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She wasn't going anywhere.
Tonight wasnotthat night.
She wasn't my mom.
She'd kill anyone who harmed our kids. Not with cyanide she made in our kitchen, but with a cleaver she’d learned how to wield in culinary school.
"Junior just kept on hitting the guy," I rasped. "Over and over until he was mulch. We'd sneaked into the church looking for Conor, and there was this moan..." I could still hear it. "We armed ourselves with a candlestick from the altar and a plate. That was what Aidan used on the priest.
"I remember standing by the pews, blood spattering onto me, wishing that he’d been there when my stepfather had done that to me. Of course, I thought he was my dad back then…”
Her hand cupped my cheek. “Aidan Sr. took care of things, didn’t he?”
“He killed him,” I confirmed, remembering the little Senior had told me.I took pleasure in cutting that bastard to shredswas all he'd said. “I don’t know how. Maybe I should ask for details. Maybe that would feel good, knowing how it happened? I mean, I just know he’s at the bottom of the Hudson.”
“He’s fish food, baby.”
“He is,” I said simply. “So's the priest who hurt Conor." The memory replayed before I had the chance to shut it down. "The other night, Junior told Senior about Kid's abuse, about what we did that day, and he completely lost his shit.”
“Didn’t take much to figure out that something was wrong with him, sweetheart. He’s been edgier than usual all day. Actually, Lena has been weird too.”
I thought about how Aidan Sr. had tortured the Archbishop of New York.
I thought about how he’d set fire to the cathedral after dumping him at the altar so he could feel the flicker of the flames eating him alive.
But more than that, more than any of that, I thought about how he and Lena had tried to kill themselves.
Guilt, they said they couldn't live with knowing they'd let Conor down...
“My mom had to know, didn’t she?” I blurted out.
She tensed up at the question, and I didn’t blame her. She’d known my mom. Hers had been best friends with mine, and she’d been practically raised by Fiona too.
“You know I don’t have the answer to that, sweetheart. I just know that she grieved you until the day she died.”
“Good,” I said simply. “Aidan and Lena destroyed a centuries-old cathedral for Conor. They tortured and burned the archbishop alive and almost killed themselves…
“My mom should have carried the burden of grief for my abuse for the rest of her life too.”
I braced myself for her judgment, for her telling me that was out of line, but she didn’t do that.
She didn’t even tense up. If anything, she relaxed.
She softened.
Sliding up against me, she settled all her curves against my hard lines until we were cleaved together, skin to skin.
“If anyone hurt Jacob,” Aoife ground out, “we’d do the same to them, wouldn’t we?”
My heart didn’t know what to do.
At first, it slowed down as my body was incapable of processing the idea that my son could go through what I had.
Then it raced with the need to avenge my kid, a kid who was so protected and cosseted that he’d never know what an empty stomach felt like, that he’d never be without a roof over his head.
“We would,” I agreed, and that her words reflected my thoughts soothed something inside me that I didn't know was an open wound.
She nodded. “It isn’t the life that changed me, Finn. Being a mom did that.
