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Another sound came from the end of the table, this time of someone clearing their throat. It drew my gaze to the corner of the room where another door opened. When Iris stepped through, dressed head-to-toe in black, my heart sank. “Why are you here, Mother? Shouldn’t you be resting?”
“Not when there’s work to be done.” Her tone had taken on a thread of authority that strangely suited her.
“Maybe you can help me talk some sense into these people,” I said, gliding a hand across the room. “We need to fund rehab centres and I know the Consortium has the funds to do so.”
“So I heard,” Iris said, walking towards me. She arrived at my side and stood too close for comfort. “Sit down Rupert.”
I breathed steadily. I wasn’t interested in being shown up by this cretin of a human but I also didn’t want to put on a show for these greedy, balding men. I lowered myself into the chair then felt her nails dig into my arm. I jerked my head up to see her nod towards an empty chair next to Bertie Barrington.
I narrowed my eyes. What was she playing at?
“That’s the Caretaker’s chair you’ve assumed as your own,” Miles said in a voice filled with glee.
Iris quirked a smile and my stomach plundered into my bowels. What the fuck was going on? I stood and towered over the slight, elderly women standing before me.
“What the hell is a Caretaker?” I asked the room.
Iris slid into the huge chair, almost disappearing into it, then she pierced me with sharp, triumphant eyes.
“Will someone answer me?” I demanded.
Iris’s top lip curled in a grimace. “Sit down, son.”
I walked around the back of my newly designated chair and gripped it with white knuckles. I don’t know how much angry heat was rolling off me but Bertie moved his chair as far away as he could.
“Tell me what’s going on,” I said directly to Iris. “If you want me to assume this position, I need to know what I’ve walked into.”
She blinked and shrugged her pointed shoulders. “You are Chairman of the Consortium now, Rupert. But that doesn’t mean you get the final say in everything.” She paused to let her words sink in, then delivered the final blow. “I do.”
I almost laughed out loud. “What do you mean you get the final say? You’ve never been involved with this organisation.”
Her face was dead straight. “I’ve been involved since your grandfather created this role especially for me.”
My heart rate picked up as I realised she wasn’t bluffing. “I don’t understand.”
She rested her hands on the table and pursed her lips. “Peregrine didn’t trust his own two sons with the responsibility of a whole island. He always thought they were too soft.” She arched a brow to punctuate the point. “And he was right. As younger men, they both put on a good front, but they were too weak, too blinded by greed.”
That didn’t sound like Aro to me. “And you weren’t?” I asked.
She shifted in her seat, not at all abashed by her explanation. “I was always far more driven by power. And Peregrine knew better than anyone that power is a far greater asset to have than money.”
“So, do you decide which families are in and out? Of the Consortium?”
“I have the final say, yes.”
“And which businesses are supported, how people get on and off the island?”
“Yes, Rupert.”
“And the capped wages for the rest of the island.”
“We don’t stay rich by giving our money away, son.”
“Wait…” my heart skipped a beat. “The marriages?”
“One of my better ideas,” she said, blinking her fake eyelashes at me.
I glanced around the table. None of the people sitting around it looked like this was news to them. In fact, the more I thought about it, the more I realised I’d never once seen a Consortium member dismiss Iris in the way they dismissed the other wives on the island. Sinclair would say dismissive things behind her back to me, Hector and Ossian, but in light of this, it was more to stroke his own ego by elevating himself. When truthfully, he lived in Iris’s shadow. What saddened me the most was that Aro would have known this all along, and he hadn’t breathed a word. In all fairness, there had been a lot of new information flying about - Sinclair and Ossian’s deaths, Dax and Roses’s baby, and not least the revelation that Hector and I were not Thorns after all.
