“That’s how you crippled them. Why they want you dead—yesterday.”
I tapped my temple. “You’re catching on.”
She became quiet for a while. “The vegetables. The trucks. Why you didn’t come with me to Italy. You—”
“Boom,” I said, bringing my hands together in what was meant to be an explosion, but it was quiet. “The biggest load. The most money.”
“Your Da,” she said and then hesitated.
I turned my head toward her. Her eyes were narrowed in thought.
“Did he teach you how to make those explosives? The ones that blew up the vegetable trucks?”
“Every one of ’em,” I said, and then turned back to the water.
“The news…” she started, and then her voice drifted. “You do it because of her. Why?”
Her. The woman I thought was dead. My mother.
“I was told she died of an overdose.”
I remembered my father driving her to the hospital, and then I never saw her again. My memories were fucking faulty, though, because I remembered little else about her. And I should’ve. I was ten. Killian and I lived with our father’s parents for a while after we were told we’d never see her again, first in Derry and then in Gweedore, and then our old man brought us to Hell’s Kitchen.
Keely said something, but it took me a minute to look at her.
“I was wrong.” She hesitated. “And maybe a little scared. No.” She shook her head. “Really. I was really scared. Am terrified now.”
“Of what, darlin’?”
She took a deep breath, released it, and then took a step, another, until she closed the gap between us. I stood, turning to face her, and her arms came under mine and her head came to my chest.
Three words left her mouth that I’d never heard before.
“Of losing you.”
She might as well have said I love you. If she did, I was in so much fucking trouble—because Keely Kelly was the most dangerous job I’d ever done, and her heart was the most valuable thing I’d ever stolen.
27
Keely
He’d never looked at me like that.
Not even the first time we’d met, at the cemetery.
Not even when he watched me walk down the aisle.
Not even after he fucked me the first time.
Or the time after.
Or anytime since then.
Not even when he found me in a dress the color of his eyes—a brilliant green—before the first political event.
Not even when I called a truce at Sullivan’s.
He looked at me with no pretense, no guise, no holding back. He looked at me with eyes full of truth. It was how he’d looked at me back at the flat in Derry, but he wasn’t closing his eyes again.
