Devil of Dublin: A Dark Irish Mafia Romance Read online

  Honestly, I didn’t want to go home ever.

  I chugged the vinegary water until I had to stop to take a breath. Then, I chugged some more. I felt it trickle down the sides of my mouth and into my collar as Darby giggled.

  “You were thirsty!”

  When I couldn’t stomach another drop, I screwed the lid back on and wiped my mouth with my shirt, feeling my cheeks heat again. Darby must have thought I was disgusting, but if she did, she was polite enough to not show it.

  “There’s more!” she said, pointing into the bag. “Look! Look!”

  I set the jar down and took a deep breath. Then, I reached into the bag again. My fingers brushed over something rough and crumby. A lot of somethings.

  “They’re your favorite!” Darby clapped as I pulled out a handful of crushed biscuits.

  My mouth watered at the sight of them, but my throat locked up completely as heavy, rusty chains of emotion tightened around my neck. Breathing was difficult. Swallowing? Impossible.

  I put the biscuits back in the bag, and Darby frowned. I wanted to tell her I was sorry. I wanted to tell her I’d missed her every fucking second since she’d left. I wanted to tell her that I couldn’t eat because something was wrong with me, with my throat, and it wouldn’t let anything through. Not even the words thank you. But I couldn’t, and it made her sad.

  Darby stared at her rubber boots with her bottom lip poking out, and an icy panic washed over me.

  She was going to leave.

  If I didn’t do something, she was going to leave.

  I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t eat. So, in a moment of desperation, I did something I hadn’t done to another human being since I was five years old.

  I stepped forward, and I gave her a hug.

  Darby’s head barely came up to my shoulder, but she wrapped her arms round my waist and squeezed me so hard that I almost laughed.

  With her face pressed against my chest, she said, “Grandpa says I should stay away from you ’cause your daddy is the Devil, but I don’t care about that. He says my daddy is a son of a bitch, but you’ll still play with me, right?”

  I didn’t feel like laughing anymore.

  She knew. She knew, and she’d come back anyway.

  I squeezed my eyes shut and nodded through the pain, letting my chin tap the top of her head so that she would feel my answer.

  “Good!” Darby chirped, letting go of my waist and taking a step back. “Let’s play barber shop!”

  Grabbing one of the chairs I’d made, she set it down in front of me with her tongue poking out of her mouth and her eyebrows pulled together.

  “Will this hold you?”

  I nodded, almost completely paralyzed by the rush of emotions I’d been flooded with during our hug.

  “It will? Wow. You should make furniture when you grow up.”

  Darby took a few things off the tea tray, poured the rainwater out of them, and set them on the wall behind me. Then, she picked up two small sticks and made a V with them, snapping them open and closed with both hands, like scissors. Once she was satisfied with her setup, Darby gestured for me to sit.

  “Hello, sir, and welcome to the Little Cottage Barber Shop. What brings you in today?”

  The chair creaked as I sat and stared at the ground.

  Darby stood right in front of me, her delicate fingertips grazing my forehead as she swept the hair out of my face.

  “A ball at the castle? My goodness! Well, don’t worry, sir. We’ll get you cleaned up in no time.”

  I closed my eyes and concentrated on my breathing as her fingers slid through my hair again and again. Touching me. Removing the only thing I had to hide behind, a few strands at a time.

  Dropping her fake barber shop voice, Darby said, “This is fun. Maybe I should do hair when I grow up. I used to think I’d be a teacher, like my mom, but she’s so tired and grumpy all the time. She says teaching is the hardest job ever. She also says they don’t pay her enough because ‘society devalues traditionally female occupations.’ ” Darby said that last part in a deep, grown-up voice.

  After pulling my shoulder-length hair back behind my ears, Darby began running a stick over it, like a comb, and I didn’t know if I wanted her to stop or keep doing it forever. It hurt so much. Not the knots or the tangles, but the tenderness. It felt like she was sawing my heart in half with that fucking stick.

