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“All the more reason to get to know me then, isn’t it?” I heaved a breath. “Only God knows how long I’ve got left.”
Conor grumbled, “Talk about asking for bad karma.”
I ignored him. “I don’t have much energy, Aela. But what little I’ve got, I’m focusing on you. If I could kill theFamigliafucker for you, I would have. I’d slice my own throat before I’d let you and Seamus be in harm’s way, and that’s exactly why my brothers are coming to get you.
“Since I’m in enough trouble healthwise, the last thing I need is a Cheshire cat grin around my Adam’s apple.”
I could almost hear her mind ticking away, but the key to breaking her obstinacy?
Logic.
Truth.
Cold reason.
For a creative woman, she was surprisingly rational, but then, if she hadn’t been, she’d have driven me crazy—and not in a good way. Back when I was younger, she’d had my cock in a knot. If she’d been illogical and stupid, she’d have just made me want to strangle her.
“Okay,” she muttered, even though I knew she wasn’t happy about it.
Nerves hit me. “Does he know anything about me?”
She swallowed loud enough for me to hear it. “I never hid you from him.”
“Then why did you hide him from me?” I rasped, my voice low, even though I knew the answer.
“I thought you hated me. Thought you’d hate him. And you forget, Declan, I knew you back then. I was well aware how you’d work, how your familystillworks if the photos I saw in the tabloids are anything to go by.”
My brow puckered. “Huh?”
I knew I was slurring, even though Conor tapped his watch, telling me to hurry up with it because if Ma caught me on the cellphone, she’d slap me. Bullet wounds to the chest or not.
“I saw Eoghan and Inessa’s big day. Nice fancy arrangement, all prettied up for the cameras, but only someone in the life would see a contract behind it.”
My jaw ached from how hard I clenched it. “Sometimes, ties have to be cemented.”
“And I had no desire to be a tie or to be ‘cemented’ when I was a kid. Not to a man I thought loved me but looked at me like he thought I was a tramp, not to a man who might have believed I trapped him into marriage.”
Her exhausted sigh resonated, because I was equally as tired. Still, I remembered the last time I’d set eyes on her and guilt hit me. “I didn’t hate you,” I muttered. “I was under a lot of pressure.”
“Yeah, because your girlfriend had just been slaughtered,” she returned. “Tell me why I’d want to raise a kid in that world, Declan?”
A sweet kind of despair hit me then. Landed straight in my solar plexus.
How was I supposed to answer that?
Because she was right. What woman, in their ever-loving mind, would want to raise a child in this world? It tilted everything on its head. Made me respect her and, crazily, lose some respect for my ma.
“You still there?” she asked warily.
“Yeah. I am.” I reached up to rub tired eyes. I wanted to tell her she was right, but I couldn’t. There was no escaping the life, merely procrastinating while you were away from it because once you were in it, you never got out.
So because I couldn’t tell her she was right, I compounded her words by admitting, “The guy who betrayed Rogan’s been handled. You don’t have to worry about him.”
Conor arched a brow at that, and I knew why too. That wasn’t something we shared with the womenfolk.
Certainly not over the phone.
But I needed her to know she was safe.
