The Wedding Pact (The O'Malleys #2) (29 page)

“Maybe. Or maybe that’s just what we have to tell ourselves not to take out a gun and put it in our mouths.”

He froze. “What?” No fucking way was she talking about what he thought she was talking about.

“Not me.” She opened her eyes and grabbed his hand. “I’m not talking about me. I swear. I love life too much to go down like that. I’ll have to be dragged from this world, kicking and screaming, no matter how shitty things get. But I worry about my sisters.”

He watched the expressions play across her face. “They’re strong.”

“That’s what I keep telling myself, but I don’t know if I believe it anymore. My brother’s death changed a lot of things. Everyone is so much more brittle now.” She stroked her hand down his arm, starting at his shoulder and moving over every muscle. “My brothers are so angry and afraid, even if they try to cover the latter with the former. I don’t think my baby sister has spent more than a half an hour sober since we were hustled out of town after all that shit went down. And Sloan…” Her eyes darkened. “She’s a ghost of the woman she used to be.”

He knew all about how the death of someone beloved could change everything—ruin everything. But this wasn’t about him. It was about saying what was necessary to comfort Carrigan. “It won’t always be like this.”

“Oh, no doubt something even more horrible will come along and push our already teetering family off the cliff.”

“That’s not what I meant.” He was seriously worthless as this comforting bullshit, but that wasn’t going to stop him from trying. “Your family is strong. Your parents will hold things together and your siblings will find their feet. Life will go on, whether anyone wants it to or not. This tragedy won’t break you—any of you.” He brushed her hair back. “I don’t know if I’ve said how fucking sorry I am that it happened. I didn’t give the order, but it doesn’t matter. It was Halloran men who did it.”
Ricky
who did it.

“I won’t lie and say it’s okay.” Her eyes shone, but no tears fell. “Devlin was too good for this life. I think any one of us would have stepped in front of that bullet to give him a second chance at life. But…it’s not your fault. When you live the lives we do, your family has a nasty tendency not to tell the right hand what the left hand is doing.”

Wasn’t that the fucking truth. He traced over her cheekbone and down to her bottom lip with his thumb. “I know. But I
am
sorry. I wish—”

“We all do.” She sat up, the move knocking his hands away. “There’s no use talking about it. It’s over and done with. Practically ancient history.”

What the fuck?
James sat up, too. He didn’t realize what she planned until she lurched off the bed and reached for her dress. “What are you doing?”

“I gave you tonight. We’re done now.”

It took him a full five seconds to hear and process her words. “No fucking way. Get your ass back in my bed.”

She shimmied into her dress. “This has been fun—too much fun—but it’s over now.”

He could barely believe she was doing this
now
. It was stone cold. James scrubbed a hand over his face. “It’s over when I say it’s over. We have a long way to go before that, lovely. I said I love you and I fucking meant it.”

She froze, her back to him. “Well, that’s just too damn bad. I’m not responsible for how you feel. I didn’t ask you to fall for me.
I
know how to keep my emotions in check.”

“Liar.” He was on his feet before making the decision to move. “You’re running scared. Again.”

“What I’m doing is going home before my brothers follow through on their threats to start another goddamn war. We lost too much last time. I’m not letting that rest on my head.”

It was an excuse, and not even a good one. If she’d wanted to avoid the threat of war, she never would have called him in the first place, let alone come out here with him. “Don’t you ever get tired of dancing to whatever tune your family sets?”

“No.” She stepped into her heels. “Unlike some people, my family will always come first.”

She was going to throw
that
in his face? He crossed his arms over his chest. “Whatever you have to tell yourself to sleep at night.” He wanted to grab her, to shake her until some sense popped into that gorgeous head of hers, but he’d never laid a hand on a woman in anger and he sure as fuck wasn’t about to start now. Tying her up until she saw reason wasn’t an option, either. He was left with nothing but standing there and watching her get ready to walk out of his life.

He couldn’t shake the feeling that if she left now, it would be for good.

So he tried to be calm and rational. “Carrigan, sit down and we’ll talk this through.”

“Talking never did anyone a damn bit of good.” She stopped in the doorway, her knuckles white where they fisted the hem of her dress. “Good-bye, James. For good this time.” Then she was gone, disappearing as if she’d never been there to begin with.

And he just watched her go.

As soon as he heard the door close behind her, he slowly got dressed. It didn’t take a genius to realize what she was doing—making yet another personal sacrifice for her family. She’d said as much. She might even be trying to protect him, too. It didn’t matter. All that mattered was that she’d walked out without talking about it, without giving him a chance to find a way out of this mess.

She might care about him, but she didn’t trust him. And fuck if that didn’t hurt.

He rubbed a hand over his chest, knowing damn well that it wouldn’t do anything to combat the dull ache that started there the second she walked out of this room. There would be no more phone calls. She wouldn’t come running to him again, no matter how deep into shit she got. No, she was off to marry this Dmitri Romanov and sail away into the sunset.

Fuck
.

He walked through the still mostly dark house, letting the memories wash over him. Play fighting with his brothers in the living room. Watching his mother knit in the rocking chair, looking more at peace than he ever saw her in Boston. The loud meals served around the tiny dining room table, while he and Brendan and Ricky all competed for her undivided attention. She’d always managed to make each of them feel like they were the center of her world.

And their old man…James touched the thickest scar running across his upper chest. He could feel the ridge of it through the thin fabric of his T-shirt. His father hadn’t dared touch them while she walked this earth. He’d always thought that it was because her death broke the man, but now he wondered. Victor had been batshit crazy for as long as James could remember. Had his mother been the reason he stayed his hand? The shield between her boys and their sadistic fuck of a father?

