Siena blinks then breaks into a huge smile. “Wait, really?”
“If I go to the New Year’s Eve party,” I continue, “and survive seeing him, which I will, then Emilia’s birthday will be easier. And the next thing after that will be easier still.”
Olivia twirls with Emilia. “Exposure therapy!”
“Exactly,” I say.
“So you’ll come for sure?” Siena asks.
I smile at my cousin, remembering I’m the only family she has left.
“I’ll think about it,” I say, but we both know I’ll do it.
One year. I made it almost one year without him. Whatever comes next, I can survive that too.
2
VIN
The MacCuinn mansion is huge, sprawling, a lot of stone and green grass and a shit ton of Irish.
They’re not old money like us, status earned through centuries of blood, generational wealth and traditions passed down. They’re newer, louder, more ostentatious. I like it. They don’t give a fuck, and they fucking want it bad.
They’re good partners, and Ronan MacCuinn, the oldest son of the boss of the family, is like a brother to me.
Tonight, the main room of the MacCuinn estate is packed with Irish: cousins and brothers, sisters and soldiers for the MacCuinn Clan. A fire blazes in a hearth the size of a small car. Someone’s playing guitar in the corner, badly, and nobody’stold him to stop because nobody cares. Pretty much everyone is wasted, and I intend to join them starting now.
Ronan presses a glass in my hand before I’ve had time to shrug off my coat.
“Vin.” Ronan grins at me and holds up his own glass in salute. He’s red-haired, about as big as me, and built like a fucking door. “You actually came.”
“I said I’d come.”
“You say a lot of things.”
I drink. The whiskey is good. It always is here. “I keep my word.”
He studies me a moment, something sharp under his easy smile, then claps me on the shoulder hard. “Good man. Come. Declan’s been asking for you.”
The room parts for us as we move through it, or it parts for Ronan, and I move in his wake. Declan is one of Ronan’s cousin, but he speaks with a thick Irish brogue that I oddly only understand when I’m fucking trashed.
Flanking him is another cousin, Luca. Big as I am, broad shouldered, and largely silent, I don’t think I’ve ever heard him talk, but then he seems to come and go.
“Vin fucking Demonio.” Declan stands, offers his hand. “Ronan said you’d show.”
“Ronan was right.”
“First time for everything.” He laughs at his own joke. “Sit. Drink. Christ, you look like your dog died.”
“Don’t have a dog.”
“That explains it. A man needs something soft to come home to.”
I say nothing and swallow what’s left of my drink, and he signals Luca to refill my glass.
The party moves around me and I stand and watch. It’s a skill I’ve honed over the past year: check the temperature of a room without giving away that I’m even paying attention. Luca pours two inches of brown liquor into my glass and settles on one of the many couches clustered around fire pits, watching me the same way I’m watching him.
Ashlyn MacCuinn is across the room, laughing at something a woman beside her is saying. She’s beautiful in a brittle, upper class way. Or maybe her smile’s brittle. I don’t fucking know. She’s hourglass curvy, long red wavy hair, big tits—the kind of chick that any red blooded straight male would want to fuck. Except me.
