“Have I ever misplaced your trust?” I ask, settling on the arm next to Kellan, feeling protected by his less intense energy. I sometimes think his part in the mafia is even more compulsory than ours. We live it, breathe it. He sits in it, arms locked with his brothers. Of all of us, I could see him living a regular life—riding a bicycle, taking children to the library, buying groceries. He’s almost normal.
Except that none of us had a chance to be normal. We never will be.
Declan stares down at the slip of paper on the oily oak table, his jaw flexing. He drags one finger across the wood, slow and deliberate, until the paper falls into his waiting hand.
The silence tightens, thick as wet concrete. Finally, he looks up at me through the dark veil of his lashes, something dangerous gleaming behind his eyes.
“No,” he relents, voice flat. “You’ve never misplaced my trust.” His thumb taps the edge of the paper once. Twice. “I think you know what would happen if you did, brother.” He smiles, and it’s all teeth. After studying the paper for a moment, he lets it drop onto the table with a careless flick and leans back.
“Oh, come off it,” Kellan says, the words coming out on a scoff as he huffs into his glass. His tie is already loose, his sleeves rumpled, but there’s a glint of sharpness in his eyes that wasn’t there before. “You asked him to do it because he’s the best at convincing people. He convinced her. Let him do his job.”
The crack of Declan’s head snapping toward him is audible.
“I asked him to do it,” Declan snarls, “because he’s the only one who didn’t speak that night. That’s it. Nothing special about him.” His voice punches through the room like a bullet. “If you have something better to do than preserve this legacy and keep us all out of jail, Kellan, then go do it.” He lurches forward and snatches the glass from him, and Kellan jolts to make sure it doesn’t spill as Declan sets it down on the table with a heavy thud.
Kellan’s eyes flick between Declan, seething and rigid, and me, frozen in place, weighing the cost of whatever he might say next. He’s usually the easy one. The affable one. But tonight there’s something brittle under his usual golden-boy exterior, something tired and dangerous.
For a second, nobody breathes. A shock wave of tension ripples through the room, like the whole house might collapse inward if anyone so much as sneezes. We’ve spent our lives learning how to dance around Declan’s detonations. How to survive him when he goes off. This could have been one of those nights.
After a long, poisonous beat, Kellan mutters, “Sorry. No.” He straightens his spine. “I don’t have anything more important to do than this.”
We wait for it to satisfy Declan. His eyes are still that cold gray, and his neck is still red. He glances at the glass on the table and lets out a low laugh, mean and brittle. His voice drips with the satisfaction of having made us all squirm when he says, “Still, you’re right about Rian. Even if that’s not why I sent him.”
He points at the paper on the table. “Rian, you’re good at reading people. If you think this is easier…”
“I do,” I say quickly, taking the offer.
He smiles, thin and wolfish. “Then we’ll do it your way. Maybe my way isn’t always right. Brute force has a time and place. So…” He leans in, lowering his voice just enough that only I can hear the razor edge beneath the words. “Tell me your plan, brother. Make it good.”
As we all move to sit together on the couch, a thick bar of lead sits in my stomach, anchoring me to the cushion. Now that’s two firsts.
The first time I’ve considered slaughtering the mother of my children. The first time I’ve lied to my brothers.
I wonder how many more firsts it’ll take before the last thing I betray is myself.
5
CAROLINE
“I’m just notsure it’s really me,” I say, my voice rising into a whine that sounds foreign even to my own ears. Weak. Self-serving. Not the me that I’ve spent four years building.
I cup the mug of tea in my hand and hold it to my chest, soothing myself with its warmth. The steam from the tea curls between us in the cool evening air. The sun’s dipping low, casting long gold streaks over the cracked porch wood and the stubborn weeds growing up through the steps.
Alaina leans casually against the railing, her jeans hugging her hips in that effortless way women like me can only dream about. Her mouth tips into a gentle, knowing smile. Alaina was made to be a preschool teacher. I came upon it begrudgingly, but she looks the part. She has a sunshiny grin and that effortless preschool teacher messy bun. When we’re together, I wonder how she stands me. She has suchjoyin her. I feel embittered by everything.
“Girls, stop that!” she chides without looking back at our children in the yard. When I give her a questioning look, she says, “I just say it every once in a while. I figure a broken clock’sright twice a day. Maybe they’ll think I really do have eyes in the back of my head.”
Laughing, I give her a small, polite round of applause. “Diabolical.”
She continues, “Anyway, maybe itcouldbe you.” She shrugs like it’s the simplest thing in the world.
I clutch the mug tighter to my chest, pulling the warmth into myself like armor. “That’s not a thing,” I argue. “It’s either me or it isn’t.”
Alaina’s neck pulls back into itself, and she looks at me with total shock, like I’ve said something she can’t believe. “What? That’s not true! I think back on who I was at sixteen, eighteen, twenty-two, whatever, and she’s a stranger. You can be whoever you want to be.”
I squint at her and glance at our kids playing together in the yard. My Isaac and Joshua, her Aspen and Juniper. Save for Juniper, they’ve found a suspicious looking rock in the yard that they’re all prodding like it might come alive. Juniper, pigtails sagging, is up in a tree, her bare feet against the trunk. I turn back to Alaina, whose eyes are trained on me, waiting. “You sound like an after-school special,” I accuse.
She grins, not even a little bit ashamed, then fans her elbows out, still holding her cup. “All I know is that you look a little brighter than last I saw you.”
