“When I was much younger. I felt abandoned. By all of them.”
“All of them?” she repeats.
“It felt like they’d all abandoned me,” I tell her. “And I suppose that’s exactly what they did. They had their reasons. But when you’re ten and you idolize your older brothers, it fucking stings to know they’ve walked away from you one by one.”
She’s staring at me intently, but I know she needs to hear this.
“Sean chose to leave the family instead of taking on the mantle of don. Cillian was forced out because he had the audacity of defending the woman he loved. I was too young to get it then. So I was angry.”
“You were ten?”
“My parents liked to keep big gaps between their kids. Their oldest and youngest children were born twenty years apart.”
“Your oldest brother is twenty years older than you?” she asks, nose wrinkling in confusion.
I shake my head. “My sister.”
Her eyes go wide. “Oh. I think I saw a picture of her in one of the rooms on the second floor.”
“That’s her. Aoife. I suppose, of all three, she had the best excuse for leaving,” I say, knowing full well what I’m getting into by mentioning her at all.
“Why did she leave?”
“It’s a long story.”
“I’ve got nothing but time.”
I grimace. “So be it. Don’t say I didn’t warn you. Aoife… She was sixteen when one of the Clan’s rival mafia families approached my father with the possibility of an alliance. Darragh Kinahan was their heir. The idea was to—”
“Marry them off,” she deduces.
I nod. “Aoife refused, and my father didn’t force her. The Kinahans didn’t take the rejection well, though. Not only did it fuel tensions between the two families, Darragh Kinahan decided that the only way to salvage his broken pride was to abduct Aoife and force her to marry him like he wanted.”
Renata shudders. “Oh my God…”
“Of course, it led to a war,” I continue. “My father stormed the Kinahan compound. We managed to rout them, but by the time he got to the room where Aoife was imprisoned, it was too late.”
“No…”
“She’d killed herself hours earlier,” I explain grimly. “She’d been dead through the entire war the Clan had fought to rescue her.”
Renata stares at me in horror. “Kian, I’m so sorry…”
“It was a long time ago,” I say, brushing aside her sympathies. “I wasn’t even born.”
But she doesn’t look away. “She and I have shared trauma,” she says after a moment of silence. “The same thing happened to us.”
I know my delivery of what I have to say next will come across as harsh. Even cruel. But I don’t care. She needs to see her brother for who he really is.
“It’s not the same thing at all,” I snarl. “Aoife wasn’t forced into that marriage by her family. My father would never have made her do anything she didn’t want to do. When she was taken, the Clan fought tooth and nail to get her back.”
I look up at her. I make sure I’m looking her in the eye when I say the final piece: “Your brother sold you to the enemy because all he’s ever wanted is power. And he’d send you to hell a thousand times over to get it.”
She cringes back, but doesn’t deny it.
How could she? It’s true.
“I know you think your brother is all you have, Renata,” I tell her. “But he’s not…”