Getting soft. As if it were ever an option.“And…we think they’re ours.” Declan is at the doorway, looking in on me, and I press the phone tighter to my ear and shrink against the wall.
“What do you mean they’re yours?” my father asks, a chuckle in his voice. Then he repeats it with a hiss, “What do you mean…they’reyours?”
“They’re…” I look up at Declan, who is stony-eyed while he watches me tell our father something that could get us all killed. “They belong to one of us. From…that night. She got pregnant.”
I look back through the doorway. Alaina is looking right back at me. There’s no way she can hear my conversation, but she has a look like she knows it isn’t good. I avert my eyes and look back at Caroline tickling one of her sons. He’s trying to get away, and she has him by the ankle so she can tickle his foot. The other one playfully jumps on her back to protect his brother.
This is the kind of play we were supposed to do.
The thought disappears as soon as it enters my mind. My father’s voice brings me back to awareness. “Rian,” he sighs, like I’m calling him about needing a new car battery. I hear him shuffle. “Son. You don’t have many other options.”
I grit my teeth and say again, “I can’t kill her.”
“Then she has to become one of us. I’m not risking a witness. Feds are breathing down my neck. I’m not doing it. I don’t raise bastards who live like ghosts.”
I close my eyes. Nod like he can see it. Declan must see how sick I am over it because he takes the phone and says, “Da, she’s nothing. She’s barely five foot…Aye, aye, I know…Rightso… Understood.”
He hangs up and hands me the phone. I stand there for another minute with my brother, the brother that the woman in the other room almost killed.
She almost killed me too, and yet I feel like I would give my life up just to save hers. Is this really all about those boys, or is part of it about her?
Caroline is telling the kids a story, her voice animated and soft, and her fingers thread through their hair like she’s been doing it every night for years. She laughs at something Joshua says and kisses his forehead.
And I realize I don’t know how to do this. Not without breaking her. Not without losing something I haven’t even gotten to have yet.
And I’m starting to care about that.
Caroline is quiet strength and softness all at once, the way she fakes a smile for her sons while her captors sit near. The mafia will take that strength and shine a microscope on it until that’s all she has?—
“There won’t be any gentleness left in her,” I say out loud.
Declan’s hand claps my back roughly, and he sighs, saying, “Aye, she’ll be someone different.”
“I can’t turn her into someone like us.”
“You won’t have to do a thing. She won’t have a choice but to change,” he says gruffly, leaning against the wall next to me casually, like he doesn’t care at all what happens to her or to anyone.
“And the boys?”
“What about them?”
His cavalier attitude about it all infuriates me, and a blanket of cold slides in under my skin. “Will they be like us too?”
“What do you want me to say, Rian? Life’s a bitch, and then you die.” Declan shrugs. He looks at his watch. “It’s almost showtime.”
Showtime.As in, time for us to threaten Caroline and remind her that she’s ours, that she’d better not get any bright ideas about freedom or honesty, that she’s being watched. That we’ll slit her boys’ throats while she sips coffee. That’s the kind of thing Declan lives for—fear, threats, insidious kindness. He claps his hands, a gesture of finality, and walks back into the living room to pretend to be a regular man, someone who doesn’t instill fear in people.
“God willing,” I mumble, wishing that car wreck had taken me out.
When I return to the living room, the boys have commandeered the rug with their toy cars—one red, one blue, both streaked with scratches. They’re building a racecourse out of coasters and books, and Kellan, of all people, is crouched next to them, carefully lining up a row of dominoes to be “buildings” they can knock down.
He doesn’t look like a killer right now. He looks like someone’s uncle. Like someonegood.
Caroline’s curled up on the couch with a book in her lap, but she’s not reading. Her eyes keep drifting to them, a soft line between her brows, like she’s afraid it might all vanish.
“Watch this!” one of the boys shouts—Joshua, I think—and launches the red car off a folded-up napkin. It flies two feet and lands under the coffee table.
Declan, stretched out in the armchair like a lion on a throne, chuckles. “Reckless driver, that one.”
