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Her pain let me feel it too, let me experience it through her as I held her close, fighting her when she slapped at me, trying to get free, trying to loosen my grip on her, but I was stronger and I wasn’t about to let go of the one person who’d never let go of me.
"Not again, not again," she sobbed, and I knew she meant Finn. I knew it and I felt that too.
Our guilt. Our shame.
We’d done our best but it wasn’t enough.
I was the most feared man in New York City and still, some fucking bastard had come into my parish and had forced my son.
My fucking son.
When I started sobbing, I’d never know. I didn’t understand that I was breaking down in my woman’s arms, that we held each other through a storm that would never cease, and I didn’t know when her grief turned to hate. Didn’t see it happen or feel it. I just heard her silence.
I knew what that meant.
Another mother might think Lena unworthy of pity or sympathy. She might think she was cruel for forging our boys in fire, but Lena was a realist. A pragmatist. Our boys making it to their eightieth birthdays was more important to her than anything else. But she was also dangerous. More than her sons knew, because I’d made sure they didn’t know. What she’d gone through had scarred her, made her impulsive, decisive and dangerous.
She’d acted on it once.
One single time.
And Aoife’s mother had paid the price of an irrational jealousy that I understood.
We were evil, Lena and I, twisted and corrupt, but we were made for each other.
How couldn’t that be right?
When I pressed a kiss to her sweaty temple, I pulled back to see that look in her eye. A look that promised death. That promised an end and a new beginning.
"Who?" she rasped. "Who the fuck dared? Is he in there? Is that who—"
She pulled free from my grasp and I let her. I let her storm into the garage, and let her see the Archbishop even though, by this point, he was unrecognizable. Christ, his own mother wouldn’t know him from Adam.
"Ma?" Junior queried, his voice panicked. He tried to stop her, but I didn’t have to turn around to know that my Lena wouldn’t let our eldest get in her way.
"Lena? What are you doing?" Finn demanded, his confusion clear, his surprise evident.
She didn’t reply, just fell silent, which was when I turned around and saw her staring down at the Archbishop.
"Who is he?" she asked. "Is he the one who touched my boy?"
Finn cleared his throat. "He’s the one who helped hide the priests in the church. He’s Archbishop Masters."
"How did he hide them?" she rasped, but when Finn started to answer, she raised a hand and then, very carefully, lifted her foot and pressed the heel of her shoe to the man’s eye socket.
My Lena had funny feet. Put her in a pair of slippers, her bones ached. Let her wear some heels, she could walk around as if she were barefoot.
At that moment, the short kitten heel dug into Masters’ eye and as he squirmed around like a dying fish, she screamed, "How did you hide them?"
"I moved them around!" he screamed back. "The second I heard of any rumors, I shuffled them from parish to parish."
"To maximize their abuse?" Lena whispered.
"N-No, just to hide them. If they moved on, they could never stop anywhere long enough to condition a child."
I frowned at that logic, logic he hadn’t uttered to us.
"How many other priests have you done this with?" Lena demanded, her heel burrowing deeper into the bastard’s eye.
