Callahan
“You want to know what I was doing?” he asks, abruptly getting to his feet.
I remain seated and nod.
“I was looking for the girl. The one who called me that night. Who told me to come out. I’d met her a few days before at a club and I didn’t expect her to call but she did. And like a selfish ass I went out and…” he trails off, turning his back to me. “You know how I spent the night my family was being massacred?”
I get to my feet. “Don’t do this.”
“No.” He turns to me and I see something I recognize in his eyes. Hate. Self-hate. “I should do it. I should own up to it.”
“It wasn’t your fault you weren’t there. And if you had been, what the fuck for? To die? To fucking die?”
“I was getting my dick sucked for the first time. That’s what I was doing while you were being attacked. While you were being slaughtered like fucking animals.” I hear grief morph into rage at the last part. Grief turned into pain and rage.
I take a breath in, try to keep steady because he needs me to keep steady. To be the foundation, the rock he can rest on.
The room is so small, it only takes two strides to get to him. I put my hand on his shoulder. “What happened wasn’t your fault.”
“I’m not saying it was. I just… I don’t fucking know.” He shoves my hand off and turns back to the window. It’s quiet for a long minute.
“Do you sometimes wish you’d died with them?”
It takes me a long time to answer. “I used to. But then I’d get angry. I’d make myself see Fernando, see him with the knife at mom’s throat.”
I don’t tell him the other part. Antonio doesn’t know what Fernando did to her before he killed her. I hadn’t realized my uncle knew but I guess it makes sense. Any medical examiner would have known and told him.
Antonio turns to look at me.
“I’d think about that and I’d think about why I survived. And it gives me strength. Strength I needed to wake up and get out of bed for a long time. I will avenge our family. I will not rest before that happens.”
“What about Portia? You chose her over that vengeance.”
Now it’s my turn to shift my gaze away as I rub the back of my neck.
“Portia has complicated things.”
“How?”
Fuck.
I face my brother but don’t quite meet his eyes. “I’m in love with her.”
It’s the first time I say it out loud. First time I really hear it. Understand it.
I focus on my brother’s eyes. I can’t tell what he thinks at hearing this. His features are schooled, steady, we’re both good at that. He studies me and I let him. It’s all I can do. Because this is the truth, and he deserves the truth.
He nods, turns his gaze downward. I think how he’s sobered up since I first walked into this room.
“I know you don’t like or trust her. I understand. But I know she’s as much a victim as our family was.”
He shifts his gaze back to mine.
“What if she’s not who you think, Callahan? What if she betrays you?”
“She won’t.”
“What if she does?”
Something twists inside my chest. “Then I’ll deal with her,” I say, my voice tight.
“What if you don’t make it to deal with her?”
I steel myself. It won’t happen, I tell myself.
“What if you don’t make it to deal with her?” he asks again a little more forcefully.
“It won’t come to that.”
“What if it does?”
“You don’t touch her. You don’t lay a finger on her. Whether I’m dead or alive. You protect her. She’s my damn wife.”
He snorts.
I grab his shoulder. “You. Protect. Her.”
His eyes narrow.
“For me,” I say.
Nothing.
“Promise me, Antonio. Promise me if anything happens to me, you’ll protect her. Keep her safe.”
Gazes locked, we stand quiet for a long moment. She won’t betray me. I know that.
Antonio nods tightly once and it’s in that moment I truly grasp that my brother is a man. And that he is capable. And that he is capable of violence. Because his nod wasn’t his acquiescence. The opposite.
If something happens to me, he’ll punish Portia. I know it.
If I die, she dies.
It will not come to that.
“I’m looking for the girl,” he says. I’m confused. He must see it because he continues. “From that night.”
“Why?”
He sighs. Shrugs his shoulders.
“She disappeared. When I called the number she gave me, it was disconnected. When I went to the apartment I thought was hers, it was empty. I was drunk. So fucking drunk but this thing it’s fucking with me, Cal. It’s making me doubt my own memories.”
He’s not alone in that.
I watch him, watch the confusion in his eyes. See the self-doubt that is too familiar. I wrap a hand around the back of his head and tug him to me. We hug. We haven’t hugged in a while.
“We’ll figure it out. Together. Okay? We’ll figure this shit out.”
He gives me a smile when I pull back. “I should apologize to the cop. I was an asshole.”
“Yeah. You should. I’ll make sure he’s paid well, but you should.” I open the bedroom door and we step into the hallway. “Question for you. Are you keeping the supplies in the tunnel up to date?”
He smiles. “Yeah. I have been for a while. Dad said it was you and Michael who’d have to do it but you couldn’t so the task fell to me. You went down there?”
I nod. “Does anyone else know about it?”
He shakes his head. “No way. Dad said just us.”
“How’d you get there?”
“I’d come in from the other side when we were in hiding.”
“So Uncle David doesn’t know either?”
“No.”
“Good. Keep it that way. Let’s go home.”