Page 3 of A Love Most Brutal (Morelli Family #2)

MARY

When my dad died, I was in a bad way. His death couldn't have been avoided. That’s what the doctor said. Even still, I believed I could have prepared us, if not stopped it entirely. Like, if I knew anything about heart attacks ahead of his, I might’ve been able to warn him to go get a check-up.

I believed him invincible. I was wrong.

And now, for the fifth Christmas Eve in a row, we celebrate without him, and we wish he was here.

We sit around the table, laugh, play games, eat sweets until our teeth hurt, and miss him.

The people around the table have remained, for the most part, though in the last year, we lost one brother-in-law and gained another.

It’s been only six months since a man I believed I could trust almost killed my sister.

We all thought we could trust him. He was family, the brother of my sister’s husband, the godfather of my niece.

The image of his gun to Vanessa’s head flashes through my mind as she tells a story now and I wince.

His dead body wasn't enough; I needed to know that everyone who was even tangentially involved was dead.

And now, they are.

This wasn’t the half of it, though. Cillian had our trust, abused it, then came into our home and placed tiny explosives everywhere. It was weeks before we found them all—under every bed, beneath desks, beneath cars—these eraser-sized, sleeping things, just waiting to destroy us.

He would have killed us all if he lived, and, once again, I hadn’t seen any of the signs. I was none the wiser until it was almost too late.

Everyone slept in a hotel while we searched for the bombs. Ten days in an Orlov, the kids loved it, and we found most of the bombs in the first week; he had a list of the general area where each was located. But then we found others, ones tied to a different list.

Contingency plans, if I had to guess.

When everyone deemed we’d sufficiently turned the house upside down, we settled in back at home. But at night, after everyone went to sleep, I would look for them. I searched around the house, in the garage, under every car.

I found seven like this.

Every time I found one it made me want to look for more.

In the daytime, when I should have been working, when everyone else was doing something productive for this family, I was searching their bedrooms, fingers roaming beneath their furniture, in their closets, wherever my mind could conjure to look.

For weeks, my exhaustion showed in the bags beneath my eyes, the rigid posture, my ever-roaming eyes.

It’s been three months since I've found any, but I still look sometimes. When we eat meals, my fingers trail beneath the table in the spot where two had been taped. There's nothing now, only the residue from the peeled-up duct tape.

When I'm out, I imagine a new place where one might be, a dormant thing waiting to kill my loved one. At those times, I press half moon slivers into my palms with my nails until I can think about something else.

It's Christmas Eve , I remind myself, trying to force my mind away from its abysmal thoughts.

I’ve been having those horrible nightmares again, the ones where my father is still alive and I hug him and tell him how much I'll miss him if he dies. In these dreams I feel preemptively lonely, the kind of dream where when you wake there should be relief, but instead I grieve again.

My shoulder still hurts where I was shot, an ache that persists no matter how much physical therapy Willa insists I do.

I massage my fingertips around the pearly pink star-shaped scar.

The therapy really does help, but I still feel twinges of pain at odd times; like when I reach for something in the cupboard, or sometimes while I drive.

When I train as hard as I used to, I get numbness all the way to my fingers.

I work hard on the rehab though, because the other option is accepting that I’ve become weaker. It’s more imperative than ever to be strong, ready for anything.

The family spreads out around the house after we clear the table, the twins playing cards with their dad and uncles, Mom watching and sipping tea, Vanessa and Nate cleaning up the kitchen and probably looking lovingly at each other, as they are known to do.

Vanessa is pregnant. She's going to have a child just six months after Willa has another, so now we’re going to have not one but two more Morelli babies, and it's when they're babies that they're most fragile.

I sit in the living room with Willa, both of us eating pie, her plate perched on her round stomach. I scrape my fork over the whipped cream, wondering if this will be the thing that takes a small cavity into a problem cavity, or if that’s how cavities work at all, when Willa gasps.

My head snaps in her direction.

“Feel,” she says, waving me closer until I hold out my palm. She grips my wrist and presses it against her stomach. It’s the size of a basketball these days, stretching beneath her maternity couture.

