by J. J. McAvoy
Taking a seat on her bed, I tapped her back. “Will you listen to me now?”
“When can we see Mommy?” she muttered, sitting on my lap.
I brushed her hair from her face. “Once you sleep and wake up.”
“You promise?” she muttered.
I nodded, lifting my pinky for her, and she linked her finger with mine. “I promise, now, get into bed and sleep.”
She nodded, crawling off me and back under the covers. Reaching down, I dusted off one of her pillows, then put it back behind her head.
“Papa…your hand,” she whispered, touching my bandages.
“I touched the stove,” I lied, not sure what else to say to her.
“Don’t do that,” she ordered, and I nodded, tucking the covers around her.
“I won’t again, now sleep.” I petted her gently.
She nodded, her eyes drooping, and she turned over to one side. “Don’t tell Mommy…my mirror.”
I smiled. “I won’t.”
I watched as she drifted off to sleep, until she was softly snoring. The older she got, the more I wondered who she’d take after more. There were days she was all Calliope—food-loving, movie watching, outspoken, sociable, dramatic, and fun. Then there were days in which I saw a lot of me in her, like my temper, but I also saw a lot of my younger self in her. The me who asked a hundred questions a day, who thought the world of her parents and was fiercely loyal no matter what.
“Calliope brought her to me before she left,” my grandmother whispered from behind me. “We were both asleep, but she must have woken up sometime during the night and went to look for her mother. She ended up near the security room. You and Calliope were on the late-night news. She wouldn’t calm down no matter what I said. I thought it was best to call you so she could hear your voice. I didn’t expect you to leave the hospital.”
“I was going to come back to get her anyway,” I whispered, rising from the bed and turning back to her. “We’ll be leaving in the morning.”
She tilted her head confused. “You two will stay at the hospital with Calliope?”
I didn’t answer.
My head hurt. There were so many things I needed to figure out, re-plan. The first and most important thing now was getting to her. I’d wasted too much time on my parents out of anger.
But wasting that time could be to my advantage?
Fiorello had men with him. Where are they now?
This isn’t over. I need a new…
“Ethan, you need some rest, too,” she whispered, putting her hand on my head and hugging me, and I wondered if she’d still do it if she knew I had stabbed her son out of anger.
My mind was racing, and the more I thought about what to do next, the more the temptation grew in me just to leave.
“I know it feels as though you have been through hell. But that is the life of the Ceann Na Conairte sometimes.”
She would know. How many times had she seen the rise and fall? But my case was different. I was fighting on the inside to get out.
“Am I?” I asked. “Or is that, Father, still, Nana? I can’t tell anymore.”
She didn’t answer.
So that meant she couldn’t tell, either.
“Thank you for watching her.” It was all I could say, pulling out of her arms.
“Of course. We will talk later.”
I nodded, watching Gigi’s chest rise slowly. “You didn’t ask me how Calliope was,” I said when I heard her walk to the door.
“I don’t need to. I know what it looks like when you lose the one you love,” she said before closing the door behind her.
Exhaling, I leaned over, lying beside Gigi, resting my hand on my face. Her tears, Calliope’s condition, my rage…I wanted to strike back. I wanted to do more than just yell at them. I wanted to…I truly wanted to kill them.
Live for family. Or die for family, right?
Well, they attacked my family…but they were my family. I was so close. I was so close to bringing them into the fold. Calliope had explained that if my parents killed enough of her father’s people, he’d call her in to change the plan. That was when she’d strike.
I wasn’t expecting it to be tonight…well last night.
They had done it faster than we had thought.
So, when I saw Fiorello’s body on the ground and the look of relief in her eyes, I thought, finally. All the secrets, all the lies, all the pressure would fall off her. We’d made it to our turning point, only for my mother to gun her down. I knew it. I knew she was watching through her scope, itching for the chance. Just like I knew, she and my father were back in Chicago. Once again, why I couldn’t tell Wyatt a damn secret. He acted differently. Like he was trying to make sure I didn’t look into him by slowly adding more and more hours to his work, complaining less, following my directions all of a sudden. I knew it, and all I had to do was have him watched. But my parents were cunning. They’d short circuit the lights in the hospital garage and enter his car. Then edit the video live feed to make it look as if nothing had ever happened. If not for a three-second glitch in the videos, I wouldn’t have noticed.
All that work they put into their schemes…I knew it all. And even still, I was going to tell them the truth eventually.
I remembered every word of my mine and my parents’ last conversation.
“She killed your aunt. She will not stop until she destroys the whole family in the name of her grandfather. Ethan, we will not sit back and watch that happen,” she had said, and I told her, “And this is why I am on her side, not yours…”
Because they would not sit back and just fucking watch.
Instead, they seemed so sure I wanted to destroy this family.
“So, it’s war, then?” Her voice played in my mind, and I wanted to yell the words I was not saying.
