Page 49 of Irish Daddies
My eye twitches. I hate that the two of them consider themselves a different breed of human than me. It’s clear they think I don’t know anything about relationships, that I’m some bumbling oaf. An animal. “I expect her to trust us because she’s alive,” I growl back, simmering under the surface.
Footsteps echo down the hall.
We all turn.
Caroline stands in the doorway, hair pulled back, boots laced, face set like flint.
“I trust you,” she says. “And I can do it. Whatever it is. Just tell me what needs to be done.”
She doesn’t flinch when she meets my eyes.
And God help me, I almost want to stop her, to tell her to take her kids and run far away from us again, that she had the right idea four years ago.
29
CAROLINE
Just a few days later,I load into the car with the brothers and get ready for a drive to goprove myself.The idea is so ridiculous, that I have to prove something and the prize is getting to live with these twisted fucks.
Even if these twisted fucks are mine in a sort of way.
The drive to the storage container is slow and agonizing. The children are with an employee of the mafia, an older woman with red hair and gold hoops and freckles all over her shoulders. Just a month ago, it would have been a nonnegotiable that the children couldn’t stay with her. Slowly, my boundaries have turned into suggestions.
“I’m sorry,” Kellan says without looking at me. His eyes are trained out the windshield as he drives me to meet Declan and Rian. The last time I was in a car with him, I didn’t know what awaited me, and that unsureness ended badly for us all. Now, I know what’s coming. I know what I have to do for some peace in this little family forged by fire.
I shrug, staring at his profile while he looks forward. It’s a sweet profile, the kind you’d catch on the train and think that he’s going home to a frozen dinner and a couple of kids. I reach out and run my index finger down the slope of his nose, letting it jump off the end like a ski hill.
He turns to me with a strange look and grabs my hand with his. “Caroline, I thought it would be enough.”
My hand feels trapped in his. He isn’t holding it sweetly. He’s caging it. I pull it away and rub it, asking, “What, the man?”
“Yes. You have to believe me.” He sounds desperate to be understood, and my face collapses under the emphasis in his voice. I twist my lips and listen to him. “It’s why I was so harsh with you. I needed you to do it so we could be a family. I never would have done it if I had known…that he’d ask for more.”
“They always ask for more,” I tell him quietly, curling a lock of his hair around my finger.
“Who’s they?”
“Men like that,” I say quietly, looking away from his narrowed eyes.
“You mean men like us,” he says accusatorily to the back of my head.
I don’t answer.
The pier is colder than I expect. Everything smells like fish and salt and oil. I follow Kellan’s lead as he walks, his head bobbing from the small slip of paper with a hastily scrawled map and back up. He sighs and lowers the map, pointing and saying, “It’s that one, I’m pretty sure.” It’s the only storage container with faint screaming coming from it.
The screaming turns my stomach. I know what it means. Rian and Declan are already in there, doing God knows what.
Kellan raps on the metal doors four times in a weird succession, and there’s scrambling inside before it opens up, giant metal being shoved upward like a garage door. There’s a metal chair in the middle of the room with a man seated in it. He’s young. Early twenties, maybe. One eye already swollen shut from whatever they’ve already done to him. He spits blood onto the floor when he sees me, and I cringe against Kellan’s chest.
Kellan whispers, “You don’t have to do anything. Just be here. We’ll tell our father you did.”
“He knows who gave the order,” Declan says without turning. “We need a name.”
“What order?” I ask, swallowing down bile. Air pockets flutter in my chest, a realization that who I am in this storage unit is someone different than who I was before.
Declan looks at me. “The order to send that man after us.”
“What man?” None of his words are registering. It sounds like a foreign language.