  “I want to be a YouTuber when I grow up too. I already have my own YouTube channel. It’s called Adventures in Teddy Bear Land. I make videos of my stuffed animals. They all live in Teddy Bear Land, and there’s a king and a queen and a castle. In my last video, it was the queen’s birthday, so all the stuffed animals got dressed up and got in their cars and drove to the castle for a party. I used my mom’s shoeboxes for cars. She’d said I could.”

  Suddenly, a memory flashed in my mind. An image of my own mother, kneeling over the side of a bathtub, washing my hair when I was little. It felt like I wasn’t even in my body anymore. I was standing behind her in that dimly lit bathroom, watching over her shoulder as she massaged the bubbles into my scalp.

  I could smell the shampoo. The sweat under her arms. I could even smell the glass of wine she knocked off the edge of the tub with her elbow. I watched as it fell into the water with a splash, as four-year-old me scrambled toward the back corner of the tub in horror, the red liquid spreading toward me like a pool of blood.

  My eyes flew open with a gasp.

  “Sorry,” Darby said, stilling her hands. “I’ll try to be gentler. You got a lot of tangles back here.”

  Darby dropped the stick and began pulling sections of hair up to the crown of my head. Her fingertips felt like razor blades as they dragged across my scalp. It was too intense. Too fucking painful. No one had touched me like that since …

  Since her.

  “So, at the queen’s birthday party,” Darby continued, “all the stuffed animals brought presents and danced, and they even had a food fight! I have a bunch of plastic food from my play kitchen that I made them throw at each other. It was so funny. The king and queen did it too.”

  I closed my eyes and immediately saw my mam again, but this time, I wasn’t in the tub. I was in the passenger seat of her car in front of Father Henry’s house. Her eyes didn’t look right. The white parts were too red. And she had sores on her lips. She licked her fingers and raked them through my hair, telling me to be good for Father Henry. Telling me that she had to go away.

  A different set of fingers slid through my hair, tugging and twisting sections at the back, and I had to remind myself that it wasn’t her. It was Darby. Not her.

  She was gone. And she was never coming back.

  “Then, the dragons flew in and delivered the cake!” Darby cheered as her fingers slid across the back of my neck, gathering up the rest of my hair. “They also delivered a present from Sir Whiskers McLongtail. He was home sick and couldn’t make it.”

  I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t fucking breathe.

  “But the king and queen of Teddy Bear Land were so nice that when the party was over, they asked the dragons to fly them straight to Sir Whiskers’s house so that they could give him a piece of birthday cake and some chicken soup. Theeee … end!”

  Darby rested her hands on my shoulders, and my burning hot eyes filled with tears.

  “That video has almost a hundred likes now! Can you believe it?”

  Panicking, I swiped at my eyes with the heels of both hands. I couldn’t cry in front of her again. I wouldn’t.

  But I was. My fists and cheeks were smeared with tears as Darby walked around to the front of the chair.

  “Okay, sir. You’re all done. That’ll be—”

  I stood up so fast that I knocked the chair over as I bolted for the doorway.

  Everything hurt. My eyes, my throat, my lungs, that worthless fucking muscle in the center of my chest, my arms as the branches and brambles ripped and tore at them. I couldn’t think about her. I never thought about her. But D
arby’s tenderness, her touch, it had shattered the locks that kept her memories away. It had shattered me.

  I couldn’t stop the tears from falling, just like I couldn’t stop the pictures from flashing behind my eyes. A birthday cake. Her singing. A present with dinosaur paper and a bow on top.

  As Father Henry’s house came into view through the trees, the church’s steeple looming behind it, I felt as though I were being burned alive. His house was small—provided by the church for the priest to live in alone—and it sat at the back of the graveyard, on the edge of the woods.

  Racing past the cemetery, I burst through the front door and ran through the living room, where Father Henry was sitting in his armchair, watching TV.

  “Oi!” he yelled, sloshing whiskey over the side of his glass. “What’d I tell ya ‘bout slammin’ doors?!”

  I couldn’t let him see me cry either.

  My feet were loud on the wooden stairs that led up to the attic.