Because I had not answered her questions, I thought she would figure it out. After all, she was the great Melody Callahan, but she had made up her mind already, which was why they truly didn’t pick up on anything else.
“It was dangerous from the start,” I whispered to no-one.
These plans, all of my plans, they were dangerous from the start. Over and over again, I asked myself am I going too far? Was there any other way I could do this?
Over the last year, with Calliope, we’d regained so much control. We’d become so much more popular with the city. We were was supposed to be on the cover of The Chicago Times next month.
She’s going to be pissed missing her first Times dinner dedicated to introducing her to the city for Christmas. I smirked, thinking about the face she’d make. Then my face fell, thinking about her.
She was stable when she came out of surgery, but when she survived, it was going to take her time to recover. It wasn’t a flesh wound. But how much time could I squeeze out for her to heal? I need to know what she knows first. She is my mole inside…does she keep files anywhere? No. She wouldn’t do that. No paper trials.
Fuck!
There was too much going through my mind, too many counter plans, new plans. I could see too many things, and none of them were full proof. No plan ever was. I always needed to adjust. But right now, I was irritated. Irritated with myself and all my thoughts. Irritated with my family for their lack of thought.
I may have put them in danger in the past, but never once did I think they could not survive it, nor were any of my actions without any purpose. I always had a plan to get them out of it, even if they failed. Wyatt was the only one who got seriously hurt, and that was because he went full attack and did not cover his ass! The moron! And yet, that was my fault. I left him with all the men in this city, and he decided to play the Almighty.
They always did this.
Left me to figure out how to undo their mess.
When they were out, running around the world, following different passions, I was right here protecting them, and how do they repay me? Uncle Neal secretly sends his children away and pretends I didn’t notice that it was beca
use of his fear of me. But that wasn’t the least bit surprising. Helen poisoning my wife—that was something. Killian going off and making friends with our enemies. Wyatt joining hands with my parents to assassinate her.
Part of me wanted to walk away.
Part of me wanted to cut the puppet strings and let them die. I could pretend to quit again—take Calliope and my daughter, leave this whole clusterfuck to them, and regroup. But how many of them would die while I did…then again, maybe that’s what is needed to recreate this family afterward. That could be the new plan, start the family over. That’s how Grandfather Sedric did it. He lost all of his siblings and his mother. Then he rebuilt the whole Callahan family the way he wanted. He made the rules. He created this family based on his morals. I could do the same, right? If they were gone, instead of fight for them to understand me, I could just start over and raise a new generation who did.
The thoughts came before I could stop them, and with them, I couldn’t help but hear Calliope’s voice in my mind. “The only way I can be queen, Ethan, is if we have people to rule!”
“There would still be Irish and Italian families to rule, Calliope,” I muttered.
“All that work I did to make them regain faith in you, and you piss it away if your whole family dies. Also, what the fuck do you mean to raise a new generation? Exactly how many kids am I having in this fucking generation?” Would be what she most likely would say in reply.
So that plan couldn’t work. If Calliope woke up and found out that I had let them die, she’d fucking try to kill me. And the last thing I needed was an angry wife on top of all my other problems…that wasn’t the only reason. The other reason was simply that I didn’t want them to die.
They were fucking idiots. They never listened! They made me want to scream most days and were always looking for me to fail, but I didn’t want them to die. It is weakness…and strength, I guess.
I groaned, rubbing my head.
Now what then, Ethan?
Ring.
Ring.
“What happened?” I asked, sitting back up from the bed.
“Her heart stopped. They brought her back, but it’s still touch and—”
I didn’t hear what he said next as I was grinding my teeth, ready to throw the phone at the fucking wall, but I stopped, breathing in through my nose.
I went too far.
“I’m on my way,” I replied, already up.
WYATT
The only thing I could think of was, what the fuck was I going to do now?
What was I going to say to him?
What was I going to tell Helen?
The longer I thought, the more my mind was blank. I felt like I had egg on my face. Like I had been walking around with egg on my face the whole time and no one let me know. Why did I always end up in this spot, standing like an idiot in the face of my brother? What the fuck did I do to get myself fucked over this much?
Was I just that incompetent?
Was Ethan just that much better than me?
Why was he always able to get the last laugh at my expense? Stand there overlooking as if…as if we didn’t have the same genes? What made us both so different? Why were we never on the same page?
“Wyatt! Wyatt!” Helen grabbed my arm desperately. Her face was a mess, her hair matted and pulled into an ugly bun. She looked almost like a beggar. It was completely unlike her.
Ever since Aunt Cora’s death, she’d been different. We’d all been different, and I thought Calliope’s death could fix us. That was why I so badly wanted to end her. To not see anything else. I wanted to say everything was her fault, and if she had never come, we’d all be perfect.
“Is she dead?” Helen asked, desperately squeezing my arm. “I saw the news; she went down hard. There was a lot of blood. She has to be dead, right?”
I hung my head, staring at the ripped clothes in my hand.
“Wyatt, why aren’t you answering me?”
