Page 145

“Thirty years, Graves. For thirty years I trusted you with the things closest to me. My business. My enemies.” His eyes flick to me. “My son.”

“Alasdair,” Graves says.

My father raises one hand to silence him. “I gave you one duty above all others. Train him to win. Keep him close and make sure he knows his place.”

My pulse slows.

“He didn’t know about Sera,” I say. “I sent the staff home for the night and told Graves I wanted to be alone.”

Graves looks at me, no fear in his face when my father’s arm moves in a blur, and a gunshot rings through the barn.

Graves’s head snaps back.

Blood spatters my face, hits the brick wall behind him, and covers his boxing gloves.

For half a stuttered heartbeat, he stays standing, then his knees weaken, and he drops.

Everything inside me drops with him.

The barn disappears.

The heavy downpour outside dulls.

The blood-spattered mats blur.

My father’s expression stays blank.

My fucking breath stalls.

Graves' body hitting the mats is an image I’ll replay until the day I die.

But I stand there with blood on my face, and his dead body at my feet, and I give my father nothing.

Not the break in my chest.

Not the scream behind my teeth.

Not the boy in me reaching for the only man who ever taught him how to survive this house.

Not. A. Fucking. Thing.

“You see?” he says. “Consequence.”

My father tucks his gun away.

“Now we will discuss Sera Tallon.”

The conversation should break something loose in me. But I lock it down so fast that I go numb.

That’s when I give him my eyes.

“Your sister embarrassed me by fucking Tallon scum. You will not,” he says. “I’m going to ruin that family once and for all, and you’re going to help me. Marry the Kinnane girl, or the next body to fall will be Sera’s.”

I stay quiet and let him think he’s still ordering the heir he made to toe the line.

He has no idea that son is dead on the mats with Graves.

“I mean it, Fionn,” he says over his shoulder as he walks to the door. “I’ll kill that bitch if you go near her again.”