The more he thought about it, the more it seemed to fit. He’d never seen her in a swimsuit. Whenever he thought about it now, he’d chalked it up to the summers that were never quite warm enough. But what if it wasn’t? His hands clenched. Had Victor hurt her as a proxy and then turned his attentions on his boys when she was no longer available?

His stomach lurched, and he had to close his eyes and concentrate on breathing. It was the past. Knowing that didn’t magically make the hurt go away, but it helped him focus. Right now he had bigger problems than worrying about if his old man beat his mother fifteen years ago.

He
would
find out, though.

In the meantime…James turned to the front door. He’d give Carrigan some time. Chasing her down now wouldn’t do either one of them a damn bit of good. She was freaked out and she had reason to be. As much as it stung that she didn’t believe in him enough to give him the chance to fix things, a part of him understood. A very small part. The rest wanted to track her down, but it would only make her run farther and faster from him.

No, he’d find a way around this, and then he’d come for her.

He walked out of the house and locked the door behind him. The first order of business was to get through the exchange tomorrow with those pieces of shit bringing in women. Then he’d deal with the mess with Carrigan.

It wasn’t like she’d be married in the next twenty-four hours, after all.

*  *  *

Sloan drifted up the stairs, moving down the hallway on bare feet, taking silent count. Keira had stumbled home sometime after one and was currently passed out in her bed. But she was safe. Cillian hadn’t come back from wherever he’d gone when he left this afternoon, but she suspected he was wherever he’d been spending all this time lately—most likely a bar. Aiden…well, Aiden was the easiest of her siblings to keep track of. He rarely left their father’s study anymore, except when business demanded it. More and more he’d taken up the mantle of leadership, and she sometimes wondered if she was the only one who could see how heavily it weighed on him. But he wouldn’t accept a shoulder to lean on because it would mean he was
weak
.

She shook her head and walked into the formal living room. It was one of the few public rooms on the front of the house with windows looking down over the sidewalk. Not that she could see much between the trees and darkness, but it didn’t stop her from trying.

Carrigan hadn’t come home yet. She glanced at her watch, a diamond MICHELE that she’d gotten on her sixteenth birthday from her parents. Most days it felt more like a shackle than a way to tell time. Two a.m. Too late.

She knew something had happened at the wedding, but she didn’t know what. Not that she was surprised about her family’s unwillingness to talk about it—they never had been free with their information unless forced. All she knew was that it involved Carrigan and had whipped both Cillian and Aiden into a fury that still hadn’t abated two days later.

And now her sister had pulled another of her disappearing acts.

Sloan touched the glass, as if that would do something to draw her home and to safety faster. Things were happening too quickly, spiraling out of control. She sighed. Even though it had been banishment for all intents and purposes, she craved the simplicity of their house in Connecticut. When they were there, the drama and worries that populated daily life in Boston seemed worlds away. She could almost believe they were normal people who didn’t believe in arranged marriages and who didn’t do unmentionable things on the illegal side of their operations.

But it was a childish dream. Just like her hope for one day marrying a man she loved—and who loved her. And her wish to be a schoolteacher. And countless other things that had fallen by the wayside as she turned eighteen and had to face the facts—she was expected to marry a man of her father’s choosing, and to devote her life to making him happy and giving him children. There was no room there for a career of her own. And love? Love wasn’t even on the radar.

Movement below drew her attention to where Carrigan and Liam appeared from beneath the tree directly in front of the town house and hurried up the steps to the front door. A few seconds later, the sound of it opening and shutting whispered through the near-silent halls. If she hadn’t been waiting for it, she wouldn’t have known that it’d happened.

Sloan walked back through the hallway to the top of the stairs, reaching it just as her sister did. “Carrigan.”

“Holy shit!” Carrigan jerked back, her hand on her chest. “I didn’t see you there.”

Which was the point. Her mother had already lectured her about how unseemly her nighttime wanderings were. So she made sure that Aileen didn’t know about them anymore. The thought of spending the night locked away in her room had panic fluttering in her throat. She was already locked up in every way that counted. She couldn’t be locked in physically, too.

She frowned at her older sister. “What’s wrong?” She hadn’t come home from some nameless club like Sloan had originally suspected. Not wearing that green dress that Carrigan would consider respectable, and certainly not with her makeup done up for the day, rather than nighttime. It was more than that, though. Usually when she rolled home in the small hours of the night, she had an expression like a cat who’d stolen the cream. Not tonight. Tonight her eyes were shining, and there were little tremors working their way through her sister’s body that she could see from several feet away. “Carrigan?”

“I…” She wrapped her arms around herself, the shaking getting worse.

If there was one thing Sloan recognized, it was a person on the verge of a complete breakdown. She’d danced along that edge herself too many times to miss the signs. She slipped an arm around her sister’s waist and guided her to her room, carefully shutting the door behind them. “It’s going to be okay.”

“It’s not okay.” The shining in her eyes overflowed, a tear slipping free. “Nothing’s ever going to be okay again.”

She froze. Carrigan was
crying
? She could count how many times she’d seen her older sister cry on one hand and still have all five fingers left over.
What in God’s name is going on?
“We can talk about it.”

“I’m marrying Dmitri Romanov.” More tears fell, as if that first one had broken a dam and now they all rushed to fill the new space. She stared into the distance, seeing something that wasn’t in this room. “I have to. I don’t have a choice.”