Scythe & Sparrow (The Ruinous Love Trilogy, #3)(28)

“Eyes on the prize, dickhead,” I say, and with a final salute to Eric’s dead body, I hop down from the vehicle, taking Fionn’s waiting hand as he slams the door shut with the other. The truck rolls to the cliff edge and we follow to watch it tumble down the steep embankment, gathering momentum. It hits a boulder and flips, then cartwheels end over end until it smacks the surface of the slow gray current to sink into the silty gloom.

“Investigators are really going to have questions if the body turns up with his eyes stapled open,” Fionn says as the last tire disappears from view. Bubbles pop in the swirling eddies and we watch in silence until the last one dies, and the water resumes its slow procession. He turns to face me then, and I’m not sure how to read the mask that watches me back. There are hardly any clues to what he must be thinking, just a feathering of the muscle along his jaw. A haunted spark in his eyes, like a candle nearly burned to the end of its wick, fighting to hold off the dark. He must realize I’m trying to read him because he breaks our connection and bends to retrieve the crutch I dropped when I took his offered hand. “Let’s hope he never turns up,” he finally says.

We don’t talk. Not as he helps me into his car, even though he doesn’t need to. Not when he turns the truck around to head back to the main road. Neither one of us remarks on the thunderstorm that looms in the distance, or how its black heart bursts with bright streaks of light in the palest shade of pink. It’s beautiful, and I want to say it out loud. But I don’t.

It isn’t until we’re on the other side of Weyburn and well past the town limits that Fionn pulls Eric’s phone from his pocket. He wipes it clean. And then he veers to the center of the empty highway and tosses it out the window into the ditch on the opposite side of the road.

And he doesn’t look back.





SUTURES


Fionn



I never thought I’d find crocheting meditative and soothing. But here we are.

I’m sure my brothers would have a field day if they knew that I was holed up in my room like a hermit, spending my Saturday night crocheting a fucking blanket. But I guess they equally take the piss out of me for my “gym obsession,” or as Lachlan likes to call it, my “Dr. Bellend gym-bro phase.” And Rowan would be chiming in with some unhelpful suggestions, or even worse, he’d take up crocheting just long enough to make me a mankini for my birthday. While Lachlan is a broody asshat, Rowan is fucking nuts, and will go to literally any lengths to make a point or get what he wants, no matter how reckless or ridiculous or absurd. The two of them together are the worst, and the torment would be never-ending if they found out all the details of my life at present.

Especially seeing as how the most beautiful but admittedly also terrifying woman I’ve ever met is sleeping in the room across from mine, and I’ve done nothing but try to force myself to avoid her as much as possible.




I haven’t been doing a great job of it either.

Even when I’m at work or running through town or at the gym, Rose will suddenly appear in my thoughts. I’ll hear her voice, that desperate, whispered help still a barb in my mind. Or I’ll see her face, like her startled expression when I pulled the door of her motor home open for her, the way her eyes glimmered in the summer sun when she realized it was me. I came here to Hartford in the hope that I would isolate myself from the things that made me weak, that made me want to poke and prod the hidden dark corners of my mind. But from the moment Rose showed up, she’s invaded my thoughts as though she’s stripping my immunity, cell by cell.

But it’s not me I’m worried about.

It’s her.

I lower the blanket I’m working on and pan my gaze across the room. Simple furniture. Nondescript paintings. Impersonal details on display, all of it dull and unoriginal. Nothing that would provoke any emotion or raise any concern. Nothing you’d look at and think, This belongs to a man who covered up a murder yesterday. Or, This belongs to a man who nearly bludgeoned a farmer to death with a wrench. And certainly not, This belongs to a man who killed his own father, and nobody knows it was him.

I set the blanket aside and brace my elbows on my knees, pressing my palms to my eyes as though it will push those thoughts back where they belong.

But they never truly fade away.

I still see my father in his drunken and drug-induced rage, still remember with vivid clarity the disappointment I felt when he returned after a week of being missing, those glorious few days when I’d started to believe he’d finally been killed as the ultimate consequence of his shitty life choices. After all, I was the one who discovered who he owed, who he stole from. It was me who thought if I let the Mayes family know that he’d taken money from them, they would get rid of my father for good. With every day that had passed that week, I realized I didn’t feel the way any decent person would for selling out their own father. Me? I felt relief. Even pride. I felt fucking invincible.

But I was just a kid.

I underestimated my father’s ability to get himself out of trouble. All that growing hope and serenity I felt was suddenly washed away when he reappeared on Saturday afternoon, slurring and cursing as he shoved my brother Rowan into the kitchen of our childhood home in Sligo, demanding a meal. He smacked Rowan across the face when my brother protested. When I tried to intervene, he shoved me against the counter and knocked my head against the cupboard hard enough that I saw stars. But through the flashing light, I still caught the way my brother’s eyes turned black with rage. How he looked to Lachlan where he stood in the living room, his fists curled at his sides. It was as though there was a secret switch that had been flipped between them with that fleeting look. When the last conflict with my father erupted, I slipped a knife into my hand when no one was looking. And I remember how a single word stood out like a beacon as my brothers kicked off the brawl that would end Callum Kane’s miserable life.