Page 80 of Steel Rain

I had kept up with the news when I could. Mainly to know if it would affect my sister.

Aoibheann, the woman who had taken Isla Green’s place after her tragic death, had been a haunted woman. A witch, some would say. She was almost the same age as her step son, and Eoghan had never liked that. Even at his father’s wedding, Eoghan was certain that some witchcraft had made his father go mad and marry a woman that he barely knew.

But that wasn’t true, was it? There was no witchery. Just an alliance to be made with the Boston Irish. It was opportunism and politics.

If it had been witchcraft, then old Mr. Green wouldn’t have almost whipped Aoibheann to death. He wouldn’t have raped her, again and again. Of course, I didn’t think it was rape back then. I thought that Aoibheann was being stubborn. A bad wife.

Until the night of my own mother’s funeral, when I saw her bend over to cut a bouquet of roses. Her dress had dangled from her chest, separating from her skin, and there were the scars, marks and gashes. I had seen them before on victims of war. On women who were treated like chattel.

“She did,” Eoghan said, observing me with those strange eyes. “She seems quite happy about it. In fact, after I delivered your father to her …”

I narrowed my eyes. I wasn’t sure what my father had done. But I could guess. I could guess that my father had violated Aoibheann in some way, as Old Mr. Green’s madness took over him. As his grief turned him into a sadist.

“She forgave me,” Eoghan finally said. “She absolved me of my …inactionduring her captivity with my father. She told me something, though, that swirls in my mind.”

Eoghan turned away from me, down the familiar hall to an ornately carved door. Behind it was my father’s old office. He turned the doorknob, and pushed it open, then with a sweeping gesture, let me go inside.

The room still smelled like my father. Cohiba cigars and whiskey. I could smell the felt of the pool table that was by the window, and the wood stain of his grand, mahogany desk. Even the fireplace still reeked of the scent of char.

“Your Dad always had drinks,” Eoghan said. “I’m sure he never let you have any, though, did he?”

I scoffed. “No, of course not.”

Eoghan went behind my father’s desk, pulling out drawer after drawer, until he let out an, “A-ha!”

He pulled out a glass bottle, and two tumblers, placing them on the desk. He sniffed the bottle, then with a sour face shrugged.

“It’s still good, but your father had terrible taste in whiskey,” he poured it out, before handing me one of the glasses. “Very bottom shelf.”

I took the glass, and we clinked in a cheers.

“Not everyone can have the classical taste of a Green,” I said with a smile.

“That’s true.” Eoghan sat down on my father’s old, leather, high-backed chair. I took the seat opposite, trying not to look at the seats in the corner, where Eoghan and his father had sat when I rushed into this room with a torn, pink dress, and tears down my cheeks, begging him not to make me marry a monster.

“The main bedroom,” Eoghan said, tilting his glass to roughly where the staircase past the hall led to the upper floors, “had to be stripped.”

I raised my brow at him.

“When we brought your father in, we had a small shoot-out, you understand,” he shrugged, leaning further into my father’s old chair. “Bullet holes, not to mention your father’s claw marks on the carpet as we dragged him kicking and screaming out of here …”

I shook my head. “So nonchalant about how you killed my kin.”

Eoghan’s dark eyes didn’t change when he smiled. It wasn’t a real smile. It was slight. Just a small tug of his cheekbones that gave a lift at the corner of his mouth.

“I stopped being sentimental a while ago,” he said, suddenly leaning forward on the desk. “Sometime around when my wife disappeared.”

I clamped my mouth shut.

I knew, when he made me walk here with him, that there would be something like this. I knew there’d be an interrogation. A conversation. Something. All I could do was grin and bear it. To ride it out to its conclusion, whatever it might be.

“Aoibheann told me that she didn’t act alone,” Eoghan’s voice wasn’t angry. It wasn’t hostile, like I thought it would be. It was sad. “She said someone else knew where Kira was. And that this person told her that Kira was safe. That she was happy somewhere else.”

Then something strange happened. In fact, it was so strange that I wasn’t sure if I was hallucinating.

A tear went down Eoghan’s cheek.

“She said my wife was safe, and happy …” he restated. “How could she know that, Shiny?”

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