Her gaze begins to water in sadness, provoked both by the endearment and by the harsh truth of my words.
“Don’t shed tears for me, lass. These scars no longer hurt me as much as they used to. They only serve as a reminder.”
“A reminder of what?”
“That monsters exist.”
And that all you can do is hope you become an even bigger monster to scare the others away.
She pulls away by taking a step back, a stern expression overtaking her delicate facial features.
“Just tell me. Was it my family? My father? My brother? Did one of them do this to you?”
I shake my head, to which she immediately lets out a sigh of relief, her stiff stance instantly relaxing with the knowledge her family had no part in hurting me. I don’t have the heart to tell her that even though her family wasn’t responsible for my scars, they had a hand in creating Tiernan’s.
I pick up her hand and place a tender kiss to her open palm before letting it drop again to her side. I then turn to the painting, this one, oddly enough, of a forest deprived of sunlight. Its darkness calls out to me and pulls me back to a night where the sky was pitch black, and only my childhood home burning up in flames illuminated it.
“I was sixteen when it happened,” I begin to explain, my gaze fixed on the painting, almost as if I’m being transported to that fateful night. “It started off as just another ordinary summer night in Ireland. Nothing gave me the inkling that after that night, I would never sleep in my bed again. I had spent most of my day with my Da and Patrick in town running some errands for my Ma. It was blissfully normal. Maybe if it wasn’t, I would have been able to predict what was about to happen.”
“Patrick was with you? As in Tiernan and Shay’s brother, Patrick?”
“Aye. My uncle Niall had been worried about Patrick’s mental wellbeing and constant melancholy. He thought sending him to spend the summer with us would improve his sullen disposition. Boston was in a full-fledged war at the time, with too many deaths to count. My cousin had always been softer compared to his brothers and sister. His bleeding heart just couldn’t withstand attending another funeral, so my uncail thought sending him off to stay with us for a few months would lift his spirits. Maybe all my cousin needed was a change of scenery to get him out of the depressive state he had been in.”
I frown, thinking how wrong that assumption was. Maybe if Patrick had stayed back in Boston, he’d still be alive somehow. I know for a fact that if he had, my family would be.
“Anyway, I was just happy to have someone my own age around. Most boys our age were already sworn into the war, fighting the good fight, but both Da and my Uncle Niall were reluctant to have us play a role in it. Uncail had his obvious reasons for keeping Patrick out of the war, and as for my Da… well… he had plenty of his own, too.” I shrug despondently. “I was his only son, you see? Aside from me, my parents only had daughters. Three of them, to be precise. Aoife, Riona, and my baby sister of just eight months, Ciara. They were little rugrats, the lot of them, and though I loved them dearly, a part of me also resented them for not being boys. If they were, then maybe my father wouldn’t have kept me from fighting in fear of losing his only heir.”
I kick the air at my feet, hating how bloody ignorant and headstrong I had been that summer—always giving my Da a hard time for not letting me fight and complaining about it twenty-four-seven. My resentment had grown worse over the past couple of years after news broke out that Tiernan joined in the war. Since my uncail had three sons, he had no reservation in having Tiernan pick up a gun and fight for his family. There was no need for him to be cautious with his eldest when there were two more sons in line to take his throne if the worst was to happen. But if my uncle ever had an ounce of fear that he’d made a mistake, then Tiernan exceeding all expectations only solidified that he had made the right decision. Everywhere I went, people talked about how my cousin was making the Kelly name proud. Even from across the pond, news of my cousin’s exploits in the war sounded more like tales of legends. You couldn’t go into a pub and not hear Tiernan’s name. All of Ireland was in utter awe of his bravery and calculating mind, and I desperately wanted to be at his side and have people sing my praises, too.
How fucking vain I was then.
I don’t even recognize that boy anymore.
Not that it’s surprising.
That Colin Kelly died that night, too.
“Anyway,” I continue on with my shameful rant. “Safe to say that at the time, I didn’t know any better and resented my father for restricting me and ordering me to stay put with my sisters. Now I realize he just wanted to protect me. Keep me safe as long as he could. Give me a childhood when most boys my age had been deprived of one.”
“Sounds to me like your father loved you very much.”
“Aye, that he did. I just wish I had told him how much I loved him while I had the chance instead of acting like a brat.”
“I would have never used that word to describe you,” she says, a trace of a smile playing on her lips.
“Aye, but that’s what I was back then. Blame it on the Kelly gene. We’re all cocky assholes when we’re young. Some of us never outgrow it.”
“Are you saying that you were like Shay?” She laughs.
“Ah, lass, I wasn’t that bad. Just headstrong, that’s all. At sixteen, I thought I was a man. It took that night happening for me to figure out I wasn’t,” I chastise myself.
“You don’t have to tell me more if you don’t want to, Colin. It’s okay if you don’t.”
I shake my head.