SWNOVELS Vicious Hearts: Chapter 28
“That isn’t fucking possible.”
Ares’ authoritative voice cuts through the stunned silence of my office at the Upper East Side brownstone. Besides Ares, the other faces in the room include Castle, Hades, Kratos, Dimitra, and New York City Director of FBI Operations Shane Dorsey.
It’s been two days since Una and I visited Hope House, where she got a call from the afterlife. I’ve just told them all what happened.
Una dealt with moving past everything she told me by burrowing under the covers for a full twenty-four hours before deciding she had to get out. Currently, she’s having lunch with Neve, Eilish, and Callie at Neve and Ares’ penthouse apartment.
I dealt with it by tracking down a serial rapist the police have been looking for in Sheepshead Bay, gelding him, choking him with his own severed balls, and then cutting him from chin to navel and watching the blood spiral down a storm drain in the middle of the dark alley where I found him.
I still don’t feel any less murderous. Or hateful. Or full of absolute rage for the things that piece of shit did to Una and her brother in that foster home, when they were goddamn children.
“Did you hear him?”
Dimitra’s melodic, heavily Mediterranean accent always exudes a certain power when she speaks. She might be a tiny, frail little thing. But I know foolish men have died thinking the Drakos matriarch is anything less than the hurricane force to be reckoned with that she is.
I shake my head. “I didn’t. But she heard what she heard.”
“Or she’s making shit up—”
Ares doesn’t finish his words, and the room explodes into shouting as I close the distance between us in a quarter of a second and grab him by the collar.
“That is the last fucking time you speak of her like that,” I snarl as he grits his teeth and grabs at my own collar, ignoring the yells from his brothers and Castle to back off, both of us.
“She’s your pretend fucking wife, Cillian!” he shouts in my face.
“And what is Neve, Ares?” I hurl back. “Or rather, what was Neve, when our two families stopped a war?!”
The room goes quiet. Ares looks away, shaking his head. He releases his grip on my collar and exhales slowly. When he turns back, his jaw grinds as his eyes meet mine.
“Okay, I apologize. That was way out of line.”
I drop my own grip on him, both of us moving back a step as the tension melts a little.
Ares shoves his fingers through his hair and eyes me. “You trust her?”
“I do.”
It comes out faster than I expected or intended. Ares just nods slowly.
“Well, okay then. But that doesn’t change the fact that Seamus O’Conor is fucking dead, Cillian.” His mouth thins as he jabs a finger at his shoulder. “You might have forgotten, but I shot him in the fucking heart, through my own goddammed body.”
“It hasn’t exactly slipped my mind.”
It never will. Crashing through the fucking door of that godforsaken hunting cabin in the woods.
Blood everywhere.
Neve so fucking pale with her life blood in a puddle around her, next to a dying—or possibly already dead—Ares.
The day I almost lost one of the few people I actually care about in this world, again.
No, I haven’t forgotten.
I glance at a grim-looking Castle, who I know also vividly remembers that horrific day. “I know what we all saw. But…she heard him.”
I jam a cigarette in my lips. I’ve been getting better about this, smoking less every day for the last few weeks. Or I was, until two nights ago when Una opened her soul to me.
Hades clears his throat, turning to Shane. “What happened to Seamus? His body, I mean.”
Our friend in the Bureau nods slowly. “Buried at a Bureau forensic facility in New Jersey. Only a number on the grave, to keep his fans away.”
Kratos scowls. “Why wouldn’t you burn that son of a bitch, or dump him in the sea?”
Shane gives a wry smile. “Bureau policy. Piece of shit that he was, he was also a Catholic. Even monsters like that get a proper burial.”
Ares hisses something vicious sounding in Greek under his breath, violently looking away.
Hades frowns. “What happened with the psych Doc?”
Shane lifts a brow, glancing my way before he clears his throat. “I’m…not sure what you’re talk—”
“Shane.”
He swallows, glancing at me again when I growl his name.
“Where’d you hear about that?”
“Not from you,” I mutter dryly. “Which would have been much nicer.”
“C’mon, Cillian. Those were sealed files from before my promotion.” He frowns, turning to glare at Hades. “You also could have asked before you, what, broke into some server somewhere?”
Hades shrugs. “Homeland Security guys with gambling issues can be very helpful in a pinch.”
Shane sighs, looking away. “Okay. So, that cat’s out of the bag I guess…”
“I don’t under-fucking-stand. O’Conor was the most incarcerated man in the country, and you geniuses let him out to go have fun-time in a cushy little psych ward, with visits from his goddamn children?” Ares hisses. “How the fuck does something like that even get approved?”
Dorsey snorts. “Are you joking? You’re talking about the same FBI that kept illegal surveillance flies on Elvis, John Lennon, and Groucho Marx, not to mention a few hundred other famous individuals. The same FBI that used faked evidence and psychological warfare to discredit civil rights activists like Dr. King.” He laughs bitterly. “I’m not gonna sugarcoat this. Letting a shrink study a crazy asshole so she can write a book about it is pretty goddamn low on the list of skeletons the Bureau’s got in its closet.”
“I’ve dug into the doctor from Coal Creek who was interviewing him, Dr. Gail Thompson,” Hades says. “But it’s like she doesn’t exist anymore. What the hell happened to her and that whole project?”
Shane shrugs dismissively. “Administrations come and go, leadership changes. The DOJ and the Bureau did another evaluation of her work and decided it wasn’t nearly worth the risk of him breaking out. So, they shut off the funding and canceled the whole thing. Seamus went back into his hole, and I presume Dr. Thompson went and found some other pet psychopath to put under her microscope. I honestly have no idea where she is now, and I doubt anyone at the Bureau gives a shit about her.”
He sighs, steepling his hands as his eyes lift to mine.
“Look, all respect to your wife, Cillian. But…” he frowns. “Seamus is dead. You were there. You saw the damage Ares did, and it’s clearly laid out in the autopsy report I’ve read—and signed off on—listing me as the shooter…”
Yeah. Some truths were blurred to keep both of our families out of the newspapers that day. It also made Dorsey’s career, putting a close friend to the Kildare empire in a high place. Win win.
“‘Massive chest trauma, complete arterial destruction, and fatal blood loss’.” Shane lifts a shoulder. “He’s dead, Cill.”
“Did you see him?”
He gives me a look. “Cillian—”
“Did. You. See. His. Dead. Body.”
“You did, Cillian,” Castle murmurs, finally interjecting as he stands from where he’s been lurking quietly in the corner. “Look, stress and trauma can fuck you up. You can hear and see shit—”
“If you’re suggesting that Una is crazy,” I hiss dangerously. “Then we have a serious—”
“I’m suggesting that the mind is a complex fucking thing, man.” He grunts. “Seamus O’Conor is dead, Cill. We both saw him—him and the gaping hole where his heart was. You don’t bounce back from that, no matter how many fucking vitamins you take every day.” He shakes his head slowly. “You’re chasing a ghost, Cillian.”
This would be so much easier if I agreed with them. If I could remind myself that Una does come from a long history of abuse, violence, and major stress, even beyond whatever her monster of a father ingrained into her and Finn when they were kids, secretly visiting him at that psych ward.
Yes, she may be broken, and damaged. But that doesn’t make her crazy.
At least, not that kind of crazy.
The problem is, I do believe Una heard her father’s voice on the phone the other day. Which means I’ve opened up a whole new level of crazy for myself.
Worse, that ghosts are real.