“I think Al Pacino needed a better exit strategy.”
He snorts. “He’d probably agree.”
“Do you always watch movies this old?”
“Only kind worth watching.” He stands, stretching his arms above his head until his shoulders pop. “Modern stuff is nothing but CGI and superheroes. All a fucking money grab. There’s no real grit or soul to them.”
“Can’t say if I agree. I’d need to watch a lot more movies than I have.”
“You said you weren’t allowed with the Bratva?”
“Fedorov wasn’t big on movie nights.”
Killian’s expression hardens, anger flickering in his dark eyes. He’s able to play it off with another roll of his shoulders.
“Sounds like you’ve got a lot of catching up to do.”
We leave the theater behind, venturing back into the warm summer night. It’s a quarter ’til four, not another living person anywhere on the side street we walk down.
Everybody’s either asleep in their homes or off in another part of town.
“It’s hard to enjoy stories,” I admit as we start walking. “I think my life feels too much like one. Something out of a movie. Right now I feel like I’m at the part where I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop.”
Killian grunts. “I know what you mean.”
“You do?”
“More than you’d think.”
We walk in silence for half a block, our footsteps falling into a casual rhythm with each other. For once I’m not rushing to keep up with him and he’s slowed down into more of a stroll for me.
“You got any other family?” he asks. “Besides Eva?”
It’s not every day I think about anyone besides her.
For so long, she’s been the center of my world. The only one I’ve cared about; really the only other person I had left…
“There’s my father,” I answer, shrugging. “He’s out there somewhere. I don’t know where but also don’t really care to find out either.”
“He an ass too?”
“More like a deadbeat. He left my mom when I was four. Eva was only weeks old. I guess he decided the family thing really wasn’t his vibe.”
“Sorry piece of shit,” he says bluntly. “But sometimes I wish I could say the same—that mine walked out on us rather than stay and terrorize us, day in and day out.”
My brows rise in mild surprise. “Your dad live close?”
“Right here in Brooklyn. Still don’t give a fuck about him. Only time I swing by is to see my ma. Otherwise, I’ve got nothing to say to him that I haven’t already said with my fists.”
We cross a dead intersection and make it onto the other side of the street, only a few blocks left to go until Killian’s apartment building.
I’m hardly noticing, so invested in what he’s revealed.
“Your fists?” I repeat. “You’ve used them on your father?”
“He was a drunk,” he answers. “Ameanone, the worst kind. Came home every night looking for somebody to take his shit out on, and there we were—me, my ma, and my baby sister, Maeve. Three people smaller and weaker than him, trapped in an apartment with a man who hated himself so much he had to make everybody else suffer for it.
“He beat my mother many times over the years. Every so often, he’d come for me and Maeve instead. I learned real quick how to take a punch. How to put myself between him and my sister. Couldn’t bear to see him hurt her, even when I wasn’t much bigger than she was. So I’d take double the beating.”
