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Anyone else would have some death wish defying me like that. Not her though. Just like everything else since I met her.
It’s like she doesn’t have that survival instinct for herself. What was it this time? Was she so fascinated to find out what I might have in here that she came in here snooping around my wife’s things… fuck!
Wife. I keep saying that, but I don’t have a wife. I’m a widower and a single father. That is what I am, and I’m deluded if I keep referring to Sorcha as my wife.
I leave the room, locking the door, and head down to my office. I go straight for the cabinet where I keep my good drinks and grab some whiskey and rum. Those are the only things that are going to help me when I get like this.
That, fucking, or killing. Since I definitely don’t feel like fucking, and I can’t kill the guy I’m supposed to kill, I’m doing the lesser of the three evils.
I don’t bother with a glass. I start on the rum first and practically down it even though it burns my throat. In fact, it fucking scorches it.
Whiskey next, and the same thing happens, but it does the job to calm me. I grab more rum, and one sip takes me to the place I want to be.
It’s a place where my mind is so numb I can’t think.
I don’t think.
I remember sitting down behind my desk and closing my eyes. I remember registering that part, then feeling like I’m having an out-of-body experience and watching myself.
Then I’m somewhere else, taken somewhere else in my mind.
I’m still watching, and I turn around. I’m back at the old house. I see it just as it was. That day I came home. It was the middle of the day, although maybe the devil had gotten there the minute I left the house. I don’t know.
I was gone since the night before, covering the streets with the guys, scouring them for Stephanou. How twistedly ironic that he was at my home when I was searching the streets for him.
It was the bullet holes in the door that made me burst in, then I saw more in the passageway with my dead guards lining the path up to the stairs.
I head straight to the kitchen because that was where I built the safe room. It led down to the basement, where Sorcha and the baby would be safe. Only I knew the code to open the door, and the metal door was bullet proof.
In my mind, I walk the path I took two years ago. I see myself go into the kitchen. And there she is. My girl lying on the floor covered in blood, her lips blue, the baby crying behind the metal door.
I know she’s dead, but I don’t want to believe it.
My phone rings, and I hear his voice as I answer it.
It’s Stephanou… “I raped her as she begged for her life,” he says with a devilish laugh, and then I hear screaming.
I jump out of the nightmare as someone shakes me. Instinct makes me want to reach for my gun, but I stop when I see Marguerite.
She’s staring down at me, worry in her eyes. It’s morning, and the sun piercing through the window picks out the silver in her hair.
“Vincent…” she says. She keeps her hand on me and runs it over my shoulder the way she did when I was a child. “Are you okay?”
I shake my head. “No.” My answer is short and succinct but tells all.
“What happened?”
“Everything. It’s everything, Marguerite.”
“There’s broken glass in the room upstairs. Did something happen in there?”
I run a hand over my face and settle on my beard.
“Vinny,” she says, and I return my attention to her. “I have been in this family since I was a girl. My mother worked for your grandparents and parents, and I have worked for them all my life. The one thing I know is my place. I know not to step over the line, but today, I will because I love you like my own child. I will step over the line and say, you… need to move on.”
My lips part, but I press them together. “How?”
“You have to find a way. Sorcha wouldn't want you to be like this. Miserable and a shadow of the person you used to be. She would not want that for you. Things happen, the life we live makes it so. Even when you try to leave it behind, it follows because you can’t run away from who you are. The problem is, you keep blaming yourself, and you shouldn’t.”
