Page 52 of The Beast
Not love. I knew what I felt for Daniel and it wasn't that and it had never been quite that, and I understood that now more clearly than I had. But something adjacent to it—the familiarity of him, the safety. The way he existed in this kitchen like a piece of furniture that had always fit, comfortable and known, and the particular ache of recognizing something you were going to lose.
With Daniel, nothing had ever been complicated. No aliases. No federal agents in my studio. No brother. No ambushes in the night that he was pulled away to handle. With Daniel, Sunday mornings were Mass and brunch and the newspaper and a life that stayed inside its lanes.
I had left that life. I didn't take it back.
But sitting in my parents' kitchen with the raid and Craine and Brock's voice sayingthe only thing in this whole mess I care about is standing in front of meand my mother's face stripped bare—I let myself feel, for thirty seconds, exactly how much easier everything would have been if I had just kept walking down that aisle.
"Thank you for coming, Daniel," I said.
He looked at me. He had the eyes of a man who had been through something and was carrying it cleanly, without accusation, which was the most Daniel thing he could have done.
"Of course," he said.
My mother put the kettle on.
And the five of us—four Donovans and one very decent man who deserved better than any of this—sat in the kitchen where I had grown up and let the Sunday morning have us.
Somewhere across the city, a man I had known for one day and had already let inside every wall I owned was standing in a studio full of my private work, and I was not there, and I did not know yet what that cost.
I would find out. But not right now. Right now, the family needed me here.
I folded my hands on the table, and I stayed.
22
BROCK
Ilet her go.
Of course, I let her go. What was I going to do—stand in the door of her own studio and keep her from her father on the worst morning of his life? I'm a lot of bad things. I'm not that.
So, I stepped aside when she saidmove,and I watched her take the stairs, and I listened to her car start down on Wentworth and pull away, and then I was alone in a room full of the truest thing she had with nothing left in my hands.
And I wanted to tear the world down to the studs.
It came up in me fast and black and familiar, the thing I keep chained in the cellar—it wanted blood. It wanted to find Craine and put him in the ground. It wanted the militia, every backwoods one of them, lined up and gone. It wanted anybody whose hand had touched what just happened to that family, wanted them all, and it wanted it bad, because there is one cure I have always known for a feeling this size and I have spent my whole life administering it to other men.
I stood in the quiet and made myself breathe. Brought it down a notch. Then another. You don't run an op hot. Hot men make mistakes and mistakes get people killed, and the only person in this city I'd die before I let get killed had just driven off hating me.
So, I cooled it, and I made myself think the thing through clean.
And clean, it kept pointing the same direction. Back at that house. Back at Dominion Hall.
Sure, Craine was a corrupt son of a bitch. Sure, he was running the federal machine for his own ends, leaning on a frightened woman, tearing apart an honest man's life to make a point. But I'd been around the world twice and I'll tell you a hard truth I learned out there: that's not special. That's every day. That's what men with a little power and no conscience have been doing since the first king put the first crown on. Craine wasn't a monster. He was a bureaucrat with a long enough reach to be dangerous. I had no more use for hating him than I had for hating the weather.
I'd watched good men—friends, brothers in arms—tie themselves in knots over Washington. How to find the rats. How to drain the swamp. How to fix a thing that had been broke on purpose since before any of us were born.
I never caught the disease.
I'm a simple man about it. I don't have politics. I have targets.
If a problem can be solved with a bullet, it's mine, and if it can't, it belongs to somebody with more patience and less sense than me. Fuck Washington. Fuck the Bureau and its incorruptibles. And fuck Dominion Hall, most of all, for being the reason the rats came scratching at Mary Catherine Donovan's door.
Because that was the part I couldn't think my way around. None of this rain falls on her if her path doesn't cross mine, and her path doesn't cross mine if I'm not in this city, and I'm not in this city except that my brother got tangled up in whatever that mansion really is. The line ran straight. Her father's ruin started in that house.
So, I made up my mind, standing there in the paint smell with the morning going on outside like the world hadn't tipped over.
I'd go back. I'd find Tommy and I'd have it out with him, plain as I knew how. I'd tell him our time in Charleston was finished—mine, his, all of it. I'd tell him Dominion Hall owed the Donovans a debt and was going to pay it, every dollar of that business made whole, every box returned, the father's name cleaned, and they were going to do itnow,tonight, with whatever money and lawyers and leverage a place like that obviously had lying around. And once it was fixed, we were gone. Done. I'd pull my brother out of that pit by the collar, if I had to.
