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Instincts jerk to life inside me. Instincts that have never once led me astray. Instincts telling me to cut and run. To leave, right fucking now, and never look back.
I ignore them.
I start walking again, circling around towards the left side of the house so that I can see her face.
From below on the lawn like this, I can only just see her profile. Thank fuck that’s the only glimpse I get. Because even that one sliver of her face ruins me.
It isn’t just her physical beauty. The high, round cheekbones or the shadows cast by thick, long lashes – I’ve seen it all before. I’ve been with women more alluring, more sensually appealing than her.
It’s the expression shaping those features that does me in.
An expression of pure, deeply human joy. Something I wasn’t entirely sure actually existed until now.
Her soft lips are drawn into a sublime half-smile. Her eyes are closed, her chin balanced delicately on the violin as her long, deft fingers spirit over the strings. Her other arm pushes the bow through the air with surprising force.
“What’s that song?” I mutter. I almost don’t want to speak. Don’t want to make a single noise. But I have to know. Her song is strangling me.
O’Malley comes to a stop beside me, huffing and puffing, having followed me across the lawn. I shoot him a brutal glance, wanting to wring his neck for breathing so fucking loudly.
He pants, bending to place his hands on his knees before straightening.
“It’s Irish. An Eala Bhàn. Was one of her mother’s favourites.”
My eyes crawl up the brick to the balcony once more. The girl’s smile has contracted. Her brows furrow slightly. Tension creeps into her jaw and neck as her fingers fly faster, grinding the notes out harder.
The joy in the song, in her, darkens. Becomes edged with pain. But even in that pain, there’s beauty. Beauty I want to peel back, layer by layer. To understand.
To own.
My fingers twitch at my sides, wanting to clench into fists around something. The bow. The violin’s neck. Hair the colour of fire I’d rather forget.
My next words come without thought and without hesitation.
“That’s it,” I say to O’Malley, my eyes glued to his daughter. “The collateral.”
“What?” O’Malley asks. “The violin? It was her mother’s. It’s worth a fair bit now, but it’s nothing like-”
“Not the violin.”
If not for the music, there would be a long beat of silence before he explodes. His Irish accent, dulled by years in Canada, grows suddenly sharper.
“You want my daughter?” he sputters. “What, that the only way ye can get a woman, ye ugly piece of shit?”
My pistol finds his forehead before he can even blink. His cheeks, so red with rage a moment before, drain of all colour, turning ashen.
“Watch yourself, O’Malley,” I murmur softly, already imagining the spray of blood and brains on the manicured lawn. I’ve killed men for less insult than this.
The music stops.
The softest tremor of sound, the call of, “Dad? Are you down there?” on the summer air has me hunching into myself, slipping the gun under my jacket. My breath shudders out of me. My guts burn with something I haven’t let myself feel in years.
Shame.
There’s something terrible about being a monster in front of a pure little songbird like that.
It almost makes me hate her.
“That’s the deal,” I hiss savagely, too quiet to be heard from the balcony above.
