When I made it inside, I headed to my favorite part—the monastery. AKA, The Cuxa Cloisters. It framed a courtyard that was too miserable to sit in thanks to the weather, but that suited my mood to perfection.
I didn’t take any notice of the ancient stone arches that a stoic bell tower loomed over, I barely noticed any of it as I leaned against one of those arches and tried not to fucking cry.
Working with Da meant being his fists. So far it was a miracle I’d avoided wet work, but it seemed like my time had come.
Before the year was out, I knew I’d have my first kill under my belt—
“Declan?”
The soft voice, the whisper of my name, broke into my thoughts.
Before I could get angry at having my space invaded, my private place that was free from the Irish Mob’s taint because no Westie would be caught dead here, I saw her.
She was like an angel.
A dark-haired one.
Her face was petite, rounded at the chin with the tiniest little indent in the middle, and her cheeks were rosy with the cold. Her eyes were bright with expectation, and her smile was hesitant as she looked at me like she expected me not to know her.
But I did.
I knew her.
I’d seen her with Deirdre, which should have marked her for death, but how could any lover of art mark a woman like this for death?
She was beautiful. She was gothic. She was a muse in the flesh.
Titian would have switched from redheads to brunettes for her.
Aela O’Neill.
Walking salvation and the promise of hell.
I should ignore her, should send her packing, but instead, I rumbled, “Hello, Aela,” and took my first steps, without even a blink, into the abyss.
DECLAN
NOW
“You have a son.”
My mother’s voice was calm. Relatively speaking, anyway. Lena was one of those women who either looked like she was a duck—all serene on the surface, but below it, her flippers were paddling like mad—or she was just so crazy that she didn’t get flustered by much.
Having known her for as long as I’d been alive, I figured it was a mixture of both.
To put up with my father, you had to be a little nuts. Let’s make that a lot. Aidan O’Donnelly Sr. had a rep the size of New York state, and for a reason… he was insane.
Categorically, undeniably.
He saw the world in a different way too, and God help me, after having been around him my whole life, I knew I had his slant on things as well. All in all, that didn’t bode well for me as a parent, did it?
Two nutcases for folks… didn’t exactly put me in the major leagues for potential parenting skills.
I mean, I knew Ma and Da would kill for us. But that was part of the problem.
Most parents usually only said that, they didn’t think they’d have to act on it. In the life, murder was as much a part of it as having eggs for breakfast.
I scrubbed a hand over my brow, rubbing my eyes which were crusted from sleep, and rolled my head to the side on the pillow. I felt like shit warmed over, which was better than death warmed over, I figured, but not by much.
At least I wasn’t in total agony. Not of the physical kind anyway.
When the bed started to move without me doing a thing, I gritted my teeth, and when the new position put me directly in the firing line of my folks? I winced.
Da was there, and he was looming in the corner.
There was an unspoken rule in our household.
Never piss Ma off. If you did? You invoked Da’s wrath, and no fucker wanted that. Christ.
Irony being, of course, aside from the psychopathy, he’d been a good father. Hard on me, but I’d needed the direction because it had stopped me from getting killed before I was twenty. I just wasn’t sure if I wanted to emulate him.
I looked like him, and while I wasn’t the baby of the family, that was Eoghan, I knew Ma tended to give me a bit of leverage, some room for maneuvering she didn’t necessarily give to Aidan and Brennan, my older brothers. Conor got more leeway because he was a genius and he was weird with it. Eoghan was the baby, so that justified her trying to coddle him. Me? I was in the middle and should have been ignored. It was a curse and a blessing that I looked like Da, I guessed.
There were shadows under both their eyes, a fatigue that came from fear. There was never denying how much we were loved. Funny how I thought that now, when it’d never have been a blip on my radar before. Not because I’d almost died, because fuck, whenever we left the house, almost dying was a distinct possibility, but because I had a son. She was right.
A son whom I had to somehow help raise.
Care for.
Not get killed.
My jaw worked as I saw their fear for me entwined with a kind of concern I wasn’t accustomed to seeing.
From her tone, which had been carefully free of all expression, I’d anticipated her anger. I thought they’d be pissed at me, but they weren’t.
In fact, as I tried to read Ma’s expression and then Da’s, I realized they were both keeping things on the down low.
Was that a positive or a negative?
I had no way of knowing until I answered their question.
“Looks like it,” I muttered, staring at my feet, which were peeping through the standard-issue hospital blanket—it was half paper, half cotton, and with all those tiny holes in it.
Christ, I was looking forward to going home to get a real bed that didn’t come with a remote.
“Looks like it? You didn’t know?”
I scowled at Da, pissed he’d think that. His eyes were concerned, I saw, as he stepped toward me. I didn’t want to say trouble was brewing in them, more like he was worried. For who though? Me? The kid?
Shrugging set off a tidal wave of aches in my body. “I didn’t know.”
“I told you he wouldn’t have kept the lad from us, Lena,” Da cooed, and I watched, confused, as Ma’s shoulders sagged like that was the best news she’d heard all year.
“You thought I’d kept a kid from you?” I muttered, mostly bewildered, but a little pissed off too. After all, who the fuck did they think I was?
Family was everything.
Jesus.
That was the first rule, wasn’t it? The first of a million, granted, but that was at the top of the agenda.
“I wasn’t sure,” she rasped, and when her eyes started to gleam with tears, I groaned.
“Ah, hell, Ma. Don’t cry.”
Brennan was right. I did somehow upset her more than most of my brothers, and I didn’t have a clue why. It wasn’t like I was particularly bad—bad in our world was relative—or that I pulled stunts to break her heart, but it didn’t stop her from getting weepy over me.
I was used to it, but even so, it pissed me off because the last thing I wanted was her to get upset and for Da to blame those tears on me.
We had a working theory as a family that every tear Ma shed, Da would go out and kill some of our enemies to that exact number.
Sure, sounded lofty and romantic, impossible even. Only it wasn’t.
Da was just that much of a psycho.
I pinched the bridge of my nose, and muttered, “You know how things ended with Deirdre, Ma.”
“I do.”
When Da didn’t give me shit for swearing in front of her, I figured getting shot came with some perks. “Well then, you know that what happened with Aela was—”