My smile was tight. “Never better.”
Her concern was clear, but she nodded, and I felt her gaze on me as I trudged out of the office and past the snooty assistant.
The second I approached my father, he grabbed my arm. I didn’t wince, even though it hurt. I locked my pain behind a mask, refusing to let him beat me in that way.
I wasn’t like Camille or Victoria, I didn’t cower or whimper in the face of his fury.
Tipping my chin up when he jerked me over to the side of the warehouse that was farthest from the assistant, I almost breathed a sigh of relief when he didn’t drag me outside.
That he didn’t told me he was frightened of Eoghan, and more relief filtered through me at the realization.
God, I was so glad Eoghan was a serial killer. Okay, sniper. Same difference.
I mean, I knew I shouldn’t be happy that my husband had killed a lot of people, but fuck. What a lifesaver.
Irony—well aware.
“What did you say to him?”
I didn’t bother backtalking, didn’t bother giving him the deadeye. If anything, I kept my face blank and stated, “He saw the bruises.”
“You lie,” he growled out, his face turning purple like he’d been squeezed. He used to be a handsome man, and I knew most of his kids had his looks, me included, but I looked more like Mama with my coloring and shape. My sisters were all curves, me? I was a little like a ruler with butt. My tits were small but round, and I could rock the shit out of a bra, nothing more, nothing less.
Still, I looked like Mama, and I knew he almost held that against me.
I got it.
He’d loved her.
Adored her even.
And he’d gotten her killed.
He’d been the reaper of his own misery, and to a man like my father, guilt did not sit well on his shoulders.
He was losing his hair, and it was thinning at the sides too, his face held lines from stress but not laughter, and at the moment, on the brink of apoplexy, he looked like a massive beet in a black suit.
“Not impossible,” I countered calmly. “He saw the bruises.”
“I paid to make sure he didn’t.”
“Well, he did.” I almost snapped those words at him, but managed to pull it off at the last moment. “I said nothing. I had no time to say anything.”
His eyes widened at the thought, then they were back to squinting at me. “In the church, with the register—”
“He saw the bruises,” I repeated. “You touched his property.”
That had a hiss escaping him, and even as outrage flushed through him, I saw the calculation in his eyes.
He knew Eoghan was right.
I had been his property.
The second Father had signed me away two years before my damn wedding day, I’d become Eoghan’s. Father had to protect my chastity, had to keep me locked away, because if any taint fell on me, that would fall on him.
And Eoghan would be well within his rights to rain hell on my father’s shoulders.
“You shouldn’t have angered me,” Father snapped, out of the blue.