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“Not in this case, since you’re here and Simon Doughtry is a pile of ashes somewhere.” I don’t give her time to answer. “How did you know him? I’ve seen the way you used to live, Lynch. Why were you being hassled by a loan shark’s enforcers?”
“Why do you think, genius?” She throws me a dirty look that explicitly seems to call me stupid. “Because I owe the loan shark money.”
“How much?”
“Who fucking knows at this point. Hundreds of thousands.”
Interesting. Interesting because this sounds wildly out of character for someone like her. Willow Lynch strikes me as the kind of person who would throw on a balaclava and rob a bank at gunpoint before she ever stooped to borrow money from a man.
“Why did you borrow hundreds of thousands of pounds from a loan shark?” I ask. There’s no judgement in my voice, only cool curiosity.
“I didn’t. My mum did.”
Ah, and there it is. That little hard pit inside every broken human being, that first wound around which all her scar tissue is formed. Lynch didn’t have a father, her birth certificate told me so, so it stands to reason the black pit at her core is her mother.
“Your mother can’t repay her own debts, Lynch?” I ask lightly.
Willow doesn’t look at me. She looks at her yoghurt and eats it even though she doesn’t like it, and sucks on her spoon, leaving a smear of lip blood on the silver curve of it.
“No,” she says, looking up finally, her tone as light as mine. “She can’t.”
There’s something in the way she says it that tells me I won’t be getting any more out of her—for now. But that’s fine. We have plenty of time ahead of us. I intended only to keep Willow around until I grew bored of her, but I begin to have the sense that I won’t be bored of Willow in a long, long time.
“Well, neither of you need to worry about it any longer,” I say, standing from my cheer and fixing my shirt and jacket with a smile. “Your debt to Declan McConnolly is null and void. You owe him nothing at all.”
Willow’s mouth drops open. True surprise registers across her battered features, her eyes shine that slick oily green, the colour of poison and sick desire.
“You paid off my debt?” she asks, voice so hoarse it breaks.
“Don’t be ridiculous. I would never dignify a leech like Declan with my money. I didn’t need to anyhow. He’s dead.”
The empty yoghurt container drops from Willow’s hand. For a second, her mouth moves voicelessly.
“What?”
I smile at Willow, who appears to me to be made particularly pretty with her mouth open wide in shock.
“I apologise for not bringing you flowers, Lynch. I thought you might like this better.”
I pull a rolled-up paper from my pocket and toss it on her lap. Declan McConnolly’s face stares back from the front page, underneath the headline REVENGE OR RETRIBUTION? NOTORIOUS LENDER FOUND DEAD.
“Declan McConnolly is dead. He was found a few weeks ago dead in his home, which has since burned to the ground. His accounts have been frozen, his businesses and assets seized. No records remain of his many victims—or so I heard.”
Willow stares at the newspaper for a long time, even though I can tell she’s not reading the article. Her lips tremble in a way that makes my stomach drop and my heart clench and my breath catch. I try to remind myself that I’m looking at Lynch, poison in human form, but all I see is an injured woman, pretty and powerful despite all her suffering. A woman unlike anybody else, who deserves so much better than the hand she’s been dealt.
“This is totally fucked,” she whispers finally.
I firmly push away those new, intrusive thoughts and give Willow my coldest smile.
“No, it’sjustice. Now stop pretending to be all broken and get up; it’s time to go home. The dogs miss you.”
And so do I, is something I would never say or feel or think in a thousand years.
35
Ceasefire
Luca
