8. Cillian #3
He stays at the window with his hands clasped behind his back and he looks at me the way he looks at problems he’s deciding how to eliminate.
I’ve been on the other side of that look before, but directed at other people.
I keep my face neutral.
My hands are on my knees and the knuckles are still bleeding sluggishly.
I’m fairly certain he can see it and that he doesn’t care.
“Doyle tells me,” he starts, “that you conducted yourself like a man with no training, no discipline, and no understanding of what I sent you there to do.” The way his head tilts is almost serpentine. “Tell me that’s not accurate.”
“The job is done,” I respond, careful to stick to the facts. “The names—”
“I don’t care about the names right now.
” He says it so flatly that a shiver races up my spine.
“The names I was going to get regardless. That’s not why I’m standing here looking at you bleeding on my floor.
” He looks at my knuckles with disgust before he takes a step toward the desk.
“You put a man in a hospital, Cillian. A man who was talking. A man who had more to give us. A man who has a reason to talk to people I would prefer he didn’t talk to, because you decided”—his voice drops even further—“that your feelings were more important than my operation.”
I stiffen. My feelings? “He made comments—”
“I don’t give a fuck what he said!” He brings his fist down on the desk once and the lamp jumps.
I don’t. “I don’t care if he said every filthy thing you’re thinking right now.
That is not a reason. That is not a justification.
That is you deciding that what’s between your ears matters more than twenty years of me putting everything I had into making you worth a damn.
” His cold eyes don’t move off my face. “I pulled you out of nothing. You understand that? Eleven years old, nothing, nobody, and I made you into something. What you did tonight is spit directly in the face of every single thing I’ve given you. ”
There’s a roaring in my ears.
He pulled me from nothing? My parents died for fuck’s sake.
I look at him. At the man who took me in and made me and has been cashing in on it ever since.
Connor doesn’t give a fuck about anyone other than himself. Not his wife and not his daughter, who he cut out because she chose Leo Santoro over him.
And if he doesn’t give a fuck about his only child, he certainly doesn’t care about me.
Connor is furious but not because I hurt someone.
It’s because I hurt someone for a reason he didn’t authorize.
Disparaging my wife isn’t a good enough reason for my uncle.
I don’t say any of that.
I’m not ready for that conversation yet, maybe not ever.
“You’re right,” I tell him automatically. These are words I have been saying to this man since I was eleven, but the words taste different than they used to. “It won’t happen again.”
Connor eyes me like I’m a pest he’s debating executing.
He’s not done with this.
Connor is never done with anything.
He just decides when to put it down temporarily.
“Go home,” he says, turning back to the window. “And get your hands looked at. You’re bleeding on my floor.”
I get up. I go home.
Valentina is waiting for me, sitting in the living room in her chair.
Her bare legs are tucked under her and a hardcover open in both hands.
She’s wearing a deep burgundy robe, wrapped around her like she settled in for the night.
The lamp makes the inky blackness of her hair almost look blue in the light.
She looks up when I come in. Her eyes widen and the book drops from her hands. She’s out of the chair before it’s finished falling.
“What the hell happened to you?” She crosses the room fast, her hands coming up to my face first.
Her eyes move over me frantically and I’m a little stunned at what I see.
This looks like…actual concern. “Are you—Cillian, your hands—”
“I’m fine,” I tell her.
“You are not fine, you’re bleeding.” She takes my hands and turns them in the light, making a sound low in her throat that is somewhere between horrified and furious.
The knuckles are worse than I thought, or she’s reacting to something I’ve stopped being able to accurately assess about myself. “Jesus, this one’s split open. Both of them…” She looks up at me, her pupils dilated. “What did you do? Hit a wall?”
“A person,” I say.
Her head snaps up again and her throat bobs. “A person.”
“Mickey Sheehan. He’s a dock worker. Or was.
No, I didn’t kill him,” I tell her, seeing how her skin sallows.
“He was skimming product for three months and Connor wanted it handled.” Her eyes narrow.
