I twisted around and pressed close to him. “What?”
“Not a religious one. A...personality cult, I suppose you’d call it. Mixed in with doomsday stuff. A really fucking evil one.”
I put my head on his chest. “Go on,” I whispered.
“We knew something was wrong. We’d known all summer, we’d seen her changing. Weird people coming to the house. But we were kids—what were we going to do? It was scary...the person she was just disappeared, within a few months. Then my dad got back and we thought,thank God,now everything’ll be okay. But she wouldn’t listen to him, treated him like a stranger. Said he was trying to takeherchildren away from her, and she had to do what was best for us.”
He stopped for a moment, staring off into the darkness. “She wanted to take us into the cult. They had these...camps, where followers could live. And those places...I didn’t know at the time, but I heard things later...theydo thingsto people in there. Even to children. Bad shit.”
“Jesus,” I breathed.
He wrapped his arms around me and pressed me in tight to him, running a hand down my back from shoulder to ass. We were both naked, but it didn’t feel sexual—we were way beyond that, now. It felt like he was stroking me for comfort, to reassure himself that there was another person there in the blackness. “So us kids: our mum’s telling us she’s going to take us all off to paradise, our dad’s trying to explain that she’s not well—because he still loved her, he loved her through all of this. And our mum’s saying he’s evil, that he’s trying to trick us. This went on forweeks.”
I clung to him, rubbing his shoulders and upper arms, letting him know I was there for him. I thought of a young Sean, terrified and confused, and I’ve never wanted a time machine so much.
“Eventually, my mum realizes she’s going to lose—she’s not going to get custody, if they split and it goes to court. So she takes Bradan, one of my brothers, and she delivers him—shefucking delivers him—to the cult, knowing that he’s going to be separated from her, maybe forever. She actually believes she’s doing the right thing, she thinksthe cult can raise him better than she can herself. That’s how strongly they controlled her.” He started to speak again, but his voice broke on the first word and he stopped.
He doesn’t want to cryI pressed myself as hard as I could against his chest, feeling his lungs fill and empty as he struggled for control. “It’s okay,” I whispered. “It’s okay. I’m here.”
“Do you know why Bradan?” he asked, his voice bitter. “Why she took him first, separately?”
I shook my head.
“Because they asked for him. Because they’d questioned her for hours about all her kids. Seen photos. They knew his personality, his talents. They picked him out and ordered her to bring him to them. That’s the sort of people they are.”
“Oh my God…”
“Then she comes back home to get the rest of us. She’s going to take us all with her to one of the camps and then, most likely, the cult would gradually split us up and find...usesfor all of us. Only that never happens. Because, when she arrives home, my dad’s there.”
And now I saw it coming towards me like a freight train. I squeezed my eyes closed.
“They have a screaming row, right in front of us. My mum’s out of her mind, by this point—she genuinely believes she’s saving us, can’t believe the cult would ever hurt us. My dad...he’s already lost one son, he knows he might never see Bradan again. Now he’s about to lose his whole family. He loves her—that never changed—but he can’t let her take us.
So they get into a fight, us kids are trying to stop them, half of us are crying. My mum grabs a kitchen knife—” His arms tightened around me. “My dad wrestled with her. He didn’t want to do it. If it had been just him, I don’t think he would have done it—he would have let her kill him, rather than hurt her. But he knew that if he was gone, there’d be no one to save us kids. They fought and fought...and finally he slammed her down on the floor and she hit her head. And that was it. We all saw it happen.”
I clung to him like a child...but in that moment, I wanted it to be the other way around. I wanted to be like a mom to him, to comfort him.
“Afterwards...it was fucking chaos. They hauled my dad off for murder.”
I tilted my head up and blinked up at him. “What?But...the cult!”
“Turns out the cult had a lot of friends in high places, from local police all the way up to judges. At the trial, they made out that my dad was this violent, drunken Irishman—he’d had one beer, that day—and that my mum had been trying to get us away from him. The cult was barely mentioned. My dad got twenty years: he’s still in prison now.”
“What about Bradan?”
“We were trying to tell everyone the cult had taken him, but no one believed us. They split us up: I was the youngest so I got put in foster care in the US. Everyone got different treatment and it happenedfast.We mostly lost touch. I know Aedan went back to Ireland and lived there for a while. Carrick was older so he managed to slip away and go on the run until he was old enough to look after himself....” Sean sighed. “It was a mess. The only one I know about for sure is Kian: he went into the military. He’s in Washington, now.”
Jesus.I knew what it was like to lose both parents, but at least Kayley and I had had each other.
“Wewere a mess, too,” Sean told me. “I mean, some of us sided with my dad, some with my mum, the whole thing just tore us apart. We loved each other but...seeing the others just reminded us. That’s why we don’t talk.”
“What happened to you, in foster care?”
“I ended up with this pretty well-off couple who couldn’t have kids of their own. The woman was okay, but the man...he wanted his own kids. Called me a little Irish shit when she wasn’t around. Then, when he’d had a bad day, he’d take it out on me. Punching me, hitting me. I was a clumsy kid, worse when I was scared, so I’d break stuff. He hated that.” He nodded over his shoulder. “Those scars arecigarette burns. He used to get me to take my shirt off and kneel down facing away from him while he sat in his armchair. I used to think it was so I couldn’t see the cigarette coming, to make it worse. But now I think it was because he couldn’t look me in the face while he did it. The fuckin’ coward. He told me over and over I wasn’t good for anything apart from wrecking stuff—that’s what I’d done, he said, wrecked his life. You hear that enough times, you start to believe it.”
He went quiet for a while, reliving it in his head. “I started building myself up, learned how to fight, so I could fight back. And I did, eventually—he got scared of me and left me alone. I thought I’d won…” He sighed. “But the fucker had messed me up. By then, I thought all I was good for was destroying. Smashing stuff up started to feel good: it let out some anger. At school, I didn’t trust anyone and no one wants to be friends with the scary Irish kid who gets into fights all the time and breaks stuff.” He shrugged his massive shoulders. “I moved out of their house as soon as I could. Then I just kept scaring people and smashing stuff...only this time, people paid me for it. My foster mum eventually left the bastard. She lives across town.”
I hugged him for long minutes before I asked, “What about Bradan?”
