I groan internally when I glance at the clock on the wall. He’s right—it’s early as hell in Dublin. “Sorry. Did I wake you, Sleeping Beauty?”
Cillian snorts. “You know I always sleep with one eye open.”
“Clan business keeping you up?”
“No, daughter business is keeping me up,” he retorts. “First, they tell you the toddler years are hardest. Then they tell you the teenage years are hardest. No one prepares you for a twenty-year-old girl with her mother’s temper.”
I smile. “I don’t even want to know.”
“Smart man.”
“You’re right, though. I do have something particular to discuss. And I’ll get to it in a second. I just need a distraction first. Talk to me about something. Anything.”
There’s a couple of seconds of silence. “Saoirse’s good,” Cillian tells me. “She’s working on a new exhibition. But it won’t be up for another couple of months.”
“I take it the gallery’s doing well?”
“It’s doing well,” Cillian replies humbly. But I can practically hear the glowing pride in his voice.
“I’m glad she got back into it,” I say. “Talent like hers should be seen.”
I think of the landscape she sketched that’s framed and hanging in my foyer. The lake behind the O’Sullivan Manor in Dublin, stretching out far to the horizon. My childhood. My home.
Or rather, it was my home. It hasn’t been for a long time.
“She wanted to focus on the kids,” says Cillian. “And let’s face it: when things with the Teagan Clan were at their height, she couldn’t focus on anything else.”
I nod, remembering how rough that particular battle was a few years ago. Of course, I’d been removed from it all. I was busy fighting demons of my own. I would’ve preferred fighting the Teagans, though. At least those bastards fought with fists and guns.
The demons I was battling all lived inside my head.
“Yeah, well, we sent those motherfuckers back to hell where they belonged, didn’t we?”
“In the end, we did,” he agrees.
“Speaking of the devil, how is yours?”
“Still a devil,” Cillian says, with a tired sigh. “My own daughter says she prefers spending time over at the Manor. God only knows why.”
“I have a feeling you know exactly why.”
“Too true. I suspect she has a boyfriend.”
“Jesus,” I breathe, remembering when I used to bounce my niece Aoife on my knee to make her giggle. “Isn’t she, like, twelve?”
“Twenty.”
“Fuck.”
“Yeah,” Cillian replies, as though his daughter’s decision to age is a personal insult to him. “I’m pretty sure she’s confided in Saoirse, but apparently, they both think I’m too hotheaded to handle it.”
“You’re planning on killing the boyfriend, aren’t you?”
“Of course. First chance I get. I don’t understand how that makes me hotheaded, though.”
I laugh. But when a silence fills in the gap afterward, Cillian doesn’t offer me any additional information and I realize I have no more reasons left to stall.
“Lombardi got away from me tonight,” I admit.