“We got what we needed. He gave up the names. And then,” I pause, wrestling with how much I should say.
I decide she doesn’t need to know the full of it. “He said something he shouldn’t have.”
Those dark eyes are slits now. “What did he say?”
“Nothing I’m going to repeat.”
She cocks her head to the side. “What did you do to him?”
“I broke his jaw.”
She startles before a breathless laugh escapes her. “Good.” She tucks a strand of hair behind her ear. “And you’re not going to tell me what he said?”
“Nope.”
Her eyes search mine.
I hold her gaze, but I don’t fill the silence.
After a moment she seems to decide she’ll get it out of me later, or she won’t, but either way my hands need dealing with first.
She takes me to the kitchen by the wrist and the grip of her hand is tighter than it needs to be.
“Sit,” she says, pointing at the island stool.
I sit. She goes to the freezer and comes back with a dish towel of ice.
She takes my right hand and positions it on the counter with both of hers like she’s handling something breakable, which is funny, given the state of the thing.
She lays the ice over the knuckles. The ice stings but I don’t react. That was beaten out of me a long time ago.
“I take it you’ve seen Connor?” she asks. I can’t see her face as she’s bent over my hands, but I inhale the full smell of her shampoo. It oddly calms me.
“I went after and told him myself.”
“And?”
I shrug, the coldness of the ice pack numbing my knuckles. “He was unhappy.”
She makes a sound. “I bet.” She adjusts the ice. Her fingers are warm where they bracket my hand.
She’s so close that I can feel her body weight, and I am very aware that it has been a long night and this is the first good thing that’s happened in it. “Let me guess—he talked to you like you were a piece of shit?”
A ghost of a smile crosses my face, remembering Connor’s dressing down. “Something like that.”
She makes another disgusted sound but doesn’t say anything else, focusing on holding the ice over my hand for another five minutes.
Then she goes to the cabinet under the sink for the first aid kit.
She sits on the stool beside me and our knees touch, but she doesn’t move away.
She opens the kit and lays everything out neatly—antiseptic, cotton, gauze, tape, and I watch her do it.
When was the last time someone did this for me after my parents died?
I don’t know. I go back through the years with all the jobs and injuries, and I can’t find a single memory of someone sitting down beside me and deciding, without being asked, that my well-being was worth this much of their attention.
Connor never.
Teresa tried once, when I was fifteen, but I was too angry and too stupid to let her.
After that I handled things myself.
You learn to.
You learn to be self-sufficient in a way that starts to feel like strength and takes a long time to recognize as the absence of something.
She picks up my right hand and opens the antiseptic. I brace. This is going to hurt like a bitch.
The sting hits sharp and immediate, but I don’t move.
I’ve been hurt by people who meant it and Valentina Santoro with antiseptic cotton is not the thing that breaks me. But she sees me brace and her hand gently covers my arm. It feels like fire.
“Sorry,” she says quietly. “This one’s bad.”
I shift uncomfortably in the stool, not used to being fussed over. “It’s fine.”
“Cillian.” She says my name gently, which is once again very uncomfortable. “It’s not fine. Stop saying it’s fine.”
I close my mouth.
She works in silence for a moment and I watch the top of her head, the dark hair shining in the lights of the kitchen.
I would burn the entire city down before I let someone like Mickey Sheehan say her name again.
She wraps the right hand and moves to the left.
Her robe shifts when she reaches across the counter for the gauze and I hear a small sound, like the rustling of paper on fabric, and she pauses.
Quirking a brow, Valentina dips her hand into her pocket and brings out a post-it note.
My Post-it note.
The one I put in her coat pocket a few days ago. Cailín deacair.
Difficult girl.
With the crown.
She looks at it for a second.
Then she looks at me, her eyes wide. She wasn’t expecting for me to see that she still has it.
“It was in my pocket,” she responds quickly, stuffing it back in there. “I forgot it was there.”
I narrow my eyes, fighting back a smirk. “I put that in your coat pocket, Valentina. Not your robe pocket.”