Micah
When someone woke me up by pounding on my door at three in the afternoon, I thought it was a very aggressive Jehovah’s Witness. Or maybe my landlord, because he sucks at giving me twenty-four hours’ notice for repairs even though I’ve repeatedly reminded him I work nights.
I sleep during the day. Which means if you need me to be anywhere but unconscious in my bed in the afternoon, you need to give me notice.
I had stumbled to the door and pulled it open without looking, which was my first mistake. My second mistake was freezing as the blind-panic instincts of my childhood took over and the rest of me refused to believe what I was seeing.
Patrick Moynihan. Thug. Criminal. Domestic abuser. Possibly some kind of mafia boss now, if the rumors are true.
Also, my former stepfather.
He and his goons had burst into my apartment with the decorum of a pack of rabid wolves, dragging what I initiallythought was a corpse behind them, wrapped up in a ratty blanket.
When I realized the corpse was Tadhg and he was actually alive, if barely, it was the second time I froze in shock.
Fuck you, Mom, for bringing these people into my life all over again.
When she dragged me out of bed twelve years ago and told me we were making a run for it, I thought that was it. I was losing my brother forever as the price for escaping my stepfather. I didn’t expect her to completely turn her life around, but I thought at least this chapter of our past was closed, with all the good and bad parts it contained.
Instead, I find out that Mom’s been secretly in touch with Patrick fucking Moynihan, the bane of both our existences, for years. She and I still don’t have the best relationship. When I can’t get hold of her, I assume it means she’s relapsing. Turns out, sometimes it also meant she’d been letting Patrick crawl his ass from Oklahoma to Missouri just to spend a “business trip” getting high with her here in Mission Flats. So, when he needed to go on the lam, he knew exactly who would be the easiest to exploit.
And when he showed up on her doorstep with Tadhg looking half dead, instead of making him take his son to a hospital, like a rational human being, my lovely mother said, “Micah’s an ER nurse, he can help.”
Now Patrick is pacing up and down, worrying a trail in the kitchen floor and arguing with one of his henchmen about something while I focus on not overhearing anything I don’t have to. The other three men, who all manage to look like carbon copies of one another despite having vastly different hair and clothes, are lounging around my home, taking up a disproportionate amount of space and sneering at my decor.
And poor Tadhg is on my couch, propped up as comfortably as I could arrange him, drifting in and out of consciousness.
I told her 400 miles wasn’t far enough away from him. We should have moved to the moon.
We should have taken Tadhg with us like I begged her to, and said fuck the consequences.
Patrick stops his pacing abruptly to snap at me.
“Help him, boy! Why do you think your mother sent us here? She said you were a… nurse.”
I don’t miss the derision in his voice when he says ‘nurse’, because he doesn’t bother to hide it. Of course, he’s still the kind of old-school douchebag who would consider nursing a humiliating profession for a man.
Never mind that he’d probably faint at half the shit I see on my shifts, no matter how many people he’s arranged to be murdered. There’s a difference between seeing death from a distance and being elbow-deep while trying to stop it.
“Yeah, I’m a nurse. At a hospital. Where the drugs and medical supplies live. Do you think I steal stuff to keep at my house? Everyone I know would go to the hospital if they got hurt, and I’d lose my license if I got caught stealing.”
I’m working very hard to keep an edge to my tone and not let my hands shake. I remember how good Patrick was at scenting fear, and I’m sure he’s only gotten better at it as he’s risen in power.
His henchmen can’t be much safer, either. They’re already eyeing me up and down like I’m a novelty. Of course, it doesn’t help that I threw on the nearest clothes I could find before answering the door—fitted gray sweats and a baggy, cropped Eras Tour t-shirt. It’s not quite short enough to be a full-on crop top, but everything about the cut of the clothes is not-heterosexual enough for these guys to clock it.
Just enough to make the atmosphere in the room even more uncomfortable than it was already.
I wasn’t expecting to have to put my homophobe-guard up. At least, not more than your average day in rural Missouri, which is something I’ve gotten very good at managing.
“He needs IV antibiotics. He needs pain meds. He needs stitches, and potentially surgery. An X-ray would be great. And all I’ve got is a normal human first aid kit with basic wound care shit. If you really want him to live, you’d take him to the hospital.”
Pat looks at me like I’m stupid. Maybe I am. I already know he’d let his son die rather than jeopardize his business. I may have only known him when I was a child, but I saw how little he cared about Tadhg in picture-perfect clarity back then. I’m sure it hasn’t changed.
If Tadhg works for the same organization—like the tattoos crawling all over his skin say he does—then his father will be even more pragmatic about the situation.A natural hazard of the job.
Pat steps up to me, puffing out his chest and drawing himself up in a way I haven’t witnessed in years, but is still deeply familiar.
He’s a little slimmer now. Still muscular, but in a lean way, without the pudge. It makes his face seem more angular and hawkish, but his brown eyes are clear and his skin, although wrinkled, looks better. Maybe he stopped drinking so heavily. I’d say good for him, but really, I mean good for the people around him.
