Page 9 of Irish Daddies
Maybe going out with Insurance Paul, Mystery Man, whatever we’re calling him right now, wouldn’t be so bad. Maybe it’s okay to want more than the life I’ve been surviving. Maybe it’s okay to want.
For the first time in a long time, I let myselfwant, for just a second.
What if it’s good? What if he loves kids? What if he’s the kind of man who fixes gutters without being asked and who brings me my favorite flowers on a Tuesday just because? What if he’s kind where the world has been cruel? What if his touch feels like home?
6
RIAN
“Well,Kellan obviously can’t know the plan,” I say coolly, my voice like iron hammered flat.
Declan closes the study door with a slow, deliberate click. He leans against it for a beat, swallowing hard enough that his temple throbs. “Obviously,” he says, rolling up the sleeves of his shirt with jerky, aggressive movements. “Do you have any other motives for this plan of yours?” he asks me, his tone easy. He unfastens each cuff like it personally insulted him, folding the fabric above his elbows. His gaze flicks toward me—quick, measuring—before sliding away again.
He’s trying to seem casual. Like I could just spill the truth into the empty air between us.
I walk past him and lower myself into one of the heavy chairs around the table, the leather creaking under my weight. This house feels wrong. A stranger’s house made ours only by the blood on our minds and in our plans.
Our safe haven. Caroline’s cage.
The study is all dark wood and red leather, but this part of the house has a low ceiling, so low that when Declan stands in front of me, he looks enormous. The window has an arch and stained glass, like we’re in church.
The three of us go to church every Sunday, and Declan and Kellan both play the part in front of our little Irish community well, but I always feel like I might burst into ash in front of everyone if I take part in a prayer.
The soft, colored light across Declan’s face isn’t right for his angled features, and I inhale sharply. His glance tells me he caught the sound. I clear my throat to mask it and cross one ankle over the other, pushing my shoulders back, matching Declan’s performance with one of my own. His gray eyes flicker over me—one cloud to another. Our father’s legacy, staring itself down.
“Like what?” I ask, my voice steady. If he’s accusing me of something, he’ll have to say it outright. I raise one eyebrow and lean forward, resting my elbows on my knees, letting my hands drape forward. My jewelry glints, ruby red and emerald rings and one thin gold bracelet.
Declan shrugs a single shoulder, all fake nonchalance, standing still. “I don’t know, Rian,” he says. “But something stinks.”
I arch an eyebrow. “Stinks like what?”
The corner of his mouth pulls back into a sneer. “Like a rat in the water.”
The phrase takes me aback. It’s the same one my father mutters all the time when someone is about to vanish without a trace.
Sometimes, when I look into my brother’s faces, the faces of complicated men that aren’t good by any stretch of the imagination, I see our father’s legacy, and it doesn’t shine. It’s a stain, even if it is the only one I’ve ever known.
A sick laugh bubbles up in my throat—too bitter, too close to bile—but I let it out anyway, souring the room. “You callin’ me a rat, brother?”
Declan’s hand tightens on the doorknob protectively. He stares at me for a long, punishing moment, his silence dignified. “I’m asking,” he says quietly, “if you’re still one of us.”
It’s not a question I could ever say no to. I have always trusted my brothers. We’re bound by terror, both the terror that we enact together and the terror that we’ve had enacted on us.
But the first time my father said those words around me—I smell a rat in the water—I never saw my uncle alive again. After a few days, his bloated, gray corpse turned up in the Massachusetts Bay with no fingers, only the clover and dagger tattoo on his left wrist. I was ten. I learned then that family can betray you.
And now Declan is asking if I’m loyal to him.
I meet his gaze without blinking. “If you trust me so little,” I hiss, my upper lip curling at the suggestion, “why don’t you get Kellan in here instead of me?”
A shroud of cold sinks through my body as the pause between us expands, seeping through the cracks of the door. I see my brother’s hand graze the knife he keeps on his belt. I force my eyes to stay on him, to pretend I don’t notice the slight wiggling of his fingers, the small muscles in his shoulders shifting. I steady myself, preparing for blood, calculating how long it would take to get my own knife out. He’d have already killed me by thetime I thought to do it.Could I disarm him?I scan the room mentally. A banker’s lamp sits on the table beside me.Would throwing it buy me enough time?
A thick boot on the ground snaps me out of it. My hand is on the lamp, but Declan is laughing and crossing the room to sit next to me. He stretches out like a man who owns the room, the house, the world. “No, never Kellan. Old softie’s too tenderhearted. He’d crumble if he knew there were children to kill.”
The words knife through me, and I wince inwardly at my brother’s brutality. He’s a man of little empathy, someone willing to murder children he doesn’t know, children of a woman he’s shared a bed with. Declan could kill children with the same carelessness he’d swat a fly and be asleep by the next hour.
Outwardly, I chuckle with him at his callousness, shaking my head in mock exasperation. But my stomach twists.
I lean forward, conspiratorial. “We’ll get him to watch the house then,” I say smoothly. “He’ll think he’s gaining intel on her, while we deal with Caroline. And once she’s done…we move in and take care of the boys before he can even think to stop us.”
