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A soft, sad silence settled among us. It sank into my marrow—regrets. So many of them. Some days, I felt like I was drowning in them.
Conor cleared his throat, asking, “What’s our next step, then? Dagda?”
I frowned. “Why? I promised Aoife I wouldn’t kill him.”
“So kind of you,” he teased, lips curving into a wide grin. “I just thought you’d want him to confirm his involvement in your mother’s death.
"It's not like he’s going anywhere while he’s tied to a hospital bed. He can't run away from you, can he?”
“You think a man with his rep stays still for long?”
“He’s old, Star.”
“The only old spies are dead spies,” Troy intoned, but she was right.
You had to be reactionary in this life, no matter your age, or you’d end up in a coffin earlier than anticipated.
Unless the PTSD was bad like Maverick’s, you cared about dying ahead of time.
“Anyway,” Troy continued, “Star thinks Smythe was bullshitting.”
“He’d have told me that my dad was alive if he thought it would spare him.” I crumpled the Pixy Stix wrapper in my hand. “I should have fucked his face up even more for his audacity.”
Conor hitched a shoulder. “Wouldn’t you prefer to have confirmation from the guy who allegedly killed her?”
Perplexed by his blasé tone, I turned to him and queried, “Conor, how can you stand to be around him after everything? How don’t you want to strangle him?”
“That’s a dangerous question, Star.”
“Why?” Troy broke in to ask.
“Star… maneuvered things so that my father and another enemy of Dagda’s were at the same place at the same time. I’m sure you can imagine how that ended.”
Troy, never a jar short of cookies when it came to this stuff, snorted. “Cold, Star. Cold.”
“Which is why it’s a dangerous question.” Conor sighed. “My da had ALS. You’d have to know him to understand that a man like him could never be seen to be sick.”
“That’s very ableist of him,” was her pious retort.
“You can add it to the tons of other -ists that described him,” I mumbled under my breath.
Though Conor had to have heard me, he answered Troy, “It sounds as if it is, but it was more a survival mechanism.
“Think about it—he was the head of the Irish Mob. If he looked sick ever, someone would come for him. Then, they’d likely come for Ma and, when we were younger, his sons. The mafia underbelly is Darwinian bullshit at its finest.”
“That’s why you’re okay with Star arranging for him to be in a coffin?”
“Nice, Troy,” I spat, inwardly cringing at her wording.
“I’m not okay with it, but we’re working through it.”
“What is this? An episode of Dr. Phil? I thought you said you didn’t do interventions, Star?”
“I never said I didn’t,” I retorted. “I just said that I don’t show up to them with SMGs!”
“I don’t even want to know,” Conor muttered as he switched on a radio station and set it on low. “Dagda did my da a favor. A debt is paid and he doesn’t have to suffer and be used as target practice by another faction who wouldn’t be as noble as a sniper in ending his life. That’s why I can be in the same room as him.
“If you’d asked me when he died, I wouldn’t have said that. I grieved him and you hard. But I wouldn’t have wanted him to suffer, and I’ve got you back.”
