Page 43

Twenty-Eight

Aidan

“Aidan, let me in. You can trust me.”

Can I trust her? How much can I tell her?

How much should I tell her? Can I trust her with the truths about the younger version of myself?

Will I tell her everything? Not just the parts that might make her feel bad for me and like I’m some stray puppy she’s rescuing, but the parts that will fully reveal what a broken monster I truly am?

I’m not sure I know how to tell part of this story without telling all of it.

I get dressed. There’s no way I’m telling her any of this naked. It’s too exposed. Those fucking fireworks! I’d forgotten what day it was. I never forget this day. But Maddie being in my home is an adjustment.

Usually on July 4 th I stay as far away from other people as possible and as far away from fireworks as I can get. I usually go off into the wilderness and go camping outside the range of the normal festivities.

I know if I tell her this, there’s no going back.

She won’t look at me the same way again.

The more bodies I stack up, the more and more I look unsafe and unstable.

She won’t be able to ever trust me again.

But the truth is, I don’t think I can keep this from her.

I don’t think it’s enough just to have her here.

Some fucked-up part of me needs her to know the worst of it, so we can go back to the normalcy of her rejection. Except this time she won’t be calling me weird. We’re well past weird and into evil, psychopathic, monstrous.

Finally I unlock the door and go back to sit in one of the chairs in my closet. There’s no need for her to know I was huddled naked in a ball on one of the thick dark green rugs only a few minutes ago—when I thought she’d left me in peace to be with my pain alone.

I’m not sure if I’m upset that she’s back even after I told her to leave, or if I’d be more upset if she’d done what I asked.

Whereas the closet in her quarters is bright with full lighting and white painted shelves and walls, mine is as cavelike as my bedroom—dark wood paneling with all clothes tucked away inside large walnut cabinets.

I have a couple of dark green leather chairs in here, a round table, and a side cart with drinks.

I swear I’m not an alcoholic, I just like this small dark place sometimes to think or to read.

There are several well-placed wall sconces around the room with old-fashioned antique lightbulbs that give off a warm amber glow. A floor lamp sits just beside the chair. I don’t have a mirror in this room. I use the mirror in my bathroom.

There’s a stack of books on the hardwood floor beside my chair.

Maddie sits in the empty chair and scoots it closer to me. She places an encouraging hand on my arm. “Please. Talk to me.”

I sigh. I want to fight her on this, to resist, but an equal part of me wants to tell her everything, even knowing how it will end if I do.

“The summer before I met you, I went with my father to a big meeting he was having on the Fourth of July on the top floor of the Stryker building.

I felt so grown up. I was going to work with my dad.

He was going to show me all that I would inherit someday.

I was excited because it was past my bedtime and because of the parade going on below.

I had the perfect vantage point to watch the fireworks with the floor-to-ceiling windows in the conference room.

There were some important people there, and I realize now they were discussing criminal business, but as a five-year-old kid I didn’t know what their code words meant, and I wasn’t paying attention anyway. I just wanted to watch the fireworks.”

So far her expression is open and encouraging. It’s not going to be that way for long. Still, I press forward.

“You remember meeting Brian and Mina?”

She nods, warily.

“They rolled into that building like death was a fashionable celebrity and took out eighteen people that night. Guards, my father’s associates, and my father. Right in front of me. I locked myself in the conference room and hid under the table. I was the only one they spared.”

She gasps.

“Aidan…” She looks horrified. If she’s horrified now, I’m not sure if I can bring myself to tell her the rest because it’s about to get a lot worse.

“My whole life I thought it was Brian that killed him, and all I wanted was revenge on the man that ruined my childhood and gave me nightmares. My mom had just died the year before, and I went to live first with an aunt, then with my uncle Martin.

Mina protected me from Brian that night. I was sure she was an angel. And I thought maybe my mom sent her since she was in heaven. It just made sense.

I’d thought angels wore white, but she was dressed in all black and covered in blood. But it didn’t matter, she was nice to me. I felt safe with her.

After I met Brian and Mina as an adult, I wasn’t sure anymore which one had killed him, but once my brain fully processed that she wasn’t an angel who protected me that night, but one of the bad guys, memories I’d suppressed started to come back. And I realized she was the one who killed my father.

That was when the memory came back. I remember seeing my father shoot Brian, and then she shot my father. I can still see her holding the gun, looking guilty as she noticed me standing there. Brian survived because he was wearing a bulletproof vest.”

“And you’re on speaking terms with these people?”

The room suddenly feels too small—even though it was designed that way and before this moment was comforting. I get up and begin to pace. I need to put some space between us.

“It’s more complicated than that. I couldn’t be angry at Mina.

She got me through a lot. I thought she was an angel my entire childhood—like a literal magic, wings, flying down from heaven angel.

I had a drawing of her. I prayed to her.

And every time a miracle seemed to happen in my life, I thought it was her.

I couldn’t just turn on her after that.”

Despite the fireworks still going outside, I wish there was a window I could look out to distract myself because I don’t think I can look Maddie in the face for the rest of this.

“They trained me to kill… properly, so I’d be prepared when I took over the family business.

When I did take over, I stopped being mad at Brian and Mina altogether because I learned the full truth.

My father was hurting my mother. He was prostituting her out to all his friends and business associates, passing her around to the highest bidder.

Sometimes he watched. He was a sick fuck.

She had no choice in the matter. He’d added prostitution and human trafficking to the illegal part of the business, and I guess he got off on the idea of including her in that business. ”

I turn back to look at Maddie. She looks sick. Does she think I’m the type of man who would involve myself in something like that, especially after what happened to my mother?

Uncle Martin killed off that part of the business when I was still a kid, but if he hadn’t, I would have.

I may not have handled things with Maddie in a reasonable or honorable way.

I may have broken laws and morals to have her, and I may be willing to break even more to keep her, but I would never physically hurt her.

I would never do the monstrous things my father did to my mother. Men like that are weak.

Uncle Martin expanded more into drugs and gambling to replace the income, and he built the front business to huge success, but I don’t tell Maddie any of this.

When my uncle was training me to take over, he said there were some things we didn’t let any outsiders in on, even romantic partners.

Despite his best efforts he didn’t expect I’d end up a bachelor like him and wanted to make sure I didn’t tell someone the wrong things.

I’m probably violating that code now, but this feels different, somehow.

Maddie hasn’t said anything else, but she’s also not running screaming from the room, so I take that as a sign that I can keep going.

“My mother couldn’t live like that, and she couldn’t get away from my father, so she shot herself.

There was security footage. She’d load a revolver with blanks except for one, spin the chamber, and pull the trigger.

She did it every time she got to the end of her rope from one of those men and couldn’t take it anymore.

I’m not sure if she really believed she’d actually ever get the bullet.

Maybe she wanted God or fate to decide for her.

As a Catholic, she didn’t believe in suicide. It’s a mortal sin after all.

So maybe this was her way of letting God decide whether or not to take her—the loophole that let her free herself without one final sin she could never confess.

One of those nights the live round got her, and she died.

My father knew she was doing it. He watched that security footage, and he never tried to stop her.

He just let her gamble with her life over and over until her luck finally ran out.

He didn’t give a fuck one way or the other.

He didn’t care if she lived or died and left me without a mother or even if the cash cow he turned her into dried up. ”

Part of me thinks him not stopping her is the kindest thing he ever did for my mother, but I don’t say this part out loud.

Maddie sits in stunned silence for a long time. Processing. Finally she says, “H-how do you know that’s what happened? You were so young. Did you see the security footage?”

She’s not asking in an accusatory way, she’s just trying to understand how I know so much about something I couldn’t have been witness to.