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About fucking and dying.
CHAPTERTEN
Sadie
It killed me that I stayed silent for so long, knowing the hell that my boys were going through at the hands of monsters masquerading as priests. I stayed silent out of fear of something worse.
What if I said something again, and instead of beating the fuck out of me, Colm letothermen molest my sons? What if he wasn’t content to offer the boys up to priests and added little Kat to the mix?
Every time I spoke up, I paid for it in swollen lips, wired jaws, popped blood vessels, sprained wrists and internal bruising to my lady parts. I paid at the hands of the man who had sworn to love and protect me and with every blow, every injury, I grew to hate him. Despise him.
Eventually, every ounce of love I’d ever felt for the man had been transformed into hate. Not just hate, but a visceral feeling that flowed through my veins until I was filled with nothing but booze and rage.
It was the only thing left between us after a while, our love of booze and our rage. I’d never know why Colm was so filled with rage. He grew up with everything. He had power he hadn’t earned, money to spend he didn’t make, and a woman who loved him dearly. Still, it wasn’t enough to stop his rage.
During the last year before he died—I didn’t know it would be our last—I was no longer Colm’s victim. I was his equal. His tormentor.
I reminded him of all the things he’d done wrong in his life, a list that always started and ended with what he allowed his own sons to endure. Mentally torturing my husband was the second time I took my revenge.
“Sadie, babe, I need another drink.” Colm was so fucking drunk that he couldn’t move. Couldn’t walk the ten feet across the room to get his own drink. “Please.”
“Please? Is that what my sons say to those priests you leave them with?”
His eyes slammed shut, and his head thrashed from left to right, the only proof that his actions bothered him. Haunted him. “You don’t understand.”
“I do understand, asshole. You did it to me, too. You make us, your family, pay with our bodies for your incompetence. You’re a failure, and we have to pay the price.”
“Sadie, girl. Stop. I need a drink.”
Colm was my second act of revenge, which I took nightly when he was too drunk to move, too drunk to fuck, and too drunk to hit me.
But he wasn’t my last. The third time I took my revenge, I was a scared little teenage whore with my first John.
He liked it rough and anal, and I didn’t. From that moment on, my fiercest protector was the blade Cillian had given me as a wedding present. That little ivory-handled bodyguard had come in quite handy over the years.
Every kill after that John was easier. The more I learned about my victims, his deeds, and the misdeeds he tried to hide, the easier it was to hunt them down, to find them where they were weak and vulnerable. Just like they preferred their victims.
They couldn’t hide anything from me, not any of them. As much as it killed me to be patient, Uncle Seamus’ words had always stuck with me. I took my time to hunt down the men who touched my sons, who used them for their sick pleasure.
One by one, and over a long period, I exacted my revenge on each and every one of them. It was a full year after Colm’s death before every man who’d touched Jasper, Virgil or Calvin, was dead and buried.
Only there was no satisfaction. No relief. My thirst for revenge grew. For the church. For the priests who preyed on children. For Ronan Rhymer and his fucked up son, Brendan.
Colm started me on this path, only I didn’t realize it at the time. He’d preyed on me the same way Owen had, the same way the priests preyed on his gambling addiction to feed their desire for young boys. He preyed on me and groomed me to accept his deviant behavior as normal. After the sheltered life I led, I was easy pickings for him.
Back then, I didn’t know how it would affect me and change me into someone different, darker and colder than I’d ever imagined. Meeting Colm changed me from the scared Catholic girl I was raised to be into the Irish powerhouse I was today.
Most days, I didn’t know whether to thank him or continue to curse the day I set eyes on his handsome face.
CHAPTERELEVEN
Sadie
“We could have hired a seamstress to come to the house, Kat.” I loved to shop as much as the next woman, but wedding shopping was a different beast altogether. And the pretentious shop girls at wedding boutiques made me want to wring their fucking necks.
Kat let out a sigh and looked at me through the mirror. She’d taken a stab at having the old wedding dress altered to see how it would look on her.
Kat had pulled strings to have Vegas’s most prestigious wedding gown designer fit us into her schedule to give the dress a modern twist. From the look on Kat’s face, the jury was still out.
