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I nodded. “Thanks.”
After a heartbeat of silence, Noah asked, “How awful is it in there?”
“It’s your funeral if you go in there,” I warned him. “Mam will be on you next, asking where your wife and children are.”
“Luckily, my mam is happy with Lochlan and Aran giving her grandchildren,” he remarked seriously. “I’d probably lose my mind if she were as bad as Aunt Nessa.”
Getting back to the more important subject at hand, I asked, “Do you know what Donaldson is doing back in town?”
Noah shook his head. “Not yet. Honestly, I think he was just waiting for that shit with Congressman Oliver to die down. After all, men with sicknesses like that can’t lay low for long.”
“You’re not wrong,” I agreed.
“There’s also a rumor that Klive Simpson is becoming visible again,” he went on. “After the Sartoris got their hands on Brewster Pushkin, Klive and his group have been kind of quiet, but I guess they’re back.”
I glanced back at my parents’ house, knowing that my mother would kill me if I left this early. So, doing the only thing that I could, I said, “You’re going to go in there with me, let my mam see you, then when we say that we have to leave in fifteen minutes, she’ll go easy on me.”
Noah laughed. “If people could see the great Declan O’Brien now.”
“They have no fucking idea,” I muttered, ready for this goddamn dinner to be over with.
Chapter 2
Keavy~
I glanced around the cabin, checking every single detail. Though it really was located out in the middle of nowhere, you never knew who could come wandering about. Hunters and hikers got lost all the time, even if you didn’t include the riffraff that just liked to get into shit. The cabin looked run-down enough to invite mischief, and there was never a shortage of people that liked to start trouble.
Luckily, everything looked exactly as it’d had the last time that I’d been here. Nothing looked out of place, and my consideration to detail was keen enough for me to trust what I was seeing. Now, anyone paying attention would notice that the windows, though filthy, were double-paned and new. There were small clues like that everywhere in the cabin, and I even had a hidden security system wired around the property, making sure to alert my phone in the event that anything was amiss.
Sitting down on the only chair in the kitchen area, I couldn’t help but feel the weight of the past take over like it usually did whenever I visited the cabin. However, it wasn’t a regretful kind of weight, more of a weight tinged with loneliness. When you lost the only person in the world that loved you, for better or for worse, it changed you, and losing Cian O’Connell had definitely changed me.
Though Cian had done his best to keep me connected to my parents, babies didn’t bond with fading memories. My parents, Oran and Sile Collins, had died in a tragic car accident when I’d been only six months old, so I had no memories of them. It’d been one of those unfortunate situations where the icy roads had won, and they’d both been killed immediately. The old news articles had attested to that, so I’d felt good upon learning those facts as I’d gotten older. I hadn’t wanted to believe the worst of the man that had raised me, even though it could be argued that I’d been kidnapped.
When my parents had wrecked their car, I’d been in the back, safely secured in my car seat. Though the car had been flipped and destroyed beyond conceivable use, I’d been bundled up with enough cushion to protect me against the steel wreckage.
According to Cian, he had come upon the accident, had heard me crying somewhere in the middle of all the mess, then had dug me out of the rubble. However, instead of waiting for the authorities or calling for help, Cian had taken me back to his cabin, then had raised me as his own after that. To his credit, he had saved every article on my parents, teaching me all about them and how my father had been an electrician, and how my mother had been an insurance firm secretary. He’d also shown me all the articles about their missing child, and the police had looked for me until they’d lost all hope almost a year later. The theory was that I’d been carted off by a wild animal, leaving nothing left of me behind.
Now, while most people would have righted that wrong once they’d gotten older, Cian’s reasons for taking me had always given me a sense of belonging that I wasn’t sure I would have felt anywhere else, even with my parents. He’d been a crazy old man with no one, and he’d seen the accident as a sign from God. He had convinced himself that I’d been sent to him, so Cian O’Connell had raised me like being a father had been his only purpose in life.
