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“Shut the fuck up.”
Cain’s smile disappears. “You think I want this?”
“I think you do whatever Father tells you to do and convince yourself thinking about it first makes you different from the rest of us.”
His eyes flash.
Good. What I said isn’t true, of course. But it will make him think.
“I think,” I continue, “that Father is angry. I think he’s afraid of Samson losing focus. I think he wants Samson reminded where his loyalty belongs. But kill him?” I shake my head. “No. Father wouldn’t want that.”
Cain stares. “What makes you think any of this is Father’s idea?”
Man…
I know better than to ever underestimate my father or my younger brother. One is evil, and the other is evil’s spawn. Will Cain truly live up to his name? Will he kill his brother?
And if he’s willing to kill Samson, he’d be willing to kill me.
“Samson doesn’t need to die,” I say. “He needs to be convinced he’s fucking up.”
Cain tilts his head. “And how would you convince him?”
“By talking to him.” I can hardly keep a straight face. I’ve told Sam ad nauseum that Delaney is a weakness, but he hasn’t budged. “By making him understand what Delaney is costing him.”
Samson and Cain have never been brothers in any easy sense of the word. They’re too different and too alike in all the wrong ways. Samson is brute force shaped into a man. Cain is precision made flesh. Samson breaks doors. Cain convinces people to open them.
I stand between them and call it balance.
What a fucking joke.
“So you think you can convince him?” Cain asks.
“No one convinces Sam of anything,” I reply.
“My point exactly,” Cain says. “If Samson has been compromised by a woman who distracts him, who changes his priorities, who makes him weak in ways Father can’t tolerate, what would you do if your”—air quotes—“talking doesn’t work?”
I say nothing.
Cain’s eyes sharpen. “Simply kill the woman?”
My bowels churn as I go rigid. Yesterday morning, that would have been my answer.
Sam is an asset. My role would have been to protect the asset by any means necessary and then create the public story clean enough for everyone else to swallow.
That’s what I do.
Yesterday, I would have known exactly what to say.
But now…
Ella’s face rises in my mind.
Not the way she looked in the ballroom, though that would be bad enough. Not the silver dress, soft hair, candlelight touching her skin.
No.
Worse.
