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I scrubbed a hand over my brow, rubbing my eyes which were crusted from sleep, and rolled my head to the side on the pillow. I felt like shit warmed over, which was better than death warmed over, I figured, but not by much.
At least I wasn’t in total agony. Not of the physical kind anyway.
When the bed started to move without me doing a thing, I gritted my teeth, and when the new position put me directly in the firing line of my folks? I winced.
Da was there, and he was looming in the corner.
There was an unspoken rule in our household.
Never piss Ma off. If you did? You invoked Da’s wrath, and no fucker wanted that. Christ.
Irony being, of course, aside from the psychopathy, he’d been a good father. Hard on me, but I’d needed the direction because it had stopped me from getting killed before I was twenty. I just wasn’t sure if I wanted to emulate him.
I looked like him, and while I wasn’t the baby of the family, that was Eoghan, I knew Ma tended to give me a bit of leverage, some room for maneuvering she didn’t necessarily give to Aidan and Brennan, my older brothers. Conor got more leeway because he was a genius and he was weird with it. Eoghan was the baby, so that justified her trying to coddle him. Me? I was in the middle and should have been ignored. It was a curse and a blessing that I looked like Da, I guessed.
There were shadows under both their eyes, a fatigue that came from fear. There was never denying how much we were loved. Funny how I thought that now, when it’d never have been a blip on my radar before. Not because I’d almost died, because fuck, whenever we left the house, almost dying was a distinct possibility, but because I had a son. She was right.
A son whom I had to somehow help raise.
Care for.
Not get killed.
My jaw worked as I saw their fear for me entwined with a kind of concern I wasn’t accustomed to seeing.
From her tone, which had been carefully free of all expression, I’d anticipated her anger. I thought they’d be pissed at me, but they weren’t.
In fact, as I tried to read Ma’s expression and then Da’s, I realized they were both keeping things on the down low.
Was that a positive or a negative?
I had no way of knowing until I answered their question.
“Looks like it,” I muttered, staring at my feet, which were peeping through the standard-issue hospital blanket—it was half paper, half cotton, and with all those tiny holes in it.
Christ, I was looking forward to going home to get a real bed that didn’t come with a remote.
“Looks like it? You didn’t know?”
I scowled at Da, pissed he’d think that. His eyes were concerned, I saw, as he stepped toward me. I didn’t want to say trouble was brewing in them, more like he was worried. For who though? Me? The kid?
Shrugging set off a tidal wave of aches in my body. “I didn’t know.”
“I told you he wouldn’t have kept the lad from us, Lena,” Da cooed, and I watched, confused, as Ma’s shoulders sagged like that was the best news she’d heard all year.
“You thought I’d kept a kid from you?” I muttered, mostly bewildered, but a little pissed off too. After all, who the fuck did they think I was?
Family was everything.
Jesus.
That was the first rule, wasn’t it? The first of a million, granted, but that was at the top of the agenda.
“I wasn’t sure,” she rasped, and when her eyes started to gleam with tears, I groaned.
“Ah, hell, Ma. Don’t cry.”
Brennan was right. I did somehow upset her more than most of my brothers, and I didn’t have a clue why. It wasn’t like I was particularly bad—bad in our world was relative—or that I pulled stunts to break her heart, but it didn’t stop her from getting weepy over me.
