Children of Vice (Children of Vice 1)

Rory wrapped her arm around Pierce, pulling him closer to her.

“Now, are you two done pretending as well?” Cillian glared at me.

“Pretending?” Ethan questioned.

“Sorry to break it to you, Ethan, but we aren’t as stupid as you think we are. Ivy called us from prison two weeks ago, and now all of a sudden she’s married to you? Why?” He didn’t direct that question to us, but to the crowd he was trying to win over.

“Do tell,” Ethan interjected, but Cillian overlooked him.

“For years now some has-been and his has-been family is trying to wiggle himself back into Boston. Trying to make us bow the fuck down. Like his pop. His father’s pop and his great-granddad before him. All to pay taxes out of our own businesses to a family that ain’t lived here for generations.” There were grumbles over that. A few of the older men spat to the left of themselves and stood taller, as if they were ready to fight if needed.

“All of us getting called up when your family gets itself on the brink of ruin.” His eyes shifted to Ethan. “Pretending to be Irish when we all really know you’re nothing but mutts.” He wasn’t done. No, he had to get a clean shot at me too. “Ivy, I loved you like a little sister. I promised your father I’d watch out for you—”

“Was that before you killed him? Or did you make that promise in prayer while Rory framed me for a crime she committed?”

More people began to mutter, but Cillian just rolled it off. “Were you so desperate to get out that you’d believe any lies he told you and whore yourself out to him?”

My fist clenched and Ethan shattered the bottle in his bare hands, the glass cutting his hands, the little of the beer that was left pouring onto the patchy grass. Eyes narrowed, he glared at him. “If you want to insult someone, keep it directed at me, not my wife. You don’t speak to a woman like that and you sure as fucking hell don’t talk to my woman like that.”

“The woman you’ve been with for what, three days?” He snickered. “Excuse me if I don’t take your shame seriously. You played her. Fine, but you aren’t—”

“For some odd reason all of you are under the impression that I married Ivy for Boston.” He took my hand, stepping onto the grass and standing with me. “That I’m so desperate to hang on to all of you, and this city, I married a woman I didn’t know. How arrogant can you all be? I didn’t marry Ivy from Boston. I married Ivy, daughter of Sean O’Davoren, the same Sean O’Davoren, who, when me and my siblings were kidnapped, kept us safe until we could get back home. I married Ivy, who was once the freakishly tall ten-year-old who fed the cats in the basement.”

He actually laughed, but I was frozen, his grip on me tightening. Just as quickly as he laughed it was gone and he was deadly serious again. “Everyone likes to think my family spends our days scheming and plotting…that is whenever we aren’t taking milk baths and eating with diamond forks. But the truth is, I’m just a guy who married his long-time crush. If you all want the Callahan family out of Boston, fine, that is your right.” He took out his phone and dialed three numbers. “And it’s done. We’ll leave as soon as Ivy finishes up some business and our honeymoon is up. Thank you for the shitty beer.”

He pulled me along. I could feel my legs walking, but my mind was elsewhere…it was on his previous confession. I knew him? Before now I knew him?

“Do you really expect me to believe that?” Cillian called out from behind us. “Especially after what you did to Eamon Downey?”

“Mr. Downey was a personal messenger, but since you didn’t get it, let me be clearer. Neither you nor your shit-faced brother is good enough for my sister. Look at her again and I’ll bust your teeth in personally.”

BANG!

BANG!

BANG!

BANG!

I jumped, startled, refocusing on him again only to see the power lines around us start to explode, sparks flying off all of them one by one, raining over us like dying fireflies.

“That’s going to be a pain in the ass to fix,” Ethan said, unbothered. “But then again that is no longer my problem. So what are a few sparks between neighbors?”

I didn’t understand what he meant until I walked out from the house, Elroy and his gang sitting on the front porch, some of them lifting their phones, trying to get the signal working, as we walked past the car toward the house across the street. Finally, after holding it in since we’d landed, the sky, as if it knew Ethan was finished with them, unleashed the rain it had been holding back. The thunder rippling through the clouds, the rain beat the earth with a vengeance just as we made it to the only house on the block that now had power.

Note to self. Ethan has a flair for the dramatic.

ETHAN

When we stepped through the door, the light immediately coming on, she pulled away from me gently. In a trance-like state, her blue eyes scanned over the foyer and the horrid wallpapered walls, the old couch, the pink shaggy carpet, and the television…a box television. The whole house was frozen in whatever my mother said the ’80s left behind. It was as tacky as tacky could be, like the house of someone’s dead great-grandmother coming back to haunt them…it was all of that and yet comfortable.

Turning to the left, she walked into the kitchen, directly toward the sink cabinet, pulling out a bottle of wine. She lifted it up, tilting her head to the side like she didn’t expect it to be there. Blinking a few times, she put it down on the counter then reached up, opening the cabinet and taking out two mugs. The first

had an owl winking and the other what looked to be a drunk cat. She put them down next to the wine and put her fingers against the back of the cabinet until it opened, revealing a hole in the wall from where she pulled out stacks upon stacks of dusty bills. She didn’t stop until she had about half a million sitting on the counter. Something that would have made a normal person happy, but instead she started to tear up when she turned back to me.

“I remember now.” Her bottom lip quivered. “Everyone called me crazy, they threw rocks at me, and even my father denied it…denied that I ever met a boy in the basement of this house…that boy was you, wasn’t it? This is a safe house, isn’t it? My father hid you guys here, didn’t he…that’s why they died? Because of you…because of me?”

Before the truth came the painful removal of ignorance…my wife was living proof of that.