Page 110 of Vicious Hearts

CILLIAN

They never came.

Numb, standing next to the hospital bed, I stare at my sister’s lifeless body as the attending nurse pulls the sheet up over her face. The priest finishes his last rites, glancing nervously at me when he’s through.

I nod back, releasing him.

The son of a bitch almost refused to do right by Saoirse, because of how she got here. That piece of shit actually looked me in the eye and told me suicide was a sin in God’s eyes, and he could neither read her the last rites, nor promise she would get to Heaven.

That was before he looked down at her again, and saw the last name on the charts at the foot of the bed.

Before he looked back at me with sheer terror in his eyes, realizing who I was.

And before I told him I’d make sure none of the pieces of him I left would ever get to Heaven, either.

When he’s gone, when the nurses are gone, I drop my gaze back to my sister’s body beneath the sheet.

She never had a chance in this world. She was too sweet. Too naive. Born under a cursed named, into a cursed house, with a monster at the head of the table.

And yet, she survived all of that—being born a Kildare, I mean. Being born the unwanted girl, destined to be traded by our bastard father like a golden trinket for more wealth or power.

Being that bastard’s victim for so fucking long that it makes me want to scream and open up my own veins to join her, right here, right now.

A few years previously, Saoirse had been promised to a disgusting pig of a man—Atlas Drakos, the eldest son of Aeneas Drakos. Theirs was to be a marriage to end the bloodshed between Kildare and Drakos—and to line the pockets of Aeneas and my father.

And then, one day, after so many years, and so many times telling me “One day, Cill, I’ll get out”, she really did.

Saoirse was gone.

She ran off with another man. And I was so fucking happy for her. For her freedom, even if it came with our father’s wrath, and banishment from the family.

Good. Good for her.

She got out.

But nine months later, she was back on our doorstep—heartbroken by the man who’d since abandoned her, and ready to burst from the baby he’d put in her before he disappeared.

A baby girl our father made her give up as soon as she was born.

Rose.

My niece.

He made Saoirse leave that sweet baby girl on the doorstep of a convent—Our Lady Hildegard Home for the Sisters of Mercy.

And that’s what finally broke my sister, after surviving all the other things that should have broken her. The unwantedness. The predator we called Father visiting her room at night again and again andagainwhen she was little more than a child. The man who stole her away just to use and abandon her in the end.

She survived all of that.

But losing Rose was the final straw that broke her.

I hate myself. I hate that I saw this coming months ago, after that horrible night when she left that baby with the nuns. I watched her get worse and worse, until nothing I could say or do would ever bring a smile out of her.

I’d planned carefully for tonight, with the goal of just one smile. Her favorite movies. Her favorite buttered popcorn and Skittles. The brand-new album from Velvet Guillotine, her favorite band.

She wasn’t in her room when I went to look for her. I knocked on the bathroom door, calling her name before deciding she was probably somewhere else. I even started to turn away from the door before I heard it.

Dripping.

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