That’s when their father entered the frame.
Andrew hissed a breath. God, he’d never forget those bitter lines around his father’s mouth or the rolled up sleeves that showed off a faded, low-quality New York Jets tattoo. But he’d forgotten the impact the whole package of his father had on him. The discomfort and fear and resentment he incited. Those fists, the ones he had balled at his sides, had been weapons that Andrew never managed to duck in time. Or help his mother avoid completely. The man himself had been a weapon.
Now, Andrew’s father watched the fight taking place in his bar with an air of amused boredom. He tried to break it up once by dragging one tourist off the other, but they went back to throwing blows and their father eventually pulled out a cell phone, dialing and pressing it to his ear. Andrew knew from experience that law enforcement tended to keep close tabs on the boardwalk, so he wasn’t surprised when a cop walked into the bar within minutes.
He was definitely familiar.
“Handler,” Andrew breathed, sitting back. “There he is.”
The fighting tourists were growing fatigued, one sitting on the ground holding the hem of his shirt to his bleeding nose, the other pacing around with a limp, but they were still mouthing off. One of them must have said something particularly offensive, because the man on the ground lunged to his feet. Handler stepped in between them before they could converge, holding them apart by the necks of their shirts.
Their father started to step in to keep the idiots apart—but before he could, one of them pulled something black out of his back pocket. What happened next was instantaneous. The man lifted the black object between the man and Handler.
Handler drew his gun and fired a bullet into the man’s midsection.
The man who’d been shot dropped the object he’d been holding and it fell silently to the ground in plain view of the camera.
“Jesus Christ,” Jamie said.
“It was a cell phone,” Rory muttered. “He shot the guy over a cell phone—”
Handler paced away, ripping his free hand through his hair.
And then he turned and fired a single shot at the second tourist, who dropped like a stone and didn’t move again.
Andrew jerked back, his brain struggling to play catch up. “Oh my God.”
The Prince brothers watched in silence for long moments as their father and Handler locked the door the Castle Gate and engaged in a heated discussion. Finally, after about ten minutes had passed, Andrew’s father started to clean up the scene, eventually dragging the lifeless bodies out of the frame. The screen went dark.
“Part of me wishes I’d never seen that,” Jamie said, pacing around the desk with his hands stacked on top of his head. “They were just a couple of drunk kids.”
Rory stared silently at the closed office door leading to the dining room. “Yeah. That could have easily been me,” he muttered thickly. “God knows I’ve been in enough senseless bar fights in my life.”
“No one deserves to get killed over something like that,” Andrew said quietly, his mouth dry as dust. “Dad helped him cover it up. I have to assume Handler threatened him with the same health code violations and bullshit citations he used on me.”
“Maybe,” Jamie said. “But the public knowledge that a double murder happened in the bar would have been bad enough. It would have killed what little business he had left.”
Rory and Andrew made a sound of agreement.
“Look, what happened was awful.” Rory pointed at the laptop. “But the video is useful, whether we like it or not.”
“Nah. He still knows about what I did,” Andrew said, shaking his head.
Rory scoffed. “He has receipts and a suspicion, A. You have a cop on video shooting a guy for pulling out a cell phone. Hiding bodies and evidence. This is a totally different league.”
“He’s right,” Jamie said. “The means of getting free of this aren’t ideal, but the alternative is living in the shadow of our father forever.”
“What about the families of those guys?” Andrew pushed to his feet and crossed the room. “They just never find out what happened to them?”
“Nothing is fair about this,” Rory said, stopping in front of Andrew and gripping his shoulder, shaking him a little. “But what’s done is done. We can’t change it. We’ve got one play to make now and we’re going to make it.”
“Andrew.” Jamie came to a stop beside Rory. “Don’t you see you’ve been punishing yourself for years over what happened with Dad? The ridiculous hours you work, not letting yourself be with Jiya. You saved our mother from being killed that night. We made a mistake not calling the police and we can’t take it back now. But you can leave it in the past now and be happy. You’re allowed to be happy.”