  Father Henry’s were louder. “Get back here!”

  I threw myself onto the bed and buried my face in the pillow just as the flip of a switch bathed the room in nicotine-colored light.

  “What the fuck did ya do to yer head, boy?” Father Henry roared. “Ya look like a fuckin’ lass!”

  I’d never heard him say the word fuck before, but whatever he was mad about, it was bad enough to make him say it twice.

  I reached up and felt the back of my head. My hair was woven into a braid that went from the crown of my head all the way down to the nape of my neck. The same way the girls wore their hair at church.

  Shite.

  I curled into a ball and covered my head with my pillow, but Father Henry ripped it out of my hands and yanked me up by the bottom of the braid.

  “I always knew ya were an abomination, but this? Under me own roof?” He spat on the floor as he dragged me off the bed.

  I struggled to stay on my feet as he pulled me across the room and over to the stairs by my hair.

  “Leviticus 18:22. Do not practice homosexuality, having sex with another man as with a woman. It is a detestable sin.”

  I didn’t know what that meant. I never knew what any of the Bible verses that he shouted at me meant—except that something bad was about to happen.

  “Leviticus 20:13. If a man practices homosexuality, having sex with another man as with a woman, both men have committed a detestable act. They must both be put to death, for they are guilty of a capital offense.”

  I didn’t want to go back downstairs. That’s where he did his rituals. Where he punished me. There was nothing in the attic for him to hit me with, other than his own belt.

  I grabbed the railing at the top of the stairs with both hands and tried not to scream as Father Henry yanked on my hair even harder.

  “Boy! You let go this instant!”

  His palm crashed against the side of my head, and my entire body swung sideways. My ribs cracked against the railing as a ringing sound exploded in my right ear. Stunned, I lost my grip on the railing, but I quickly grabbed one of the wooden spindles to keep him from dragging me down the stairs.

  Father Henry immediately grabbed my hands and began prying my fingers off the splintery rod one by one.

  I gritted my teeth and gripped the piece of wood tighter, but Father Henry was stronger. With another blasphemous curse, he bent two of my fingers backward until I cried out in pain.

  “This is a test,” he grunted, his breath hot and reeking of liquor as he wrapped his sweaty body around mine. As I felt his excitement pressed against my lower back. “The Lord knew it would take a man of the cloth to save yer wicked soul.”

  He pried another finger back and I screamed again, but I wouldn’t let go. I refused to let go.

  “I will not fail, my Lord! Do ya hear me? I … will … not … faiiiiil!”

  With an ear-splitting roar, Father Henry yanked the entire spindle free from the stair railing, sending us both crashing to the floor. I let go of it as soon as I began falling, cradling my mangled fingers to my chest.

  Father Henry did not.

  As he pushed himself to stand, hovering over me with that damn length of wood in his hand, all I could think was, Grand. Now there’s something up here for him to hit me with.

  And he did.

  ☘

  I didn’t open my eyes. Not at first anyway. I wasn’t ready to face reality all at once.

  First, I felt the wooden floor under my cheek, and I remembered where I was. Then, I felt the pain—shooting up my fingers, throbbing in my head—and I remembered how I’d gotten there.

  Stifling a sob, I sat up and brushed the hair away from my face. Only instead of sliding behind my ears, it came away on my hands like a spiderweb.

  My eyes flew open, but I couldn’t register what I was seeing. What was stuck to my fingers. What was lying in heaps all over the floor.

  Reaching up, I touched the spot just above my ear, the place where my head felt like it was going to explode. And sure enough, my fingers found a trickle of warm, sticky blood … and nothing else.

  No.

  I ran my hands over the top of my head. The back. The other side.

  No, no, no.

  Again and again, I raked my scalp, but it was gone. It was all. Fucking. Gone.

  NO!

  Boiling hot tears blurred my vision as I looked around at the sea of black waves and chunks of braid surrounding me. Loose curls rolled off my chest and pooled in my lap. At least the ones that weren’t stuck to the dried blood on my shirt.

