Page 33 of Half Cocked

“Like what, Connor? What am I like?”

Great, now she was the one irritated with me. How the fuck did she manage to turn the tables so quickly? It must have been witchcraft or some shit. My ma had a way of doing the same thing. Making me feel like a complete ass when she was the one in the wrong.

“Scared, Dani. You’re fucking terrified. Of feeling something. Anything. And you’re too fucking stubborn to help mehelpyou. So, instead, you do everything in your fucking power to try to chase me off. The most fucked-up part about it all?” I towered over her, leaning forward so that she was forced to lean back against the mattress to look up at me. “The most fucked-up part is the fact that everything in you wants me to stay. To fight you for you. To prove that I ain’t going anywhere, abandoning you no matter how much you hurt me.”

“I…”

I brushed the back of my broken knuckles across her too-soft skin. “Don’t bother arguing with me, baby girl. Because I know the truth. Nothing you say is gonna change that. And tomorrow I’ll go on fighting you, but right now, I’m fucking exhausted. So eat your goddamn chocolate bar and go the fuck to bed, Dani.” I pushed back off the mattress, turned on my heel, and walked into the bathroom before I did or said something stupid.

Stupider? More stupid?

Fuck if I knew.

33

SIX YEARS PRIOR

Icould hear the world around me long before I regained the ability to open my eyes. At first it was the beeping sounds, the machines, so loud that I could have sworn I’d died and all the noise was meant to slowly drive me mad. Then it was my sense of smell. A hint of gunpowder that would never quite leave my nostrils—the docs would later tell me it was psychosomatic. Almost like a phantom limb.

But what the fuck did they know? From what I would come to see over the years, the medical field was made up of a whole lotta guess work and not so much actual knowledge. Just one of many reasons I would never again step foot in a hospital.

Touch and taste took a bit longer to come around. But when they did, it was like being hit by a semi-truck. The pounding in my head and the rotten flavor of the tubing shoved down my throat, all while I couldn’t say a word. Couldn’t do much else but listen to them talk about me like I wasn’t there. When I was.I was there.I just needed them to shut up long enough for someone to notice.

None of them had much hope. The docs, my friends, even my family. And soon the voices stopped coming. Stopped talking. About me, to me, over me. To the point where I wasn’t sure if I’d ever heard them to begin with.

Maybe this was what hell was like? All the chatter followed by silence.

Until one day the harsh hospital lighting felt especially bright, irritating, and my eyes blinked open as if they’d always had the ability and just never felt the need to move before then.

I would love to say this was the point where I shot up outta bed, pulled the feeding tube from my throat, and immediately sought revenge against the Mulligans. And if anyone were to ask, that’s exactly how it happened. I went in guns blazing and killed off every last one of 'em.

In truth, I lay there for hours before someone noticed me, days before I could piss in a toilet, my vocal cords restrained and my legs of no real use. It was worse than being dead, having your mind trapped inside its own body. Feeling completely helpless, dependent on the people who’d already checked you off as not being worth their time.

I was nineteen years old, though I’d never remember or regain the months that had passed, which included my birthday and five funerals—there was already a headstone with my name on it. Just waiting for me to join my parents and brother.

That was the world I woke up to, a world where my family hadn’t abandoned me in life; instead, they were waiting for me in death.

The streets were still stained red with blood from both sides. Though the scales were definitely tipping in the Mulligan Gang’s direction. My pop had killed their eldest son, their heir. An eye for an eye, I was certain he’d say. In turn, it earned him, my ma, and brother matching bullets to the back of their heads. And that was it. The Rossi line ended there. With me.

Except it didn’t. Because I wasn’t dead.

But Iwasover it. The whole mafia thing. Not so much the violence—I’d been born with a thirst for the stuff. No, it was the rules that irritated me. Being caged in by my last name and the expectation that I would step in and take over what was left of my inheritance. Or at least what hadn’t been plundered by the men within my father’s ranks during all that time I’d been…incapacitated.

I visited Leo’s gravesite exactly once, immediately after I’d been discharged from the hospital. Besides the gunpowder, I could smell the rain that was about to come heavy in the air. Feel the slight chill on my skin with the breeze. As my eyes landed on the words embedded in stone.

León Arthur Mulligan, beloved son

The last part gave me pause.Beloved. What the fuck did that even mean? If they knew anything about the guy, they’d know he hated his full name. Almost as much as he hatedthem. His parents. The lineage that haunted us. That killed both of us in one way or another. Because he was entombed in the casket under my feet, and I was restrained by a feeling of betrayal I could never quite shake.

Then again, I guess I hadn’t known him either. If I had, I never would have turned my back and allowed him to put that bullet in my head. Something I wouldn’t forget. I couldn’t forget because I could still feel it there. Like an itch I couldn’t scratch. Just beyond my skull’s surface. Deep enough to keep me in a coma but not to kill me.

It was weird, waking up in what felt like an alternate universe, where I was an orphan and the man I thought I loved was dead. My fingers twitched with the urge to grab a shovel and dig him up. Because none of it felt real. It was like blinking my eyes and everyone was gone. Hard to believe when I hadn’t seen it happen myself.

I mean, for all I knew, it could be any old corpse decaying beneath the fresh layer of tilled dirt. There was no proof it was Leo’s. At the same time, I could feel it. Somewhere in that soul I didn’t know I had. Almost like another part of me sensed it the moment he was gone.

A thought that would go with me to my actual deathbed, because there was no fucking way I could admit it to anyone aloud. It was my secret to keep. Along with the fact I loved the same man who tried to kill me.

“Vaffanculo, León,” I hissed before spitting on his grave and walking away. “Vedo l'ora di vedere le margherite mettere radici.”

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