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“Don’t you think I should have known? I mean, what if she had told someone? What if …” I suck in a breath.
What if she saw? What if it fucked her up?
“There’s no what ifs, Scotty.” He rolls down his window, allowing the cool breeze to swirl through. “Saoirse is stronger than she appears.”
“I know that,” I huff, chewing on my bottom lip.Of course I fucking know that.
She sat in her living room covered in brain matter, then cleaned herself up and went on with life. Not many people can face death and walk away to be able to sleep at night. But my Saoirse, she can.
“Tell me,” I say. “Tell me what she overheard.”
“She was sitting on the front porch when I got home that night.”
“She was seven. What the fuck was she doing outside so late? What was it, one in the morning?”
He shakes his head. “She was nine, and it was three in the morning.”
Right. Declan’s memory is like a fucking elephant’s. He can recall conversations from over a decade ago. That’s why Callum has him handling a lot of their meetings. There’s no need to take notes where he’s involved. Heisthe notepad, and his mind is a sharpened pencil.
“Anyway. She was sitting there, looking all sad. Her fucking green eyes, they’re always so animated. And when she cries …” He pauses. “You know.”
Yeah, I do.
“She was crying, she said she overheard us before we left going on about Brian Walsh and how he needed to pay. The next day, when Ma and Da told her Brian had died, she knew. She was always a bright kid. She put the pieces together. I told her she was too small to understand. That didn’t stop her, though. She pestered me a few times a year about it until I finally told her what he did to Cara.”
“Jesus. And how old was she then?”
“She was sixteen.”
“What the fuck, bro?” I reach over, punching him in the chest. “She was way too young to hear about that.”
Declan grunts, clutching the sore spot. “Asshole, she’s my sister. I know what she’s capable of handling.”
“Really? That’s why you told a teenager about the brutal rape of your girlfriend? You could have waited. Or, I don’t fucking know? Never told her.”
He could have shielded her from ever knowing the truth. She didn’t need to have nightmares about that.
“I told her because she was dealing with her own thing.”
My heart pounds, the blood swooshing in my veins. “What thing?”
When she was a teenager, I was away in the Navy. She never mentioned something happening to her, but why would she? By the time I turned back up in her life, she was in college. It’s not like the topic of sexual assault came up in normal conversation. Still, she did a good job of pretending she didn’t know, of pushing away her own experience with it, if that’s what Declan is implying right now.
“Liam Doyle. He made a move on her. She stopped it before anything happened. But Callum …handledhim. She was upset about it, felt responsible for his death until I told her what Brian did.”
Liam Doyle. A dumbass foot soldier turned guard back in the day. He’d lost one too many cash exchanges and Callum Senior moved him to security instead of getting rid of the issue. Then. He. Touched. Saoirse.
“If he weren’t dead, I’d kill him,” I growl.
He lets out a sharp laugh. “Well, he is. And you’ve got another fucker to worry about.”
Vladimir.
My foot slams on the petal now that we’re out of the city and onto the interstate. “Yeah. I’m gonna have fun with him.”
He snorts. “I don’t doubt it.”
Chapter Thirty-Two
