Page 42 of Stolen Mafia Vows
“Ruairi… My brother…”
No, it can’t be true.
I hit the redial button, but the call doesn’t connect.
“Fuck!”
I have the urge to smash my phone to pieces on the ground, but some part of my brain, my prefrontal cortex, is already warning me that it wouldn’t be a good idea to cut off contact with the one person who can tell me what’s going on.
As if she can read my mind, Emily takes the phone from my hand, checks the screen, and then slides it back inside my pocket where it is safe.
Standing on tiptoes, she wraps her arms around my neck and holds me tightly. My arms instinctively reciprocate the hug,and I squeeze her against me, burying my face in her neck, while I try to ingest the information.
Ruairi … dead.
Those two words don’t belong in the same sentence. My brother might’ve been an arrogant asshole at times, he might’ve tormented me all my life because he could get away with it, but he was still my brother.
This should’ve been the happiest day of my life, but instead, I don’t even know what to think, what to feel, what to do…
I don’t know how long we stand there, wrapped up in each other’s arms, neither of us speaking, but Emily is the first to break away. She brushes her lips against mine and takes my hand.
“I’m taking you home,” she says.
Home. I had plans to carry Emily over the threshold, but now, I’ll be carrying her into a place where grief will seep into the rooms again, blocking the sunshine and turning everything to darkness.
“Stay there…” I murmur to myself.Who said that?
I hand over the car keys to Emily without protesting when we get back to the car. I don’t acknowledge her comment as she presses the START button: “I’ve never driven on this side of the road before, so I’ll take it slowly.”
I sit in the passenger seat and stare out of the window without seeing anything.
I don’t give Emily directions.
I don’t book our ferry crossing back to Ireland.
I can barely function enough to swig water from the plastic bottle that she hands to me when she stops to refuel somewhere before we reach the ferry port in Cairnryan.
She swears a few times when she takes wrong turnings in Ireland, but she doesn’t expect or want a response from me.
When she stops the car outside my family home, my legs are stiff from sitting in the same position for so long, and the sun has sunk behind the house, creating a purple backdrop glittering with stars.
Emily kills the engine and looks at me with such raw concern in her eyes, that it feels as if my heart is being sawn in two with a blunt knife. I reach up and cup her face with one hand, and she nuzzles my palm with her cheek.
“We’re home now, Eoghan.”
“Home?”Don’t do anything without running it by me first. I didn’t stop Emily, but home is safe. My father wasn’t talking about home. He was talking about revenge, he was talking about finding my brother’s killer.
“Thank you.” My voice seems to come from a million miles away, clamoring its way inside the car to be heard.
“You don’t have to thank me.” She moves my hand from her face and kisses it. “We’re in this together.”
Climbing out of the car, I lean against the passenger door and stare at the front of the house I grew up in. One phone call. That’s all it took to morph it into something unrecognizable, a place where bad things happen, instead of the home I should feel safe in.
“Emily, I…”
I don’t know where to begin. How do I tell her that, in marrying me, she has exposed herself to a world of danger and death and darkness? Ruairi is dead. These three words haven’t taken root inside my head yet, but death in this mobster world carries implications. It comes with a price tag that doesn’t involve money, and I don’t want Emily mixed up in it.
“You should go home.” I hate myself for saying it out loud. I hate myself even more when her eyes fill with tears and her face floods with heat. “I can’t?—”
