Chapter 20 #3
I think about it. I take my time responding, which is not like me, and I think she notices.
“Sometimes he was a monster, sometimes he wasn’t.” I take the hose back from her. “You held onto the good. I held onto the bad. That’s all that happened to us. People are layered, Fiona. The good ones and the bad.”
She’s watching me intently now. “Do you love him? Even now. Even after what I told you about Mom?” She reaches over the table and touches the diamond in my left ear, brushes it with a fingertip, the way you’d touch something sleeping. “These are beautiful on you, by the way.”
My eyes sting and I look at the sky until it stops.
“I feared him. I think I still do.” I turn the hose over in my hands. “And honestly? He’d have preferred that. Given the choice between the two, he’d take the fear over love every single time.”
Cricket doesn’t say anything for a while.
“It took us a long time but I think we were always meant to end up here.” She nudges my shoulder with her hand, hard enough to rock me. “Growing old side by side. Keeping each other safe.”
“Fiona.” I keep my eyes up and on the dark night sky. “How dedicated are you to PALADIN?”
“What?”
“Your devotion to the job.” I make myself ask it. “Is it deeper than your devotion to me?”
“It’s not just a job, Saoirse.” She sits up, posture tightening. “It’s a family. Lance is my husband.”
“I’m your family.”
“Why are you asking me this?”
I turn and look at her. “If I did something bad…something that couldn’t be forgiven…if Vesper told me to leave.” I hold her gaze like I’m holding the edge of a cliff and letting go means death. “Would you come with me?”
Cricket blinks at me, her expression unreadable. “What about your budding romance with Callen?”
“Would you come with me?” I ask again.
My sister sits back in her chair. She looks at me for a long moment. Then she says: “Is this about Mabel?”
Everything stops.
“Because Vesper already knows,” Cricket says.
The hose dangles in my hand, scraping against the concrete floor.
“How—” My mouth is suddenly dry. I wet my lips then try again. “How did—”
“Because she asked me to drive out of the city two days ago and dispose of a body.” Cricket is not smiling.
“So imagine my morning. There I am, in a house that smells like a wine cellar’s arsehole, standing over a dead woman who is pinned to her own desk with two ground-steel spikes, with scorpion stings running all the way up her right arm to the elbow.
” She lifts her brows in a scolding manner.
“Baby sister, you are a special kind of lethal.”
I don’t say anything. I distract myself with the stars as long as I can, then I finally let out, “She deserved it.”
“Yeah, okay.” Cricket takes the hose out of my hand.
Neither of us says anything for a moment.
“How angry is Vesper?”
“Furious.” She exhales smoke. “With an undertone of admiration, if I’m honest, which is somehow worse.
She made a phone call. It’s a heart attack now.
It’ll be a heart attack in every paper in the country by Thursday.
” She passes the hose back. “She’s biding her time with you but you’ll get your forty lashes when she’s ready, and not one second before. ”
“Metaphorical lashes?”
“Eh.” Cricket winks at me. “Vesper runs a tight ship, Saoirse. She doesn’t want us turning into the thing we’re supposed to be fighting.”
“Yeah.” I take a pull and let it out slow. “She gave me the speech.”
“What did she say to you?”
“Same as she said to you, probably. That we’re not the thing we hunt.” I tip my head back. “That she decides morality.”
My sister glances at me through her peripheral vision, then stares off into the dark. “That’s the whole of PALADIN, Saoirse. The entire job is believing Vesper knows better. It’s that simple.”
“You really believe that? That she knows best?”
“Yes,” she answers too firmly for my comfort.
Down on the street a car alarm goes off and we don’t say a damn thing until it finally gives up minutes later. The air between us doesn’t move. The pause is so uncomfortable, but with Cricket sitting with me out here, there’s no room to pace.
“So, where are you keeping them?” Cricket says.
“Keeping what?”
“The scorpions.” She actually shudders, my sister, who once broke a man’s wrist with a hardback book. “Those wretched things.”
“At the hotel.” I smile at the sky. “There’s only one left. She’s pregnant.”
“Saoirse.”
“She’s very well behaved.”
“You keep those the fuck out of my house.” She jabs a finger at me. “Lance can’t do creepy-crawlies. And Callen won’t be warm to them either, I’ll tell you that for free.”
“He doesn’t know about anything.”
Cricket stops with the hose halfway to her mouth.
“Tá tú as do mheabhair,” she says. You’re crazy. Bloody crazy.
“Tá a fhios agam é sin,” I tell her. I know that. “I keep all the ugly parts of me away from him…so that maybe, he’ll love me back.”
Cricket reaches over to pat my knee. She waits until I look at her.
“There are no ugly parts of you, baby sister. There are only broken ones.” She squeezes me tenderly. “And now that we’re all together, they’ll mend.”