The Hunter Page 64
Stuff like that. But I just flashed my craziest, don’t-forget-to-smile grin, which must’ve looked a lot like the promising start of a psychotic episode. “I did? How. Fucking. Fun. Please enlighten me, Father Dearest.”
Cillian finally had the courtesy to dump the document he was reading on the desk. He glanced up at me. “When you came to us about Syllie, Athair didn’t want to believe it. To me, Syllie was always a loose cannon. I took it upon myself to assign Troy Brennan to the task of seeing what he was up to, what dish Sylvester was stirring for us in the disaster pot.” Cillian delivered his speech in a matter-of-fact way that implied he was reciting a cabbage soup recipe.
So that’s why the FBI came kicking down Syllie’s door. Troy already had sufficient legally-obtained evidence on him.
“We found out what he was up to with Boris Omelniski and his little friends in Maine, about the plan to blow the refinery with us in it. We made sure it was empty and all faulty machinery had been shut down. It was a money-sucker, but we couldn’t take any risks.”
My whole body simmered with rage that threatened to choke me.
“Then why did you put me through all this bullshit?” I hissed, my teeth clenched together. “Shut me down every time I tried to warn you about him? Made me go through dozens of sleepless nights of listening to the fucker, on top of doing college work and working full time for your asses? I jumped through hoops and lived on zero sleep to prevent this bullshit…and you’re telling me you knew about it all along?”
My father stood, stepping around the desk and opening his arms. It occurred to me, albeit sadly, that no matter how badly he treated me, I still referred to him as Da, even in my head.
“Hence, you passed the test.”
“Fuck your test!” I seethed, pointing at him. “Fuck it in the ass with a twelve-inch dildo. I almost killed myself trying to save you. I bent over backwards for you. I went to war for you. I was willing to burn, to die, to perish. For. You.”
It was Cillian’s turn to stand. “As I said, it was your dirty job to pull. Pull you did, and in a timely manner. Something that, fortunately, has never been a problem for you, judging by the lack of baby mommas knocking on our door.”
“Go to hell, Cillian.” I dragged my fingers through my hair.
“Already there. It’s called life.”
“So you trusted me to crack this riddle, but not enough to rely on me?” I turned my attention back to Da.
Troy Brennan was about as ruthless and skillful as they came, and Sam Brennan was the golden child of the underworld. Those two could win a cold war with a decade-old laptop and a BB gun. That’s what they did for a living. Of course they’d unveiled Syllie’s plan before I did.
“Correct,” my father said, a twinkle of warmth in his eyes. “Needless to say, the will shall be altered accordingly. You are my heir. My child. A Fitzpatrick. You will keep your job at Royal Pipelines. And you will get a corner office, the one next to Cillian’s. You proved yourself a true member of the family, Hunter.” He opened his arms, expecting me to…what? Jump right in?
I smiled tightly. “Fuck you, your money, and your last name, old sport. If I have to earn being your family, I never will be.”
We rented a car and drove the four hours back to Boston. Hunter was silent the entire time, save for the first ten minutes, when he rehashed everything that had happened with his father and brother in a strange, detached voice that didn’t belong to him.
“That’s how little faith they had in me.”
“You didn’t exactly give them prime reason to trust you before, though.” I argued their point, not necessarily because I agreed with them, but because I knew how miserable it would make Hunter to be estranged from his family. No matter the complexities of their relationship, he loved and adored Cillian and Gerald, looked up to them. He always wanted to be like them and never thought he could.
“You sound like them.”
“You mean, logical?”
He scoffed. “Did you know about my dad hiring yours?” He sent me a sidelong glance, scowling as he continued zipping through the open road.
“Are you insane?” I asked. “Of course not.”
“And if you knew?” he pressed.
I was hoping he wouldn’t ask that. I shook my head. “I don’t answer hypothetical questions.”
“Newsflash: you’re about to answer this one,” he shot back.
“You need to calm down.”
“What I need is someone on my fucking side.”
“I am on your side,” I growled.
“You’d be in my bed, if you were,” he had the audacity to say, no trace of guilt or remorse in his words. “Yet you aren’t.”
“That’s because I’m on my side, too.”
“Meaning?” He scoffed.
“Meaning I don’t want to be any more attached to you than I already am, because you obviously don’t feel the same.”
“And if I do?” he asked after a charged pause.
I shook my head. “You don’t. You’re incapable of that. You come from a long line of adulterers. How would you know any different?”
He sat back, shaking his head. I immediately knew how awful that sounded. How disgusting I was to him. “Cat’s out of the bag now. So if I’m a serial adulterer like my parents, does that mean you’re going to be carving people’s faces like a pumpkin like your daddy? Are we playing the gene game now? ’Cause rest assured, darling, we may not be the same brand of fuck-up, but we are both far from the realms of normalcy.”
I said nothing. He was right.
Hunter continued, “What would it take for you to know I’m serious about this? About us? A grand gesture? A binding contract? A fucking ring?”
“Maybe stop being ashamed of me. Of us,” I bit back. “That could have been enough.”
I referred to the night with Knight and Luna, to all the times he’d minimized whatever it was we’d had. I was sure he caught the reference.
Hunter got a text message. He opened it, driving.
“Fuck,” he muttered, throwing his phone to the central console as more text messages poured in, lighting his screen in white. His screensaver was a picture of a woman’s ass with the saying: Go hard or go home.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” he punched the steering wheel, seething. “I need to catch a plane to London. Something came up.”
“What?” I asked, incredulous.
“Vaughn,” he said, as if that explained everything. “I’m dropping you off at home. Hopefully I’ll be able to keep my pants on while I’m there. As for you, try not to kill anyone, yeah?”
Now a week had passed since Hunter grabbed me by the arm and stormed out of the refinery apartments in Maine. It was the first time since he was a boy in the rain that I’d seen him truly broken.
I hadn’t heard from him since he’d left for London. I didn’t want to ask Aisling about him, but of course I couldn’t help myself. She said he’d gone for the weekend and hadn’t been picking up anyone’s calls. When I finally broke down and visited his apartment, he wasn’t there.
Not two days ago, and not yesterday, long after he was supposed to be back, according to Ash.
Hunter had disappeared, and with him, my favorite summer.
“Thank you so much for doing this. I know how much you loathe the media.” Vanessa Shieling of the Good Morning, Boston! show leaned forward and tapped my thigh, a veneered smile on her face.
There was something almost clownish about her Botox-enhanced perfection. Her carefully swept blonde hair was too shiny, too put-together. She straightened her back in her seat, brushing nonexistent wrinkles from her A-line red dress.
“How do you know I dislike interviews?”
She wasn’t wrong. The best part about retiring from archery was I didn’t have to talk to the media anymore. Because while Royal Pipeline’s refinery didn’t explode, the Junsu and Lana case did. The media wanted my side of the story. I refused, but then Crystal, whom I still had a contract with, argued that by not addressing it, I was letting the rumors about my own misconduct roam free.
“You did nothing wrong, at least this decade. You killed her dog, not her parents,” she spat over the phone, and I cringed. But she wasn’t wrong. I needed to set the record straight once and for all.
“Thirty seconds,” the director of the show called from the depths of the darkness in front of the well-lit studio. There was a whole other world in front of the stage, with Boston’s landscape in the background—one with cameras and wires and people with head mics and frantic assistants, living in the shadows of the glamorous TV world. There was also an audience. The seats were jam-packed and full of viewers.
Vanessa gave the director the thumbs-up. “We have everything we need?”
“Yup,” he answered.
Everything they needed? I didn’t like the sound of that.
“Ready?” She turned to ask me.
“As I ever will be,” I muttered.