The Monster (Boston Belles 3)

I didn’t know how to keep things.

I only knew how to break them.

It was time to break Aisling once and for all and ensure she would never, ever seek me out again.

Stop choosing what isn’t choosing you, mon cheri, Ms. B’s voice rang between my ears as I burst out of the door of Sam’s building on wobbly legs, the harsh whip of the wind slapping my cheeks.

I gasped for air, but no amount of air could satisfy my lungs.

Sam, Sam, Sam.

Broken, scarred, marred, imperfect Sam. Molded in the hands of an abusive mother, a mobster adoptive father, and a ghost of a biological dad he knew tried to kill his adoptive mother.

I wrapped my coat around my waist and jogged to the Aston Martin waiting around the corner from Sam’s building, slipping into the passenger seat. The minute I slid in, I grabbed the thermos waiting for me there and took a greedy gulp of coffee.

“Well?” Cillian asked from the driver’s seat, raising a skeptic eyebrow.

He didn’t believe Sam had anything to do with Athair. Neither did Hunter. I could tell Cillian was now looking at me, trying to see if I had sex with Sam. Any telltale sign to find out if we did something sordid. Puffy lips. Flushed cheeks.

My brother didn’t trust me not to throw myself at Sam.

I shook my head. “Couldn’t find anything, and he didn’t volunteer any information.”

“Of course you couldn’t. Because Sam has better things to do with his time than to mess with Athair for no apparent reason.”

“He was the only person at the table capable of poisoning one of the guests.”

“Athair had an oopsie visit to the hospital. Give that pretty head of yours a rest, Ash. Sam is innocent—in this case, of course. In general, he is probably responsible for every other bad thing that happened in Massachusetts since 1998. Case closed.”

When I said nothing, he groaned, lowering his head on his headrest, closing his eyes.

“Tell me you’ll drop it. I have enough on my plate as it is. I don’t need to extinguish another fire.”

“Fine,” I bit out. “I won’t sniff around him anymore.”

“Promise?” he asked.

“Promise.”

It was stupid. Childish, really, but old habits died hard, and I found myself crossing my fingers in my lap like a kid, between the creases and folds of my dress.

It was far from over.

Sam might be playing me, but now I was playing him, too.

I was going to find out the truth about what happened with my parents.

If it was the last thing I did.

A week had passed since I’d visited Sam’s apartment.

A week of radio silence from his end, and my brothers trying their hardest to restore something resembling normalcy to our household.

They visited after work a few times a week to check in on Da, convinced the poisoning was either Mother’s doing or Gerald’s unspoken mistake.

I played along, showering Mother with attention, watching her with hawk eyes to ensure she didn’t try to harm herself, but the truth was, something had shifted within me, rearranging itself into a different shape. I was beginning to change, and I didn’t know how or why but the past few weeks had a lot to do with it.

Outwardly, I went through the usual motions. I caught up with Persy, Belle, and Sailor at an up-and-coming Indian restaurant downtown. I even pretended to muster an amused chuckle when Sailor frowned at her phone with a long-suffering sigh and showed us a picture of Cillian. “This is his version of sending me dick pics.”

“But it’s not a dick.” Persy had blinked, not getting it.

“Not an anatomical one, anyway,” Belle had murmured, tearing a piece of naan bread and dunking it into a mint and mango dip. Persy had protested us calling her husband a dick, but of course we all knew that he was—to everyone but her.

Mother continued moaning about how horrible my father had been to her, yet every time she ventured out of her den and he had tried to speak to her, she would make a sharp U-turn and dart back to the master bedroom, leaving a trail of tearful accusations echoing over the opulent hallway walls in her wake.

Da was still sleeping in one of the guest rooms, floating in and out of it like a ghost, his disheveled white hair sticking out in every direction, unshaven and haunted by the state of his marriage.

It didn’t help that he started getting mysterious, cryptic messages threatening to drain his secret bank accounts in Switzerland—accounts that according to Da no one knew about.

The first couple days after the messages started pouring in, my father had made it a point to shower, get dressed, and go into his office. He had left his door ajar and sat there, motionless and quiet, waiting to hear my mother’s door flinging open so he could talk to her.