few days later. She fuckin’ lied to me.”
“Ci, she lied to you every day for almost thirty years. Why are you pissed now when you weren’t pissed when you found out?”
“Because I fuckin’ believed her when she said she didn’t know.”
I stood up from my desk and grabbed my keys.
“Where are you going?”
“To do what I should have fuckin’ done months ago,” I hissed, storming out of my office and almost running into Duncan on the way out.
“Where’s the fire?” he shouted.
I didn’t wait for the elevator; I shoved open the door to the stairs and heard Mac respond, “In his fuckin’ heart.”
Damn right it was. I rubbed my chest, the spot where my heart was beating faster, as I rushed down the stairs. She fucking lied to me.
I drove out of the garage under the building that held our offices and pulled into traffic. I should have walked. It was only a few blocks, and maybe I could have burned off some of this anger. Instead, I stewed even more, getting angrier by the second as I yelled at the cars in front of me.
I slammed my hands on the steering wheel as another cab cut me off. My anger was out of control. I should have taken Mac up on his offer to hit the gym. He would have let me pound on him in the ring to work off the rage that was coursing through my blood.
She fuckin’ lied.
Twenty-eight years I missed out on as Maddie’s father. Maybe if she’d known, she would have come to me when she was pregnant. She wouldn’t have been so scared to tell us about her husband and her son.
I would have been there when Henry was born. I would have walked my daughter down the aisle instead of her getting married in a fucking chapel in Vegas.
All the time we lost. The children we could have had. The life we could have lived. Together. If she’d only told me the fuckin’ truth.
What else had she lied about?
What else had she kept from me?
Were there other files she hadn’t told us about?
Other information she’d kept to herself?
Does she even fucking trust me?
Had she ever fucking trusted me?
I pulled into the parking garage and slammed on the brakes before I drove headfirst into the concrete wall. Then, I slammed the car door as I climbed out and had no other option than to wait for the elevator.
Every second I stood there waiting for the elevator doors to open, my anger built. Every moment on the elevator, as I waited for the doors to open, my pain pressed down on me.
When the doors finally opened, I walked into my apartment, and my girls turned to look at me.
“We may have found something,” Maddie said excitedly.
Caity just watched me. The smile on her face when I walked in dropped quickly when she saw the state I was in.