But I’d begun to understand it, and understand why Finch liked to come on Fridays despite everything he alsodidn’tlike about it. Aidan was so good, so kind, so giving, that some of it seemed to spill over and lend some purity to the people around him.
There was just something about those big blue eyes and that trusting, welcoming smile that made me wish I could be around him more and more.
He was really cute, too, but I tried not to think about that. The guy was apriest, after all, or as good as. It would be wrong of me to think about what he might look like under the cable-knit sweaters and chinos that seemed to serve as his lay uniform. But knowing that it was sinful to think about him as a man still hadn’t stopped me.
Sometimes I even wondered what he’d look like when he got his cassock on.
I blew out a long breath towards the spires of the church, muttered a prayer to Saint Jude to make me a better man, and then went back into the church.
It was already getting dark out. Aidan usually turned off the evening lights in the main church before he said his prayers, and inside the church the lights were off, but I couldn’t see him. Maybe I’d missed him already. He might have gone out the back way, through the church hall. But in that case he would have locked the front doors I’d just come through, if he’d closed up.
The church seemed gloomier than usual, though the few lit prayer candles next to the entrance still jumped and glimmered. Aidan liked to make sure all candles were put out before he went home, so he must still—
A scuffling noise and a cut-off cry sounded loud in the empty, echoing church, and pulled my attention at once to the left-hand side, halfway down.
The confessional box.
Someone seemed to be leaning half-in, half-out.
I reached under my coat to pull out my gun, then made my way fast and quiet down the side, past the altars of the saints, my eyes steady on whoever it was down there. It wasn’t Aidan.
But then a muffled protest sounded and that—thatwasAidan.
I reached my target, grabbed him by the shoulders, and threw him away from the confessional box. He hit the ground; there was a clattering noise as a knife tumbled across the marble floor. “Don’t move,” I snapped as he looked after it, and made sure he could see my gun and nothing but the gun.
He was older than I’d first thought. Scruffy and beat-up, missing parts of himself in a way that suggested the criminal life. Only one ear, a few fingers gone—and, I saw as the hem of his old, frayed jeans shifted, he had one false leg.
Whoever he was, he seemed used to having a gun on him. He only smiled as he watched mine, aimed dead at his heart, and nodded his approval. “Alright, now, alright,” he said. “There’s no need to be rude.”
I glanced behind me quickly to confirm my suspicions. Aidan was there in the confessional, his hand over his own mouth as though he were afraid to shout out. He was pale as milk and shaking. “You okay?” I asked, even though I could see with my own eyes that he wasn’t.
He nodded.
I looked back to the asshole on the ground. “Get up. Slow.” He obeyed, still grinning to himself like it was all some big joke. “You and I are gonna walk out to the community hall, nice and slow. Move.”
“Teo,” Aidan said sharply. “Just—just let him go.”
I chanced another look behind me and saw blood smeared across his cheek. I crossed to the guy who was still helping himself up with a hand on the pew next to him and shoved him down on his back along the wooden seat, my gun to his chin. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” I asked him coldly. “Assaulting a priest?”
The guy’s smile didn’t even falter. “Well, now, he’s not a priest yet, is he?” His voice held the same alternating lilts and drawls I heard in Aidan’s sometimes, a product of his Boston Irish background.
“Teo,” Aidan said again, and I felt a soft hand on my shoulder. “Please. This is the house of God.Pleasejust—just let him go.”
I scowled at the fucker at the end of my gun for another few seconds, and then I backed up, keeping Aidan behind me. “I see you here again, you better hope you can outrun a bullet. You hear me?”
“Oh, I hear you,” he said softly. He looked past me to Aidan, gave another grin that made me want to shoot him that much more, and then he turned and ambled out of the church. He paused at the door to bless himself with holy water. I watched him the whole way, keeping him in my gun’s sights, but as soon as the door closed, I holstered my weapon and turned to Aidan, who had slumped back on the seat inside the confessional.
“Did that fucker cut you?” I took him by the shoulder and touched my fingers to the blood on his face. It was coming from a slight cut next to his mouth. “Oh,hell, no.”
I made to pull my gun again, but Aidan grabbed my wrist before I could run after the Irish asshole.
“Please,” he said, and the way he said it was so tearful and desperate that it stopped me in my tracks. “Please, just let him go. I’m fine, and I don’t want to make a big deal out of it. Sometimes these things happen. I’ll report it to security later but—I just want to go home.” His blue eyes were glossy, and he seemed as close to tears as he was to terror. He was still colorless, still trembling.
“Who was that guy? Did you know him?”
Aidan closed his eyes, leaning his head back against the wall of the confessional box behind him. “No. I don’t think so. How would I know him?”
“He was Boston Irish, like you.”
