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If any of that seemed like I wasat ease, then I wasn’t certain what was going through Finn’s mind.
“Are you sure you don’t need a new sleep shirt?”
I blinked at him. “Later will suffice.” I really didn’t have the energy to get changed. “Tell me what you meant.”
He climbed off the bed, and just as I feared he was going to leave, he started to pace. Back and forth at the foot of the bed, so fast and so often I sank back to observe him in surprise.
I wouldn’t have been shocked to see sparks crackle around him as he worked through whatever he was dealing with, and boy, was he dealing with something.
“Why don’t you hate me?”
Well, that was easy. “Because I love you.”
His nostrils flared, and though I knew,point blank, he loved when I said that, he always responded like a deer in headlights. He also never replied.
I’d decided not to take offense at that.
Fiona, his mom, had loved him. Dearly. But I knew Finn didn’t believe that, and considering what Lena, his adoptive mother, had told me about his father? And that Fiona had known of the abuse? I couldn’t blame him for being confused about love, even though the O'Donnellys had most definitely cocooned him in the love of their family.
“Love isn’t a ‘get out of jail free’ card, Aoife.”
He sounded so impatient, and I had to snicker at him. “That’s a shame,” I told him wryly. “I’m sure a lot of your boys on Rikers Island wished it was.”
“This isn’t a joke,” he exploded again, and once more, he began to pace.
Jesus. It was a wonder he didn’t start running.
I’d known he wasn’t handling my being shot well—yes, I was aware of the irony in that sentence—but this was the closest to combusting I’d seen him.
Trouble was, I didn’t know what to do to make things better for him.
I understood he felt guilty, and because I wasn’t being mean to him or hating on him, he wasn’t sure how to deal with me.
Weren’t men strange?
Would he have preferred for me to stop talking to him?
Then, I realized something I should have figured out before.
Finn, whether he was devout or not, was a Catholic.
Catholics practically got off on penance. It was what we did best.
“Finn?” I asked quietly. “Have you gone to confession?”
That had him braking to a halt. “Huh?”
It was the first time I’d seen him speechless, but it was a week for firsts. I hadn’t seen him so close to losing control, either.
“I asked if you’d gone to confession. Since the shooting, I mean.” How I kept my tone so calm, I wasn’t sure.
From something Brennan had said while my eyes were closed and the guys had thought I was sleeping—I hadn’t been pretending, had just been drifting—I knew Finn had shot and killed one of the Colombians. I also knew that the shooters had, somehow, been tossed out of the moving truck and the brothers had shot them too.
That was a lot for anyone to deal with.
A Catholic?
Someone used to purging their soul after every sin?
