I trail off, realizing how ridiculous I’m going to sound when I say it.
“If it hadn’t been for…?” Cillian asks impatiently.
“I had a tracker on his van. I found his house easily. I thought it’d be an easy kill. Force my way into the house, kill the bastard, leave. The end.”
“Sounds like there’s a ‘but’ coming.”
“Lombardi wasn’t the one that opened the door. A girl did.”
“A girl?”
“His sister. Renata…”
It’s still bothering me that she gave her name up to Phoenix, but she refused it to me.
“He has a sister?” Cillian asks, sounding confused.
“I told you about her after it was done. She was there when I killed her father.”
“Jesus,” Cillian whistles low. “How old was she? Six, seven?”
“Five.”
“Fuck. Bet she remembered you.”
I want to throw something. Instead, I grit my teeth. The look in her eyes when she answered the door… like her worst nightmare had just come calling.
“Yeah, she fucking remembered me. She almost took my eye out. Thankfully, I walked away with a gash over my eyebrow instead of a slit eyeball.”
“Little kitten grew claws, eh?”
I laugh bitterly. He doesn’t even know the half of it. Little kitten tried to kill me just a few minutes ago.
“Okay,” Cillian says after a moment, “so you were taken by surprise. The girl was there. Who else?”
“Nobody. Just her. Well, I think Drago was actually in the house, too. But he managed to get away while I was busy trying to cow the wildcat.”
“So that’s what happened,” Cillian says. “He sacrificed his sister as a diversion and ran.”
I hesitate. “Actually, something had happened between the two of them before I showed up. I’m pretty sure she’d injured him. He was wounded when he ran. There was blood.”
“Did you find out what happened before you killed her?” Cillian asks, making the obvious assumption. When I don’t answer, he grumbles, “Kian? You did kill her, right?”
I breathe. Rub my temples. He’s not going to like this.
“Kian…”
I grit my teeth and spit it out. “There’s still time to find out. I didn’t kill her.”
A predictably confused pause. Then: “Why the fuck not?”
I groan. “I don’t know,” I grimace in defeat. “I don’t fucking know.”
I rest my head on the cool surface of the desk and breathe. My fingers are still tingling with adrenaline from the fight in the shower. And the memory of her body pressed up against mine, soaking wet and writhing…
“She still has the same scar, you know,” I say softly, almost to myself. “The crescent moon scar on her cheek.”
I don’t even know why that’s relevant. I don’t know why I mention it. It just slips out of my mouth as though my subconsciousness can’t keep it in any longer.