I hold my breath and wait. I’ve touched my sister’s stomach before, felt the little flutterings of movement, but she said the little thing’s been really wiggling around now. The baby bumps against my skin once, then again harder—a real sturdy kick—and I gasp.

“Little fighter,” I breathe, and Willa grins.

“I hope she’s like you.” Willa pats her hand on top of mine, then takes another bite of pie like she didn’t just say the most tender and devastating thing imaginable.

Vanessa wrangles everyone into the living room for a movie, but my hand still tingles with the feeling of the tiny foot thumping against my skin.

We are two months away from the child being a breathing, crying, pooping thing in this world, and I will have to protect it.

Her. A baby girl that my sister hopes is like me.

I hope she’s nothing like me.

My niece Angel sits next to me on the couch for the movie and lies her head on my lap. She is fast asleep twenty minutes later, and her brother too. They look younger when they sleep, like tall little kids instead of new teenagers.

I comb my fingers through Angel’s hair, straight and sandy blonde like her dad’s, and that heavy weight of fear settles over me.

We’ll need to get a bigger couch in a few years, or some bean bags at least, equip the space to fit the still-growing family as my sisters keep adding children to the mix.

How many can they really have? Don’t they know our ability to keep each of them safe is stretching thin?

Angel and Artie will start fighting lessons after their birthday, sure, but it’ll be months if not years before they’re able to defend themselves, and how many years until the next babies can protect themselves?

And by then, Vanessa and Nate will probably have a diving team worth of children—Nate loves kids, he won’t be able to help himself, and Vanessa can deny him nothing.

My heart rate goes erratic, thrumming in my ears, but I sip some water and pretend to watch the movie while Angel drools on the knee of my sweatpants.

The feeling of my lungs tightening is familiar, though still oppressive.

I draw a quiet shaking breath through my mouth and gingerly extricate myself from beneath Angel's head. I'm careful not to trip over Ranger still dressed as a tiny, geriatric dog Santa as I tiptoe out of the living room. He cracks an eye open and watches me, like he knows what I’m doing and doesn’t approve.

“Mary,” Vanessa whispers, and holds her hand out over the back of the couch. Nate sleeps next to her, his own breathing quiet. I take Vanessa's hand in mine and squeeze three times, our code. I love you. I see you. I’m okay.

This is enough to appease her and she squeezes back, smiling before returning her attention to the movie.

Once upstairs, I change into black jeans and put on my chest holster under the bright red and green matching sweater that Nate insisted we all wear this year.

I slip on my shoes and leave the house as quietly as I can.

It’s freezing outside, and not much is open on Christmas Eve, but I take one of the cars, roll the windows down until I’m shivering, and drive with one destination in mind.

The club is busier than I thought it would be. I didn't even know that it would be open, I just thought I'd try it, and when I drove past, I heard the beating music through the car’s open windows.

The Brickyard’s bouncer looks surprised to see me and waves me in without a cover fee.

I’ve been staying away these last few months, first because my shoulder was still too busted to go out clubbing.

But when it was healed enough, I wasn’t in the mood to dance with strangers.

Too stressed about the non-strangers in my life to humor the idea of meeting anyone new.

Plus, I have more destructive things I can get up to than this, and sometimes destructive is exactly the right thing to distract me.

There are fewer people than a normal Friday night, but still a crush of bodies on the dance floor moving to the loud music. It overwhelms my senses immediately, between the lights and the thudding bass in my skull, I start moving on autopilot.

I beeline for the dance floor, not stopping to smile at my favorite bartenders or sip sparkling water while I assess the crowd for my target of the night. I just push through until I reach the middle of the floor and take a few deep breaths.

This has to work. It has to be enough to distract me.

It will.

Even with my shoulder, at least once a week I find myself at Leroy's for a fight; it's impossible to worry about the crushing reality of mortality when I'm trying not to get my ass handed to me by a man twice my size.

It's how I used to feel here, when dancing and making out with strangers was enough to occupy my mind for a few sweet hours. It’s never enough to make the anxiety go away fully, but sometimes I can pretend.