She looks away from me pointedly.
“What happened?” I press.
“What do you care?”
“Call it professional curiosity.”
Her hands are shaking a little. The way she defended herself against me was instinctive. She’s not the type of woman to lay down and take abuse. She’s a fighter. And it’s impossible not to be drawn to that.
It’s truly unfortunate that I’ll have to kill her.
I study her face, taking note of the bruise on her arm. It’s yellow now, probably days old. It’s not hard to imagine how it got there. “Does he do that to you often?” I ask.
She flinches. A dead giveaway. I know I’ve stumbled across the truth. “He’s not my boyfriend,” she says defensively.
“Oh, I know.”
She frowns. “You do?”
“It took me a moment to figure out why you’re so familiar to me,” I explain. “But once I got up close… Once I saw that scar on your cheek…”
Her face flushes with confirmation.
“…I knew.”
“Sometimes, even decent men must do terrible things for the greater good,” she whispers.
I wonder if maybe she has a concussion or something. I frown. “What did you just say?”
She lifts her chin and meets my gaze. The fight is back, no doubt spurred on whatever haunted memory is playing out in her mind’s eye. “That’s what you said to me,” she says fiercely. “That day…”
“The day I killed your father,” I say emotionlessly.
She hesitates for a moment. As though the memory is still painful. “Yes.”
I feel a twinge of regret. The first I’ve felt since the day I hurt—No, I hiss at myself silently. Don’t go there. Don’t relive that nightmare. “If I’d known you were standing there, I wouldn’t have killed him.”
“Yes, you would have,” she retorts. “You would have just dragged me out of the way and carried on with your nasty little business.”
I raise my eyebrows. Fair enough. “Well, yeah. That’s what I meant.”
She stares at me. For a second, I actually think she might smile. But it never comes. Maybe I’m the one suffering from the blow to the head.
“Tell me the truth,” she says. “You haven’t spared me a second thought since you walked away that day, did you? Not until just now.”
I blink. “You’re right.”
She’s not, though. I have thought about her sporadically over the years. I used to wonder what became of her.
But when her brother got back on my radar, there was no woman tied to him. It seemed unlikely to me that a young man would take on the responsibility of a younger sibling, particularly a sister—relatively useless as a female in a macho world.
So I’d never imagined that she was here the whole time. Hiding under her brother’s shadow.
I could tell her all that. But what would be the point? She’d never believe me. And in a few minutes, it won’t matter anyway.
She’ll be dead. This will all be over.
“Oh, of course not. Why would you remember the little girl you left surrounded by dead bodies?” she says, bitterness soaked into her tone like venom. “But I remember you, Kian O’Sullivan. I’ve thought about you every single day since I was five years old.”