Isaac gasps, and Joshua cackles. Alaina watches with narrowed eyes, but her arms don’t cross. She’s confused now, not just angry.
Declan stands by the fireplace, arms folded. He’s watching everything, watching me. When his gaze shifts to my boys, something unreadable passes through his expression. It’s not warm, but it’s not cold either. It’s…calculated. He catches me staring and nods, once.
My pulse hammers again. The walls feel too bright, too white, like they’re spotlighting every secret I’ve tried to hide. Alaina and my boys in the same place as these men doesn’t feel normal.
I inhale sharply and turn to her, prepared to kick her out, to tell her to leave. “Alaina?—”
“Caroline, let’s go get a coffee,” she says quickly.
“What?”
She looks up at Declan, whose scar is glinting purple under the harsh, white lighting overhead, and says, “I’d like to take Caroline out for a coffee. Is that going to be a problem?” She narrows her eyes at him, daring him to tell her that we can’t leave so she can know for sure that this is what she thinks it is.
He looks at me, back at his brothers, and then at Alaina again in what feels like slow motion before answering, “Sure, you girls go out.” Then he looks at me and with a wide smile says, “And we’ll keep the boys.”
I freeze. That wasn’t a suggestion. It was a leash, velvet-wrapped and tight around my throat. Alaina’s smile falters. She feels it too. “No, that’s okay, I’ll?—”
“No, no, I insist. You two have fun. You haven’t seen each other in weeks. It’s clear you were worried about your friend. We’ll keep the boys company. It’ll be fun, won’t it, boys?”
“Yeah!” Joshua chirps, raising one of the rocks like a trophy. A stain of chocolate circles his lips.
Declan’s grin looks forced to me. Without light in his eyes, it’s like the painted expression of a doll. I wonder if Alaina can see it. He tilts his head and asks, “You trust me, don’t you?”
It hangs awkwardly in the air. I clear my throat and agree, “Of course, Declan. I trust you.”
He nods, looking down at Joshua with a sharp beam, his eyebrows lifting cartoonishly. When people don’t normally hang out with kids, they always end up exaggerating their expressions.
I look at Alaina, and I see the same thought tumbling around her brain:What did you do?
22
RIAN
She doesn’t knowI’m watching her.
Her friend is gone, getting ready at her hotel room and leaving Caroline alone with her children before their coffee date. Caroline kneels in the living room in front of one of the boys. She’s half laughing as she tries to clean jam off his face. He keeps dodging her hand, giggling wildly, and the other one is shouting about a Hot Wheels that needs saving from an imaginary fire, a toy courtesy of the friend who arrived looking wary, with eyes like a caged animal. Caroline had that look once.
But now her eyes are soft and alive in a way they never are around any of us. She throws up her hands and says dramatically, “Fine! I guess you’ll go to college with jam on your face!” and when the boy finally relaxes, she grabs him around the middle and wipes him off, smothering him with kisses.
It isn’t lost on me that I don’t know which boy is which. Isaac or Joshua. It isn’t lost on me that they’re nearly in kindergarten, and this is the first time they’ve seen their father. That they don’t even know it.
“Excuse me,” I say, standing from the couch and slipping out of the room. I can’t stand to be in it, to be surrounded by all of this and know that I’m supposed to kill her. I can’t. Caroline looks up at me for just a moment before returning her focus to her sons.
As soon as I’m in the hallway, I dial my father, my fingers shaking. He’s still out of the country, hiding from the feds, but just the thought of him instills fear into my heart. He’s not a large man except in height. In fact, he resembles Kellan most of all—thin frame, bright blue eyes, strawberry blonde hair. They even have the same dimples and smattering of freckles. But that’s exactly how he disarms his victims. Underneath all of it, he’s an abyss.
The ringing of the phone is distant, like it’s coming from down the hallway, and I press my hand against the wall and loosen my tie. Sweat beads up on my forehead. Finally, he answers, “Aye?”
Swallowing, I glance out the doorway into the living room at the small gathering, the kids on the floor with a happy Caroline, her legs open and her arms holding some part of them at all times. Her friend has returned, sitting on the couch, looking wary, smiling with no light in her eyes. Kellan is making snack tray after snack tray. Declan is showing the boys whatever they want up close—first, his collection of knives, then his home theater. It’s a setting I never expected, and one I don’t quite understand.
Declan glances at me and sees the phone against my ear. His face hardens and he says something quick to everyone in the room, then barrels toward me. I turn quickly to the wall, making a shield with my hand, and say, “Da, we’re not going to kill this woman.”
A pause. A pause in which all of time stretches toward me, a pause in which Declan gets closer and my throat gets drier. “Andwhy’s that?” I hear something clink on my dad’s end. Alcohol opening or a flint lighter being flicked or one of his spinning tops being twirled.
Or a gun being loaded. Or a knife being tapped.
“She has kids.”
“And? Don’t tell me you’re getting soft now.”