Nevertheless, I could admit that my upbringing had been…unusual. Cian had home-schooled me, though the internet had done its job to connect me to the outside world. Yeah, the signal had been spotty at best, but it’d been enough to keep me from being ignorant of the way that the real world worked. Now, for being crazy, unconventional, and puzzling, Cian had also been touched with a bit of brilliance; perhaps that’s why he’d been crazy. It was said that highly intelligent people were a bit eccentric, and Cian had definitely been a bit eccentric.
Now, not only had Cian taught me academics beyond what’d been taught in regular schools, but he’d also taught me the art of survival. At the age of five, he’d started taking me out to teach me how to hunt, identify plant life, withstand the cold, and anything else that you could think of when a person lived in the middle of the woods. In fact, I could remove a bullet, brew certain plants to act as antibiotics, reset broken bones, and a few other life-saving talents.
I also shot better than most military snipers. I also knew how to make a bomb, albeit small ones, but still. If that weren’t enough, I could also dismantle many guns, then put them back together with my eyes damn near shut. I also knew how to make my own bullets, and I knew how to make a silencer.
There was also my ability to make most foods from scratch. Whether in the kitchen or over a campfire, I knew how to feed myself with whatever was handy, even if I had no fire, to be honest. I could also build shelter, though nothing that would ever appear in Architect Digest. Cian had raised me to be a true survivalist, so everything that I had and everything that I knew, I owed it all to Cian O’Connell. Honestly, I wouldn’t be the person that I was today if not for that man.
Then, five years ago, Cian had passed away, and that’s when I’d found out that his crazy hadn’t extended to irresponsible. Over the years, I had asked him where he’d get his money from, but he had always brushed me off, grumpily telling me to mind my own business. So, trusting Cian with my life, the same way that I’d been doing all my life, I had stopped prying after a while, just letting things be.
However, after Cian had passed away, I’d finally learned the truth through the contents of his will, and I’d been shocked beyond belief. Apparently, Cian hadn’t always been a recluse, and during his younger years, he had created a complicated surveillance program that the defense department of the United States had purchased, netting Cian millions. Upon his death, he had left it all to me, and that was when I had finally moved from the cabin into town.
At first, the experience had been a bit overwhelming, but I’d also been grieving at the time, so that’d had a lot to do with it. I’d never been alone before, so it’d taken me a while to wrap my mind around Cian’s glaring absence. Right or wrong, his reasons forgivable or not, he’d been my entire world, and he’d been the best father in that world. He had unselfishly given me every minute of his day, then had made sure that I’d be able to survive without him when that day came.
Glancing around the cabin, though spotless, it looked decrepit. It looked like no one in their right mind would live here and like the roof would cave in on you at any moment. What no one knew was that there was a trapdoor concealed within the floorboards, and down the single flight of stairs, there was a basement full of firearms that would land me in prison for life if ever discovered. None of the items were registered, and many of them were illegal. Granted, I could argue that Cian had purchased them all, but the police could easily counter with why I hadn’t turned them in upon Cian’s death. The answer to that was an easy one; this place reminded me of Cian. Everything about this place reminded me of my childhood with the man that had raised me the best that he could, believing that all children were a gift from God, and that I’d been hand-delivered to him.
I also hadn’t forgotten the lessons that he’d taught me. Once a month, I came out here and hunted, camped, and fell back into my roots. I worked as a bartender Thursday through Sunday, so I had lots of free time, thanks to my inheritance. While I didn’t need the money, I wasn’t used to doing nothing, and Cian would have been disappointed to see me become a spoiled trust fund asshole.
As for any real friendships or connections, I had none. Oh, there were customers that I chatted with, and there were a few one-night-stands in my past, but I wasn’t made for a relationship. While I wouldn’t say that I was as…unusual as Cian had been, I was definitely different. I knew more about guns than I did shoes, and I liked myself just as I was. Living in the woods, dressed in camouflage, surrounded by the bare minimum…that’s what I was comfortable with. The cabin was where I felt like me, my apartment in the city feeling like a role that I was playing sometimes.
