Chapter Twenty-Nine

“Dolan’s Home”

1.

The door opened, and light flooded the room. He stood there, lantern in hand, breathing heavily, like he had just run a great distance. Annabelle averted her eyes to shield herself from the bright light of the room beyond. She hoped he would take that as submissiveness.

“Well, well,” he said. It was still difficult, getting used to his real accent. He wasn’t Irish. That is, he wasn’t born in Ireland. He was American, born to Irish immigrants, but he’d travelled to Ireland to live with family there when he was twelve. His father had been a dissident, and had had to flee the country, or so the story had gone. He’d picked up the accent while there, he’d said, adding, “There’s something to how they speak over there, that makes you want to do likewise. The words almost welcome you, like a lover.”

His real accent was that of Boston, Massachusetts, slurred and irritating.

He pushed into the ring of crates he’d erected as her makeshift prison cell and crouched a few feet away, staring at her. His shoulders continued to heave. She tried to keep her eyes averted. She was sitting on the floor, hands behind her back as if still tied, and in her left hand was her sliver of wood, feeling like rough salvation.

She flinched as Dolan lunged at her. Her first instinct was to pull up her arms to shield herself, but she turned her face away instead. Dolan was very close, his hot breath in her face.

He kissed her, hard, breathing heavily through his nose. The pressure against her mouth was painful.

Dolan pulled away. “You’ll never believe what I just did,” he said. “Your―”

Annabelle drew the sliver and jammed it just under Dolan’s chin, pushing with all of her strength.

His eyes bugged, and he jerked away. He fell to the floor, flailing about like a fish that had pulled from the ocean and left to flop in the bottom of a boat.

Annabelle dove onto Dolan. Her hands roamed the pockets of his coveralls for a weapon of some kind. She came away with a knife, short of blade, but sharp. It was this she used to finish the job of killing Dolan. She did this with none of the rage she was sure she would feel, but with the coldness of a bookkeeper marking an expense into a ledger. Her calm, ironically, frightened her.