Page 74 of Ruthless Devotion
That was when the memory came back. I remember seeing my father shoot Brian, and then she shot my father. I can still see her holding the gun, looking guilty as she noticed me standing there. Brian survived because he was wearing a bulletproof vest.”
“And you’re on speaking terms with these people?”
The room suddenly feels too small—even though it was designed that way and before this moment was comforting. I get up and begin to pace. I need to put some space between us.
“It’s more complicated than that. I couldn’t be angry at Mina. She got me through a lot. I thought she was an angel my entire childhood—like a literal magic, wings, flying down from heaven angel. I had a drawing of her. I prayed to her. And every time a miracle seemed to happen in my life, I thought it was her. I couldn’t just turn on her after that.”
Despite the fireworks still going outside, I wish there was a window I could look out to distract myself because I don’t think I can look Maddie in the face for the rest of this.
“They trained me to kill… properly, so I’d be prepared when I took over the family business. When I did take over, I stopped being mad at Brian and Mina altogether because I learned the full truth. My father was hurting my mother. He was prostituting her out to all his friends and business associates, passing her around to the highest bidder. Sometimes he watched. He was a sick fuck. She had no choice in the matter. He’d added prostitution and human trafficking to the illegal part of the business, and I guess he got off on the idea of including her in that business.”
I turn back to look at Maddie. She looks sick. Does she think I’m the type of man who would involve myself in something like that, especially after what happened to my mother?
Uncle Martin killed off that part of the business when I was still a kid, but if he hadn’t, I would have. I may not have handled things with Maddie in a reasonable or honorable way. I may have broken laws and morals to have her, and I may be willing to break even more to keep her, but I would never physically hurt her. I would never do the monstrous things my father did to my mother. Men like that are weak.
Uncle Martin expanded more into drugs and gambling to replace the income, and he built the front business to huge success, but I don’t tell Maddie any of this. When my uncle was training me to take over, he said there were some things we didn’t let any outsiders in on, even romantic partners. Despite his best efforts he didn’t expect I’d end up a bachelor like him and wanted to make sure I didn’t tell someone the wrong things. I’m probably violating that code now, but this feels different, somehow.
Maddie hasn’t said anything else, but she’s also not running screaming from the room, so I take that as a sign that I can keep going.
“My mother couldn’t live like that, and she couldn’t get away from my father, so she shot herself. There was security footage. She’d load a revolver with blanks except for one, spin the chamber, and pull the trigger. She did it every time she got to the end of her rope from one of those men and couldn’t take it anymore. I’m not sure if she really believed she’d actually ever get the bullet. Maybe she wanted God or fate to decide for her. As a Catholic, she didn’t believe in suicide. It’s a mortal sin after all.
So maybe this was her way of letting God decide whether or not to take her—the loophole that let her free herself without one final sin she could never confess.
One of those nights the live round got her, and she died. My father knew she was doing it. He watched that security footage, and he never tried to stop her. He just let her gamble with her life over and over until her luck finally ran out. He didn’t give a fuck one way or the other. He didn’t care if she lived or died and left me without a mother or even if the cash cow he turned her into dried up.”
Part of me thinks him not stopping her is the kindest thing he ever did for my mother, but I don’t say this part out loud.
Maddie sits in stunned silence for a long time. Processing. Finally she says, “H-how do you know that’s what happened? You were so young. Did you see the security footage?”
She’s not asking in an accusatory way, she’s just trying to understand how I know so much about something I couldn’t have been witness to.
“When I became the boss, I gained access to a safe with all the evidence I needed. It was his confession to me. I guess the Catholic runs deep in all of us. I can’t think of any other reason he would have kept all of it. He’d had explicit instructions for how and when it was to be given to me after his death—my twenty-fifth birthday—the same day the business was turned over to me.”
I take a deep breath, trying not to lose control of myself.
The fact that my father needed me to know has made me wonder over and over if he ever felt any remorse for what he did to her, or if he just wanted to twist the knife… or brag. As a child I didn’t understand how many people were afraid of him, or how dark he truly was.
“Come with me, I need to show you something.”
Maddie gets up, cautious, and I don’t blame her. I’m sure I look like a mad man right now. I can feel the crazy trying to claw its way out of me. I take her hand and guide her down the main staircase, to the back of the house, and down another more narrow staircase that leads into the basement.
I’ve never brought or allowed anyone down to the basement room. Someone comes down to clean the bathroom, but that’s it. No one but me has ever been inside the secured room. Until now.
Maddie looks uncertain as I allow the scanner to take my fingerprint and then scan my eyes, and the steel door slides open with a sharp metallic sound.
“It’s okay,” I say, knowing that it absolutely is not okay, and isn’t going to be okay ever again once she sees all this. But how can I hide it from her? I won’t be able to hide it forever. And I need so much more than a fake surface relationship. I can’t craft a stage of perfect lies for her. I need her to know… everything.
She takes it all in. The weapons, the big board, the photos, the notes, the red X’s over faces. The list. “What is all this?”
“The men who hurt my mother. I only have one more left, and I’m sorry, Maddie, but I have to complete it.”
She moves closer to the board and the list, her eyes widening with horror when she reads the last name. “No, Aidan, you can’t! He’s my father.”
“I really thought I could take you in trade and let it go, but I can’t. I have to finish it.”
“No! I don’t believe he’d do something like that. He wouldn’t! He loves my mother. He wouldn’t cheat like that…”
I wince at her calling raping my mother “cheating”, but I know she’s not processing the full weight of everything and just the fact that her father was married and she was a kid like me at the time all this happened. It’s hard enough for her to imagine her father cheating let alone the horrors of what he was actually doing to my mother.
