“She’s beautiful,” Saoirse murmurs, turning to look at me again. “Who is she?”
I don’t answer. Probably because I’m trying to figure out how to tell a story I promised never to tell.
I feel Saoirse’s eyes fall on me when the silence lingers too long. The question in them is obvious.
She’s know I’m keep something from her.
She’s standing directly in front of Aoife’s portrait, and I can’t help but compare their features.
Aoife’s beauty is different. Subtle. Calm
Saoirse’s beauty is bold and loud. It sucks up the air in the room so that you can’t concentrate on anything else, like fire consuming every last morsel of oxygen.
“More secrets,” Saoirse guesses.
“I’m sorry.”
She looks down to hide the hurt in her eyes. But I don’t have to see it to recognize it. I can sense it coming off her pores.
I can sense everything about her, really.
She swallows my attention whole, burns it to ash, demands more.
And I feed it to her. Again and again, I give her all of me.
I never had a choice otherwise.
“It’s okay, Cillian,” she says. “You don’t owe me any explanations. You don’t have to share your secrets with me. Come on, let’s finish the tour.”
She turns to leave, but I grab her arm and she freezes instantly.
“I do want to tell you things,” I whisper fiercely. “It’s just that some secrets are hard to share.”
She frowns as she processes that. Then she glances back over her shoulder at the portrait of Aoife.
“She’s my sister,” I explain.
Saoirse’s eyes snap back to my face. “You never said you have a sister.”
I nod. “I did. She died almost thirty years ago now, when I was a little boy.”
Saoirse’s eyebrows rise with shock. “Thirty years ago?”
“Ma and Da were very young when they married,” I explain, taking her hand instinctively. Our fingers wind together as I walk her back over to the portrait. “When Aoife was born, Ma was still a teenager, hardly nineteen. They didn’t have Sean until more than a decade later. He and I were still in diapers when Aoife was nearing adulthood.”
Saoirse’s fingers tighten around my own.
“This story doesn’t have a happy ending,” she predicts. It’s a statement, not a question.
“Nobody really knows how mafia rivalries starts a lot of the time,” I go on. “It’s usually about money, business disputes. Something dry and unimportant.”
I pause and fumble for words.
I never do that. I always know exactly what to say. But this—Saoirse and Aoife and the castle and all these old memories being dragged back into the light of day—is ruining me from the inside out.
“But with the O’Sullivans and the Kinahans… Well, if you ask the right people, they’ll tell you exactly how the rivalry between the two families started.”
Saoirse looks up at me with those impossibly blue eyes.