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He started the engine and looked at me.
“If you want to freak out, now’s the time,” he said.
I started crying. It burst out of me, big fat fears, hot on my cheeks. Ewan drove back to the apartment, smiling the whole time. It took me most of the car ride to finally calm down, but when I did, he leaned over and wiped away a tear.
“We got a lead,” he said. “Cheer up. We’ll kill Colm and all this will be over.”
I only nodded, because that wasn’t true, not even a little bit, because I still had to marry him, I had to marry the killer, and it scared the hell out of me.
17
Ewan
I gave Tara space. She was messed up from watching Franz get shot, and I couldn’t blame her. It was an intense thing to do, but I couldn’t waste time interrogating those scumbags, not when it felt like each second was precious. The Don could die at any moment, and I couldn’t let him go before I took revenge on Colm for him.
“What’d you find?” Dean asked over the phone the next morning. Tara stayed in her room most of that day and all night, and I wasn’t going to force her to come out before she was ready.
“Ran into our old friends Hyde and Franz coming out of a Healy safehouse,” I said.
“No shit?” Dean laughed. “God damn, those two are real pieces of shit. Remember that girl?”
He didn’t need to specify which one. I knew who he meant. She was one of Hyde’s girlfriends, and one night Hyde got so messed up on speed that he beat the girl’s face until half her teeth were missing.
Franz wasn’t much better. He knocked the rest of her teeth out for crying too loud.
In retrospect, I was happy I shot the asshole.
“You might be pleased to know that Franz might be dead,” I said.
“Might be?” Dean sounded amused. “That’s not like you, to be uncertain.”
“Tara was there,” I said. “I didn’t want to do anything to intense, so I only shot him in the gut.”
“Oh, god,” Dean said. “What happened?”
I gave him the quick version. “I think I know where I can find Colm though,” I said.
“How sure are you?” Dean sounded on edge, and I thought I heard beeping in the background, like the sound of a heart monitor.
“Very sure,” I said. “Hyde wasn’t going to lie to me in that moment. He was desperate.”
“All right,” Dean said. “Keep doing what you have to do.”
“How’s the Don?”
There was a short silence. Something muffled Dean’s receiver at his end, and I thought I heard him walking somewhere. A door shut in the background. “Holding in there,” he said. “He’s old, you know? Doesn’t heal as well. But everyone’s coming in all the time, paying tribute and keeping him involved. I think he’ll pull through.”
“He better,” I said, and meant it. “I’m going to kill Colm for him.”
“I know you will.” He let out a soft laugh, but there wasn’t much behind it.
“I’ve got to ask you something,” I said after a pause, and glanced toward the hallway where Tara was hiding back in her room. I thought about the look on her face, pale white and drawn and terrified as I pulled her away from where Franz lay bleeding on the ground.
She kept pushing me about being a better person, and I hoped she’d come to realize that I was a monster, and maybe she’d run after all.
“Yeah, man, what’s up?” Dean asked and he sounded slightly distracted.
“Why does your father want me to marry Tara?”
Short silence. “Loyalty test,” he said. “You know that.”
“No,” I said, letting my voice drift down. “Why does he really want me to marry her?”
Another longer silence. “Shit, Ewan,” he said. “Do you really want to know?”
I leaned up against the counter and stared at my ceiling. So it was fucking true. They wanted Tara to give them her father’s secrets.
“Your father knows how I feel about the sex trade,” I said, desperate and angry and feeling betrayed. “He knows what that would do to me.”
“I know,” Dean said, almost pleading. “I’ve been trying to push back. It’s not my thing either, man, and we’ve got plenty of money and power, and there are other markets to grow into.”
“Why’s he doing this then?” I asked. “Why the hell would he use me for it?”
“You know my dad,” he said, and sounded genuinely tired. “Games within games. I think the loyalty thing is real, but I think the real test is whether or not you’ll help him start up his trafficking business.”
I felt like my heart was going to break. The bastards knew about my mother, they knew that I wouldn’t cross this line. I thought my family would never ask this of me, and now it was obvious that I was just another body to them.
