Page 63 of Steel Rain

“Scared your pet coach will come up here?” I said with a smirk.

He had no power here. Not over me.

I’d get my sister back with or without his help.

“Why are you keeping it a secret?”

“Because I asked you for help once, and you weren’t there for me.” Was I punishing my old friend? Was Imakinghim pay for past wrongs? Absolutely. And he deserved every twist of the knife as I refused to be his perfect little soldier.

“Just tell me, Shiny.” He brought his hand to his hair, tugging at the yellow tendrils in frustration. “Tell me what I did. Tell me what I did wrong, and how to fucking fix it!”

“Over. My. Dead. Body.”

He got up from his chair, walked over to the writing desk, and violently tapped his finger on the surface.Tap-tap-tap!

“We were friends! Did you forget that Shiny?” His fist came down hard onto the table, rocking the wood so that it loudly creaked as it righted itself. “Did you forget that? You, me, Dairo … I treated you like my own little sister!”

I chuckled. Of course, I remembered. How could I forget? Us three, running around the lawn of the big house, his mother calling after us to be careful as we rolled around in the clovers. Back in the days when I wore dresses and thought that my future was that of a princess, a bride, a wife …

I was a different person back then.

Sinead Flanagan had been a girl who could trust. A woman who had looked at her fiancé at seventeen years old and thought that her dreams were coming true. But on the eve of eighteen, it all came crashing down.

I had come to my father weeping, who sat across old man Green, and his son in his office during my Engagement Party. My dress was torn. My face bruised and tear-stained, my hair mussed with several strands pulled from the scalp …

I had wept to my father, and he had cast me out. The Greens had sat there with uncaring eyes as my father slapped me, and banished me to my room, alone, unheard.

“You let him rape me.” I finally said. “You did nothing.”

I don’t know why I finally said it out loud. Why I finally gave words to what happened. Why I finally said the four-letter word that changed my life. Rape.

Eoghan had been my friend, and he had let what happened … happen.

He had seen me weep and done nothing back then.

The Eoghan who stood before me now froze, his back to me, his finger still touching the surface of the desk as he looked out the square paned window into the snow outside.

“Keith was your friend too, remember?” My voice was a soft whisper. “And I knew what your father was doing to Aoibheann. All of us women knew. I realized what a wife was worth when I came into my father’s office, crying, my dress torn apart. Iknewwhat women were worth to your father, tomyfather … to you.”

I wanted to leave. I wanted to drop the bomb on him, then walk away to leave him in the aftermath. But I was bedbound. Bruised. By the same man who had stolen my youth.

“And he’s still your friend,” I said, turning her back on Eoghan. “Your …captain.Anessentialpart of your organization.”

Eoghan’s head rose, his spine straightened. But he said nothing, so I persisted.

“You clasped his hand in friendship. You showed me how much he meant to you. You made me understand my place just fine back then, and now.”

“Enough!” he barked, as if it would silence me.

The fucker had another thing coming because I wasn’t going to shut up just because he told me to.

“Aoibheann came to you once, didn’t she? Begged for your help against your father? What did you do?” Aoibheann hadn’t been helped. It took Malinda, Eoghan’s housekeeper, to help concoct the plan to get her out.

“Enough!”

“That’s right. You did nothing. You let her get hurt. You let him harm her. You didn’t believe a word she said, and we all saw it. We all know. All of us women know.” His fists clenched at my words, and I wanted to drive the knife in deeper. To twist it. To give him an ounce of the pain I felt. “But I still thought that myfriendwould have helped me back then. I thought you’d have cared, but you didn’t. When my father hit me, you did nothing. You will do nothing!”

“That’s enough, Shiny!”

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