shouldn’t say family. Maureen. The little girl. The little boy. All dead…and now your wife.” He turned a fraction, showing me her face. “I told you to come alone or she’d die. Since I knew you wouldn’t…” He shrugged.
I met his eyes as rain started to pour. Lightning forked across the sky, turning it purple for a second before thunder rolled.
“The guns, Kelly.” He nodded to the one dangling in my hand. “That’s not alone. But I didn’t kill her. Not yet. Might want to hurry, though, the bleeding is steady on the outside, but I’m not sure what’s happening on the inside.” He winked at me. “She can take a hit with a bat, Jessica Rabbit can,” he said, mocking my accent.
“What do you want?” I said through clenched teeth.
“You,” he said. “On your knees. In front of me. Begging for forgiveness. No gun to your head forcing the words. I want an apology from the soul, since you have no fucking heart.”
I threw the gun in my hand to the side of him, and he kicked it so far that I couldn’t get to it even if I tried. I did the same with the entire holster. He did the same thing.
Love was the only force that could ever bring me to my knees. My wife had called it the day at her brother’s house.
I fell to my knees not in front of him, but in front of my wife. She was all I could see. All I could hear. All I could breathe. I could smell her in the rain, and when he stood over me, holding her, her blood dripped down my face like tears.
“You didn’t see this coming, you arrogant bastard of the devil. The marauder of Hell’s Kitchen—you don’t steal things, you steal hearts. You steal them from men. You steal them from families. Your old man was the devil himself. Everything he touched, he ruined. Like the drugs you fight against.” Raff put his gun to my forehead. “Let me tell you a story, a story of how Ronan Kelly ruined a good man’s life. My old man owed a debt, and your old man forced him off the street with this band of thugs and brought him to Ginger’s.”
Ginger’s was a bar my old man fronted the money for. He used it sometimes to deal with men who owed money, or worse. It wasn’t a neutral place like Sullivan’s. If those walls could talk, the FBI would’ve brought them in for interrogation years ago.
“Over money, Kelly,” Raff said, pressing the gun harder against my head. His hand was steady at first, but the more he talked, the more he relived, and it started to shake. “Money. Your old man put a gun to my old man’s head, just like this, and forced him to call home. I answered the phone. My old man was crying, begging, and he told me to put my ma on the line.”
Raff sniffed. “He owed the great Ronan Kelly a debt, and if we didn’t bring enough, we were all dead. Now you’re going to beg for something worth more than your life. This woman’s life. Your life is not good enough to beg for. Hers? Worth every word from your mouth.
“Kind of like what you did to Scott Stone. You stole her from him knowing he’d never get over her because he lost her to you. The devil’s spawn. The thing he spent his entire life fighting against. And his career? His other love? The end of life as he knew it when he lost it. Now you’re where many men have been at your word, at your fucking hand, and you’re going to lose, Kelly. You’re going to lose. Because I’ve watched. This bitch is worth everything to you. More than your old man’s memory. More than your last breath. So what do you have to say?”
I lifted my hands. “Here I am,” I said, tasting blood in my mouth. Either hers or mine.
“Here I am.” He looked up at the sky and laughed. “Is that all you have to say for your fucking self? Where’s the begging? The pleading? The crying?” He turned and slammed my wife’s head against my old man’s stone at the same time thunder seemed to crack the sky in two, and more rain started to fall. “You’ll cry—”
My heart screamed out her name, but a roar left my throat when heat surged up inside of me, and I slammed