Page 56 of Stolen Mafia Vows
No one knows about this. Not even my mom.
She thought that I was at my friend’s house, reviewing for a history quiz that we were due to take in high school thefollowing day. But my friend was seeing a boy that her folks didn’t like, and her parents thought that she was with me. I couldn’t go home just in case her parents called my mom, so instead, I thought that I would chill in Kyle’s office.
Then I saw the incident with my father and a guy in a silver suit, and for a few horrible moments, it felt as if I’d stumbled onto a movie set where Jason Statham was playing the role of my dad, and I was waiting for the director to yell, “Cut,” so that life could return to normal.
I never found out what the guy in the silver suit had done. I was too scared to ask because then I would’ve had to figure out what happened to him after he disappeared into an elevator with my dad.
So, I rewrote the narrative over time. My dad’s gun was a fake. The guy was drunk and causing a scene, and my dad opened the back door, shoved him outside, and warned him not to come back. I did a decent job of convincing myself too. But part of me—a tiny dormant part—has always known that there was more to it than that.
And now that part has woken up and is coming at me with swords raised and a chilling voice yelling at me to keep him the fuck away from Eoghan.
I find out from Sienna that my dad’s flight is landing at Dublin airport just before 5 a.m., and that he’ll be driving straight to the cottage first to speak to Kyle. Eoghan thinks that his flight is arriving at 10 a.m., and that we’ll be facing him together.
Because that’s what I wanted him to believe.
I can’t sleep. I lie awake all night, listening to the rain and the vicious gusts of wind against the window, watching Eoghanbreathe, his eyelids flickering as he wanders through his dreams. He sleeps best when it’s raining. My pulse races, and I can feel tiny stabbing pains in my chest like someone has made a poppet doll of me and is sticking pins into my heart.
I only have myself to blame.
This was always going to happen when they found out about me and Eoghan. I knew it when I asked Sienna to cover for me. I knew it when I chickened out during the phone calls. I knew it when I stood beside the blacksmith’s anvil in Gretna Green and said, “I do.”
Cowards always get their comeuppance, and now I’m about to get mine.
But I will stand between Eoghan and my family for as long as it takes them to accept that our love is real.
An hour before my dad’s flight is due to land, I slide out from underneath Eoghan’s arm, my heart thumping like a drumbeat, a silent mantra playing on repeat inside my head.
Please don’t wake up. Please don’t wake up. Please don’t wake up.
I pull on my clothes in the bathroom, take Eoghan’s keys from the pocket of his pants that are still in a heap on the floor where he left them and my purse from the dressing table, and let myself out of the room, closing the door gently behind me. I feel like a mouse scurrying along the landing and down the stairs, and I swear that I can hear the house whispering my name to wake up the slumbering family and alert them to my escape.
Escape!
It feels more like a journey to death-row.
I glide through the kitchen, half-expecting to see Orla in her rocking chair staring at me like she’d been waiting all night for me to make an appearance. I exit via the mud room door. I figure there’s less chance of anyone hearing me this way. I don’t fill my lungs and pump oxygen to my brain until I’m sitting in the driver’s seat of Eoghan’s car with the engine purring.
That was the easy part.
It’s all downhill from here.
I snail-crawl the car along the drive with the headlamps switched off, the wipers playing a hypnotic tune, back and forth, barely clearing the windshield before it’s blurry with rain again. The weather masks the sound of my departure. No one follows me, no one chases me along the driveway shaking their fists and threatening to call the Irish Garda, no lights click on inside the house. Proof right there that I’m doing the right thing, even if Eoghan would disagree.
Sienna is waiting for me when I arrive at the cottage.
I’m shaking when I climb out of the car, as if I ran all the way, uphill, carrying a bag of bricks on my shoulders. My mouth is dry, my damp hair clinging to my face. I remind myself that I’m here to see my dad, not a convicted felon serving life for preying on twenty-one-year-old college students from New York. But my mouth didn’t get the memo, and when I try to smile, my jaw locks up like I just finished eating a bag of rock-hard toffee.
The baby is asleep in a rocking crib in the bedroom, and I curl up on the living room sofa with my legs underneath me and wait.
Sienna comes in with two mugs of steaming coffee and places one on the coffee table next to me. “Does Eoghan know you’re here?”
“No.” He doesn’t know that I stole his car either, but I keep that to myself. “I want to speak to Dad alone first.” My voice cracks, and Sienna doesn’t miss it.
Sienna sits back in her seat and cradles her drink in both hands as if she doesn’t know what else to do with them while the baby is sleeping. “Hear him out when he gets here, Emily. You’re still his little girl; he’ll need time to adjust to the fact that you’re all grown up and married.”
Kyle must’ve already told her where my dad’s rage sits on a chart of one to ten. She’s trying to minimize the risk of full-scale war by appealing to me, as the obedient daughter, to stay calm and let him vent before I hit him with my side of the story.
Before I can ask if Kyle is still angry with me too, he enters the living room and sits down beside his wife. His arm rests casually on her thigh.
