"The two of you." She turns her head from the window. "He walked in today and looked at you like he was deciding whether to hug you or hit you."
"That's just Aidan."
"Is it?"
I watch the road. The headlights pick out the white lines and let them go again. "He used to cover for me," I say finally. "When I was using. He'd tell Jason I was sick, tell Alex I was lying low. He did it for nearly two years before he stopped." I pause. "Not because he stopped caring. Because he figured out that covering for me was making it easier for me to keep going."
She's quiet for a moment. "That must have been hard. To stop."
"Harder than he let on." I think about Aidan's face in the doorway of whatever flat I'd been in the third time he came to collect me. The way he hadn't said a word. Just stood there and waited until I could stand up on my own. "He's the one who drove me to the clinic the first time. Sat in the parking lot for six hours because I told him I'd walk out if he left."
"Did you? Walk out?"
"Not that time."
She makes a small sound that isn't quite a laugh. I don't look at her.
"Is that why he was so angry today?" she asks. "Not just about Frank. About you going dark."
"Probably." I keep my eyes on the road. "When you've pulled someone out of a bad place enough times, radio silence tends to mean the same thing."
She doesn't say anything to that. The countryside rolls past dark and flat on both sides of the road, and the silence between us is the comfortable kind, the kind that doesn't need filling.
After a while, she says, "What's he like? When it's not a crisis."
I almost smile. "Plays guitar. Collects vinyl. Raven thinks he's the most romantic man alive, and she's probably right, which is embarrassing for all of us." I pause. "He's a good man. Better than me on most days."
"You keep saying that. About your brothers being better than you."
"Because it's true."
"Or," she says, "because it's easier than believing you might be on the same level."
I glance at her. She's looking out the window, her breath fogging the glass slightly, and she doesn't look like she's trying to make a point. She says things like that, the way other people state the weather.
I don't answer. She doesn't push it.
CHAPTER TWENTY ONE
William
THE DINING ROOM is quiet when I come downstairs. The wrong kind of quiet.
Matty is in the corner, watching me the moment I come through the door, the way he watches everything, quietly and from a distance, giving nothing away. Reilan stands by the window with his arms folded and his back half-turned to the room. Aoife is beside him, close enough that their shoulders nearly touch. She doesn't look at me when I walk in.
Aidan is standing by the fireplace. He has the same quality our father had when something was wrong, and he'd already handled it. Still. Waiting.
Nobody speaks. They are all waiting for Frank.
Five of us should be in this room. There are three. Alex walked away from this family and took the truth about our father with him. Jason is in another country with Kira, tied to the Bratva by a contract Frank's ambition wrote, living a life that should have been different. Neither of them gets to be here for this. I don't know if that's a mercy or if it's another thing Frank took from us.
I think about what Frank is. Not what he did, though that list stopped fitting in my head before I was twelve. What he is. The man who sold our family to the Bratva one percentage at a time until there was nothing left. Who put everything in his own name when our father died and left five sons with nothing. Who took what Alex did and turned that knowledge to his own advantage without a second thought. Who sat in this room while a man bled out in front of Raven to make a point. Whose son put his hands on her. Who shot at Aidan in his own home. Who watched Jason sign his life over to the Bratva and called the debt settled.
He arrives at seven minutes past two.
I hear the front door. I watch every face in the room from the moment the sound registers. Matty goes very still. Reilan turns from the window. Aoife's hand tightens on her brother's arm.
I watch Aidan. He holds himself at the fireplace and looks at Frank with every bit of history between them held behind his jaw. The muscle in his cheek is jumping. His hands are at his sides.