“Because I don’t know.”
“What? How do you not know? Weren’t you at the hospital—”
“I don’t know because Ethan does not trust me!” I hollered at her. “He doesn’t fucking trust me, so I couldn’t even get on the same fucking floor as where they were working on her. He doesn’t trust me, so…so he didn’t think to explain all this fucking time that your mom was in recurrence!”
“Recurrence? As in…”
I finally glanced up and met her gaze. Her brown eyes stared at me so confused. “Your mother’s cancer came back,” I whispered.
“No…”
I grabbed her arms as she tried to back away from me. “She and Calliope—”
“I said, no!” she hollered, yanking her arms from me. “I don’t know what lie they told you, but my mom was healthy. She was fine and then—”
“She was not fine. She had stage 4 metastatic cancer. It had spread to multiple—”
“Why are you saying this?” she snapped at me, eyes filled with tears. “Are you trying to hurt me more?”
“I’m not trying to hurt you, Helen, please listen.” I reached out for her, but she pulled back again, shaking her head.
“I would have known if my mom had cancer. They are lying to you to cover up what they did to her.”
“Helen—”
“No!” she snapped, stepping back again, shaking her head before she turned and quickly left me standing in the entryway, right on top of the Ethan and Calliope’s monogram titles.
What was I supposed to do now?
The world had flipped.
I flipped back to being the useless brother, lover, and son.
“I know that look.”
Glancing up, I watched as Uncle Neal stepped in from the living room. With a book in hand, he looked to where Helen had run off to then back at me.
“What look?”
“The look of one in his brother’s shadow,” he said, and I froze, causing him to chuckle. He stepped up right beside me, taking off his reading glasses. “Were you the one who shot her?”
“And if I was?”
“You’ll die,” he said, not at all making me feel better.
“You are shit at pep talks, Uncle Neal.” I gasped in shock.
“So, you did shoot her.”
I rolled my eyes, “Is it too early for a drink?”
“The drinks don’t make it go down easier.” He frowned, placing his hand on my shoulder. “But, I’ll have one with you because I remember what it felt like to be you.”
“Still waiting for the pep in this talk.”
He smacked the back of my head with the book in his hand. “Patience. It’s coming. You ready?”
“Sure,” I replied, rubbing the back of my head as he pushed me into the living room. Inside I came face to face with the family portrait Calliope had demanded we dress up nicely for. She didn’t want it as a photo but an actual oil painting. It was so large it hung over the whole fireplace.
“He’s always going to make you feel like shit,” my uncle said, giving me a drink.
“Who?”
“Ethan. He will always make you doubt yourself. He doesn’t mean to. But the talented ones never do.”
I frowned…he was total shit at this. “The talented ones?”
“Each generation, there is one brother who is just better at this. Why I don’t know—”
“I thought it was the younger brother who was better?”
“Because your father told you that horseshit,” he chuffed, moving to sit by the fireplace. “Even from beyond the grave, the man taunts me.”
I didn’t say anything—mostly because thinking about the fact that my father was alive and his brother didn’t know it…felt low.
“Yes, your father and my father were the second sons. But our grandfather was the first. And our great grandfather, who set us all on this road, was also the first son. Each generation, there is a son, and if there are two, one naturally outshines the other. People don’t remember him much, but Declan’s father, Kil
lian, was the better one. He made plans, too, and he wrote his plans down. My father found those plans and followed them. He built his legacy on his brother, and no one knows.”
“Did he leave a blueprint?” I muttered, drinking and wishing for something even stronger than the brandy in my glass. I wasn’t sure what that would be, but I needed my throat to burn.
“Are you trying to overthrow your brother?” he shot back.
“That is not what I meant.”
“I think it is.” He grinned. “Even if it were only 10% of what you meant, a small part of you wants to prove you are just as good as he is, right?”
I didn’t answer that, either.
“It’s hard to be a man in this family and not think of it. What if it were me.” He smiled, looking into his glass. “I thought of it, but I realized I wasn’t like him. Your father. Some days it nearly drove me mad. After all, unlike you, I was the oldest, and unlike Uncle Killian, I didn’t die.”
“So why did you roll over for my father?”
He glared and shrugged. How else could I put it?
“Guilt.”
“Guilt?”
He nodded. “The guilt of never being the brother he needed, failing him so much, kept me from betraying him and wanting him to forgive me, accept me, count on me instead.”
“I’m looking for a witty reply, but I have none,” I whispered, leaning against the chair and looked to the fire.
“Do you feel guilty about today?”
“I didn’t say I did anything.”
“You would have been able to get on the same damn floor as Calliope if you hadn’t done anything.” He obviously overheard our conversation. “This is good for you. It’s a weight that will pull you back from ever listening to that voice again that says ‘it could be me.’”
I stared into the fire, drinking. We sat like that for some time before finally speaking again.
“Uncle Neal?”
“Yeah?”
“Did my dad ever forgive you for whatever you did?”