"Does that mean you’re an expert now?" Because Finn knew my brother, he wasn’t even joking.
Conor hummed. "He’s progressing at the right pace."
"Did the books tell you to sit on him?"
"Nah, but I have to get him back for all the shit he did to me when I was a kid, don’t I?"
Finn snorted out a laugh. "True. How long’s he been here?"
"Just under a week. Showed up on my doorstep after I was dealing with that little problem Eoghan had."
"You mean the decapitated head on his doorstep? Con, bro, that’s more than a ‘little’ problem."
"Not really," Conor mused. "Bodies are a lot heavier and more cumbersome. That was quite easy to dispose of."
"Knowing your da, he put it on a spike and has it in his office," Finn said with a grunt.
"Maybe. He’s very medieval, you know that."
"Yeah, figured as much over the years," was Finn’s dry comment. "Aoife told me Victoria’s sleeping better though."
"Huh. I guess you can take the girl out of the Bratva but you can’t take the Bratva out of the girl. Not sure MaryCat would be A-Okay with finding a bleeding head on her doorstep, and she’s Irish Mob."
"She’s technically a Satan’s Sinner now," Finn said wryly. "Just don’t tell her ma that."
"Did you hear what that cunt’s next game is? It’s not right, I’m telling you."
"What?" Finn queried. "I ain't heard nothing. Not since she gave birth to a boy, anyway."
"She went to Da and asked him for help in having the baby taken away from MaryCat because she's crying all the time and has postpartum depression."
"No fucking way," Finn snapped. "Jesus, what did your da say?"
"He asked me to look into it," was Conor’s grim retort.
Finn’s disbelief was clear. "You’re helping them take her baby away from her? MaryCat will make an epic mom. You know that as much as I do."
"I’m not helping," was Conor’s reply.
Finn made an ‘ah’ sound. "You’re sowing seeds?"
"Yes. I’ve asked her to come around tomorrow."
"Digger's coming too?"
"I suppose. I don’t imagine he’ll be letting her go anywhere in the city without his protection. She’s safe physically, but clearly he knows what her mother’s like."
"A fucking cunt?" Finn grunted. "Wait until I tell Aoife this."
"Be careful she doesn’t spread it to the other women. I need this on the downlow."
Finn heaved a sigh. "You’re right. They’re getting to be as thick as thieves."
"Safety in numbers," Conor pointed out.
"I need to vomit," I moaned.
"You’ve needed to puke for days," Conor replied, his lack of sympathy clear. "You’ll get used to it soon."
"Shouldn’t we do something?" Finn asked, fidgeting on top of me.
"No. He’s going cold turkey."
"You sure we shouldn’t take him somewhere?"
"We can’t exactly take him upstate to a rehab center, can we?" Conor snorted. "Da would really love that. His eldest declared a junkie in the eyes of the world."
Finn hummed his agreement. "You sure you know what you’re doing?"
"As much as I ever know what I’m doing."
"Is that supposed to be reassuring?"
"No. So, why do you think Davidson is a prick?"
"Fuck off, Conor."
"No, really. Tell me."
"I already did. His policies—"
"No, tell me the truth."
Finn fidgeted on top of me again, and if my brain had been working, if I hadn’t been in survival mode, I might have recognized that for the tell it was.
All I knew was that the motion was enough to have me surging off the sofa, rolling out of my blanket fort, shoving them to the floor like I was a banana boat and they were frat brothers in Cozumel on Spring Break, then falling on my face on the floor where I promptly puked out my entire digestive system.
Going cold turkey?
Only for the brave.
Five
Savannah
Six weeks later
Four days before Christmas
There was a noise on my terrace.
Now, that might not have freaked out a lot of people, but I wasn’t a lot of people.
Plus, I lived seventy-four stories up. It wasn’t like Spider-Man could get onto my patio. But neither was it accessible to squirrels or opossum. I was also pretty sure that birds didn’t fly this high after midnight. Weren't they supposed to be asleep? Preparing their little voices for their morning choir?
Did I mention that birdsong drove me nuts?
Goddamn noisy fuckers.
Still, I'd take an orchestral movement from a thousand of them if it meant that noise was a skyrat.
Sitting up, I stared around my bedroom, and tried not to be freaked out.
"You shouldn’t have watched IT, Savannah. What a stupid thing to do," I muttered to myself.
Horror movies were my biggest weakness.
I didn’t have the stomach for them, but I was oddly addicted to the sheer insanity of their stories.
As a journalist, I’d learned over the years that the truth was stranger than fiction so horror movies were a weird comfort to me.
But last night’s choice was definitely an idiotic move on my part. I’d been jumpy ever since, to the point where a soft noise on my terrace was waking me up.
I sighed. "You really are a dumbass."
My ears strained in the silence of my place, half expecting Pennywise to mutter back, "Your ass is definitely dumb but oh, so tasty."
To which, of course, I had to reply, "Thanks, I spend a lot of time in the gym working on it."
Grinning to myself at my ridiculousness, I picked up my phone to look at the time, grunted at the number of notifications, then as I rolled out of bed so I could go check things out, slipped my cellphone into the pocket of my sweats.
The joy of living alone was the ability to have open doors. No privacy needed when you had three-thousand square feet to yourself. Of course, that was all well and good most days and nights, but I’d admit to getting a bit spooked as of late.
It wasn’t every day you were helping to crack open a conspiracy.
The New World Sparrows were a secret society that functioned within the boundaries of the justice and political arena. It sounded hokey as hell to me, but I’d learned the truth when an old friend had asked me to help get the story out there.
At first, I hadn’t believed in any of that. Star had always been weird, and so prone to coming up with stories that she made the students in my Creative Writing class in college look unimaginative, so I’d come close to ignoring her.
Because my career had stagnated ever since I’d become a whistleblower at TVGM, and with very little rep left, I didn’t feel like damaging it over Star’s nonsense until, of course, I’d come to realize that all her ‘stories’ were fact.