Page 78

Cillian

Hey. I miss you. I haven’t stopped thinking about you since I left. But I can’t do this. I’m sorry.

I finish typing it,staring at the screen for a moment before I save it to my drafts, like all the others. Over twenty messages, all waiting for her to read, but none of them ever sent.

I only write them to get it out. To say what I can’t. What I shouldn’t.

But the noise in my head is too loud, the memory of my mother haunting me. Her screams echo in my ears. The sound of her burning alive. It’s all there, like it never left.

Leaning my head back on my sofa, I try to block it out, but it’s still fresh in my mind. And I relive every moment of that day, like it’s happening all over again.

* * *

“I’m sorry, Pat. But she’s gone,” Fred, one of the detectives, tells my father.

“No! Don’t fucking tell me that!” My father fills with rage. “She’s fine! She’s fucking fine.”

When I glance at Tynan, his face is tight, breaths even and controlled, but I know he’s upset too. We all are.

“We got the video he recorded. It’s her. I’m so sorry,” Roy, the other cop, says.

“Play it!” Dad’s on the brink of losing it, his voice simmering. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him this scared, this angry. “Play the fucking video!”

“It’s not a good idea.” Roy shakes his head.

“Don’t feckin’ tell me what’s good for me. Play it. Now!” He bangs a fist on the kitchen counter.

“Pat…” Fred tries to calm him down. “You don’t want to see this. Trust me, you don’t want to.”

If what he said was true—if Sergey Marinov burned my mother alive—I’ll never forgive him. Any of them.

“She was my fucking wife! You play it, or I swear I will rip out your bloody throat!”

“Maybe tell the boys to go, then. No child should see their mother this way, no matter how old they are.”

My father snaps the collar of Fred’s shirt, ready to kill him.

“My boys are no boys. They’re men. Play the damn thing,” he spits out.

“Just do it,” Roy tells him.

“Jesus Christ, Pat.” Fred shakes his head, picking up a laptop and pressing a few keys before I hear it.

My mother.

Fuck!

My heart races.

“No! Please!” she screams, while Sergey holds a red canister in his hand, walking around her in circles.

She can’t move. Her hands are zip-tied behind her on the chair in some warehouse.

Sergey laughs. “Kak zhal', chto ya dolzhen ubit' takuyu krasivuyu zhenshchinu.”

“Please,” she sobs. “Please, I’ll do anything. Just name your price. My husband will pay whatever you want. Just call him.”

“Your husband…” He laughs. “…is the reason you’re here.”