  I swept the strands into a pile on the floor and held them in my mangled hands.

  It was mine. Mine. And he’d fucking taken it.

  “No.”

  I heard the word that time, not just in my head, but with my ears. I’d said it out loud, and I wanted to do it again.

  “No.”

  I pictured a fire blazing in my belly, turning my tears into steam before they could even fall.

  “No.”

  My blood became rivers of molten lava, melting away my sadness, my weakness, my shame, my self-hatred. Distilling it down into pure, undiluted rage.

  “No.”

  The iron door that had kept me silent for so many years melted and slid down my throat as my voice echoed off the unfinished walls, loud and clear and strong.

  “No!”

  My hands balled into fists, squeezing the hair, squeezing as hard as they could despite the pain radiating through my fingers. Then, I ripped and tore and shredded the strands until they were in a million little pieces, but it wasn’t enough.

  I wanted to kill something.

  The fire roared through me as my eyes darted around the attic, looking for something else to destroy, but everything there belonged to Father Henry. He would punish me if I so much as knocked over a glass of water. There was only one thing in that house that he didn’t care about … and that was me.

  I looked down at my arm, took a breath, and pinched it as hard as I could. My eyes squeezed shut as I twisted the skin as far as it would go, as a cooling wave of pain rushed over my shoulder, up my neck, and into my face.

  I did it again and again—my arms, my legs, my chest, my stomach—pinching, hitting, clawing, biting until the pain on the outside blanketed me, snuffing out the fire on the inside.

  But when I’d finally extinguished that bloodthirsty rage, the pain remained. The side of my head pounded. My fingers throbbed and swelled. My arms and legs screamed in a thousand different places. And my throat felt like it had been stitched shut with razor wire.

  But I was also left with a terrifying realization.

  There was something inside of me that hadn’t been put there by God. It was dark and violent and evil and cruel. It had a power all its own. And it wanted to kill.

  I knew I could never let it out again. I knew I could never let them see …

  That all along, they’d been right about me.

  CHAPTER 4

  DARBY

  “Darby, keep
up. We’re gonna be late.” My mom tugged on my hand, and I hustled to keep up despite the blisters that were forming under my hard white church shoes with every step.

  Grandpa was already fifty feet ahead of us. The church was just down the road from his house, and he always insisted on walking because driving on Sunday supposedly went against the Bible. But that didn’t make any sense to me. If Sunday was a day of rest, why was I breaking a sweat in my polyester thrift-store dress?

  Oh, right. Because of Father Henry.

  He’d really put the fear of God into his congregation. My grandfather had told us before we left that the last time someone had been late to one of his sermons, Father Henry had made them stand up in front of everyone and recite a prayer to ask “our heavenly Father” for forgiveness. Grandpa acted like it was the worst fate in the world, but to a ten-year-old who only went to church once a year, asking for forgiveness sounded a hell of a lot better than losing all the skin on my feet to those cruel shoes.

  “I can’t go any faster, Mom. My feet hurt!”

  “D’ya have any idea how mortified I’m gonna be if we have to stand up and say the Our Father in front of the entire village, and you don’t even know the words? Yer grandfather will find out I haven’t been taking ya to church.”

  She glanced down at her watch as she quickened her pace.

  “Shite. Repeat after me. Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name …”

  My mom dragged my protesting body around a curve in the road, and the chapel rose up in the distance. Gray stone. Stained glass. One tall steeple and two big, medieval-looking red doors with heavy black hardware. When I’d first come to Glenshire, I’d felt like the church wanted to eat me.

  The fact that my grandmother was buried in the cemetery out back probably hadn’t helped.

  “Okay, now, you say it.”

  “What?” I blinked up at my mom as she turned and glared at me over her shoulder.

  “Ya weren’t even listenin’! Darby! In a few minutes, Father Henry’s gonna make us stand up in front of everyone and—”

  “Can I just stay outside?”

  My mom stopped walking and turned to face me, her exhausted hazel eyes suddenly glimmering with hope. “Darby, you’re a bleedin’ genius.”