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“No. About Aoife,” I reply, my voice cool and emotionless.
“Aoife?” Beast pulls a face, looking at Connall whose skin has drained of colour. “Con, what’s Arden talking about?”
Connall lets out a heavy sigh, his shoulders collapsing with the weight of the truth. “How?” he whispers.
“Howwhat?” Beast asks, his gaze bobbing between the two of us.
“It doesn’t matter how we found out. What matters is that Cyn knows the secret you’ve been keeping for years,” Lorcan says.
“What are they talking about, Con? What does Cyn know?” Beast repeats, more urgently this time.
“That’s why you kept her for six months, isn’t it? She came to you to find out, and you called in the debt as payment,” Connall says, piecing the information together, ignoring Beast’s questions.
I nod. “Yes.”
“It was an accident,” Connall eventually says, pressing his eyes shut, his thumb and forefinger squeezing the bridge of his nose. When he opens his eyes again they’re swimming with tears and haunted by memories.
“Accident or not, Cyn needed to know. Now she does,” Carrick says evenly.
“Would someone tell me what the fuck you’re talking about?!” Beast exclaims, voice rising with frustration. “Mate, what’s this all about?”
Connall grasps his hands in front of him on the table, then after a beat begins to tell us his story, one that’s been kept secret for years.
“You already know that Aoife was stolen by Niall O’Farrell when I was just a kid. I was ten at the time and I didn’t understand why she suddenly left without saying goodbye. She was my big sister and I adored her.”
“Yeah, you used to talk about her a lot when we were kids,” Beast says, still trying to understand where this is going.
“My family kept the truth from me, that she was stolen,” Connall continues. “It wasn’t until four years later, the summer I turned fourteen, I found out what really happened. Tom had made a plan to take her back, and I wanted in,” he explains, blowing out a long tremulous breath.
“Ah fuck, man,” Beast says, understanding dawning as he stares at his best friend. “That was the time you spent the summer in Ireland, wasn’t it. You came back different...”
Connall’s teeth scrape against each other as he tries to hold in his emotions, but it can’t stop the single tear that trails down his cheek, and drips from his jaw. “Killing your older sister can do that to you,” he replies, swiping at his face roughly.
Beast squeezes his shoulder. “Listen, mate–”
Connall shakes him off. “Don’t do that. I don’t deserve any sympathy. Aoife died because of me. My mistake took her life.”
“It was an accident though, right?” Beast says roughly.
“Accident or not, I had no business being there. I’d barely learnt how to handle a gun. I fired a wild shot, aiming for one of Niall’s soldiers but it hit my sister. It hit her. Fuck!”
“It’s alright, mate,” Beast says, trying to console him.
Connall rounds on him, eyes blazing with shame and anger. “It’s not alright. I killed my sister.Me!” he exclaims, fist clenched as he bashes it against the table. “For years I blotted out the memory, but I can’t hide from it anymore. I can’t unsee the moment my bullet tore into her and took her life.”
“How do you know it was your bullet that killed her? There was a firefight going on. It could’ve been someone else,” Beast says, trying to find a better explanation, trying to comfort his friend.
Connall shakes his head. “It was me. I was aiming for the guard in front of her. He moved just as I fired. I saw her stumble backwards from the impact, and the shock on her face as she looked over at me. In that split second, I knew I had shot my sister, and she knew it was fatal.”
“Fuck, man. I’m sorry,” Beast says, gripping Connall’s arm, squeezing it in sympathy. This time he doesn’t shake him off.
“She stumbled into a room just beyond where she was standing, one hand pressed against the bullet wound I’d made, and the other holding onto Cynthia. That was the last time I saw either of them.”
Finally, Beast breaks the silence. “What happened after that?” he asks softly, his voice barely audible.
"As the fight continued around me, I went into a state of shock, I suppose. Too fucking scared to fire another bullet, too scared to tell anyone what had happened. We left Ireland empty-handed, our men injured, some dead, my sister gone..."
“Does Tom know?” Beast asks, referring to Connall’s older brother, and the leader of the family.
