I squinted at him, at the hint of truth I heard in his voice, but I turned to my boys and asked, "What do you think? Is he lying?"
"I’m not!" he shrieked. "I’m not, I swear it! P-P-Please don’t kill me. P-P-Please! I swear, I won’t tell the cops—"
Laughter barked from me as I loomed over him again. "You bet your ass you won’t tell them." I smirked. "Of course, you don’t mind having your ass played with, do you? Maybe you want to go to jail? Maybe we’ll find a nice big motherfucker who’ll make you his bitch. Get you hooked on Big Daddy cock until your asshole’s bigger than the craters on the fucking moon—"
"I swear, I didn’t do anything," he yelled, "I just facilitated meetings when they requested them, put people in contact—"
"What kinds of meetings? Who did you put in contact?"
"I don’t know. I just arranged for hotel rooms and made sure restaurants were booked for private events."
"You mean to tell me they treated you like a fucking concierge?"
He swallowed, something shifting in his eyes that told me he’d just given me a semi truth. Semis didn’t work for me.
Wandering over to the wall of tools, I found a blow torch, then as I returned to his side, I knocked him so he was on his back, feet raised. I clicked the blow torch on and pressed the flame to his heel.
As his skin wept and blistered while I broiled his soles, he screamed, "I shared what I learned in confession!"
Pulling the flame back, I shot a look at my boys. "What do you think? The whole truth and nothing but the truth?"
"I think so," Finn rasped as he moved toward the Archbishop. When he kicked him in the head, I watched on in surprise.
My second eldest didn’t like wet work. It wasn’t his style, even if he’d come through the ranks like every good Five Pointer, but when he pressed his shoe to the Archbishop’s throat and added his weight to the guy’s windpipe, I knew he was about to displace his own rage, was going to project his own abuser onto the fucker lying here.
"And what about the pedophiles you helped shelter?" Junior intoned, hobbling over so we were all peering down at the bastard. "What about the kids who were abused on your watch?"
My hand tightened around the canister as Finn loosened his step on his windpipe so the fucker could talk.
"That was the Church. Not the Sparrows," he gasped, like that made it much better.
I pressed the flame to the flesh between his big toe and second toe, and listened to his screams as if it were a choral symphony from the angels above.
His pain soothed my own.
His blood stemmed mine as if I were pressing the flame to my wounds and cauterizing them.
His screams made peace flood my ears.
That was when I pressed the flame to his cassock and I let it catch fire. As he screamed, I grabbed the fire extinguisher and when his roars of pain reached fever pitch, I extinguished the flames.
I did that two more times over the next three hours, and I didn’t stop until he was one big boiled blister. Until his skin morphed from red like a lobster who’d been thrown in with a crawfish boil into a nice charred black.
That was when Junior found the salt we threw on the driveway when it was snowing.
If my boy had a signature move, it was rubbing salt in the wound. I figured that said a lot about him. Figured it told me the manner of the man—a sin couldn’t just be repented, it had to be felt.
As I watched him drag his hand along the raw exposed flesh of the Archbishop’s torso, that was when the Archbishop slurred a name, "Justin DeLaCroix."
Finn stopped helping Junior by dredging the bastard’s body in salt, and stilled. "The Chief Justice of the Supreme Court?"
The Archbishop rocked his head forward. "Please, just kill me now. Please."
"What does DeLaCroix have to do with anything?" I rasped.
"I didn’t lie," he whispered, tears puddling on either side of his face where it rested on the floor. "We don’t meet, we just wait on calls. We’re directed where to go, what to do, and when. But we all know who DeLaCroix is."
"And what’s that?" I snapped when he took a few seconds to reply, pressing the flame to his feet again until he howled:
"Our Commander-in-chief."
A knock sounded at the garage doors, a soft knock, one I’d heard many times in the years of our marriage, and though my brain reeled at what the fucker on the ground had just revealed, I snapped, "Keep him quiet."
Finn’s foot covered the Archbishop’s mouth, and he twisted his face to the side with the pressure as I rushed over to the garage entrance.
When the motorized doors rolled up, I saw her, and when she caught sight of me, she didn’t even flinch. Lena had seen me look worse than this in her time, and she loved me despite the shit I did.
Of course, I loved her too.
I was a monster. Monsters didn’t love, or so they’d told me at my Catholic school when I was whipped for the various shit I did, but Lena held my heart.
She held it in her fucking grasp, and even though I’d broken her, even though my actions and my job had led to her experiencing some things that no woman should have to endure, she still looked at me with love in her eyes.
She was why I had to go to heaven.
She was why I needed the boys to get there too.
Because for all she’d let me make them into the men they were today, and for all that would make her a sinner in another mother’s eyes, there was nothing more important than the eternity in paradise that was awaiting us once this miserable life was over.
What mother, who loved her kids as much as Lena did, what father, who loved his boys as much as I did, wouldn’t want those same children to be in heaven with them? To be at peace after a lifetime’s war?
"The children can hear, Aidan," Lena told me softly, and I heard the chiding note to the words, a reprimand that she’d never have given me at one point.
It’d taken a rolling pin to the head to make me see her for what she was—my soul mate. Only when I’d pushed her past her limits had she opened herself up to me, revealing that we were two peas in a pod. Two beings capable of the worst thing humanity had to offer. Two monsters who could only find peace in each other’s arms. "Jacob won’t stop crying, and Shay’s nervous. He knows what you’re doing."
"I have no choice."
She frowned. "It’s Christmas. Of course you have a choice." She tutted as she raised a hand and pressed it to my forehead. "What have you been doing with yourself?" Uncaring of the gore on me, uncaring of the mess, the blood on me, she stepped nearer and repeated, "I thought I told you you weren’t allowed to do that anymore?" She was talking about banging my head into walls. "You promised me you’d stop that, Aidan."
I swallowed at her reprimand. "I know I did. I didn’t even know I was doing it."
Her scowl deepened. "What’s going on?"
Once upon a time, I’d never have told her.
Then the Aryans had taken her. Then they’d broken her. Then I’d broken them. Then I’d taken them. There was a symmetry in everything, but only the truth had helped my Lena. Only knowing what I’d done to them had helped her sleep at night, better than any chemicals the doctor could prescribe.