Leo was my youngest brother, but, in many ways, he seemed older than me. He’d already met the woman he planned to marry and was more settled down than any of the three of us. Of course, Harvey would have been the most settled, had he been allowed to live long enough to marry his bride.
“Leo agrees with me.”
“Of course he does,” I muttered, folding my arms and shaking my head.
“He has people he wants to protect. He knows that when something like this kicks off, no one is safe.”
“It already has kicked off,” I growled, “but we weren’t the ones to do the fucking kicking.”
“There’s something else I need you to think about,” he said.
I didn’t like the sound of that. “What is it?”
“If the day comes where we learn for a fact that the Gilligans were the ones behind Harvey’s murder, we’re still going to be in the same position unless we have the Wynters onside.”
I took a couple of steps towards him, and agony twisted in my thigh. I took a note out of my father’s playbook and did my best to not let the pain from my old injury show on my face, though it made me want to grit my teeth and growl.
“What the fuck are you talking about. The Gilligans murdered the man Hallie Wynter was about to marry, at her own fucking wedding. How can the Wynters not already be onside?”
“That’s not enough, and you know it.”
“You mean because the Wynters are fucking cowards and they’d rather let this be our problem.”
“Itisour problem.”
“No, it’s the Wynters’ problem as well. If the Gilligans’ plan was to stop the wedding in order to prevent our two families from joining, then that leaves the Wynters as weak as—” I cut off, realisation dawning on me.Oh, Samuel Cornell, you sly bastard.“No,” I said. “No fucking way.”
“It’s the only way. Leo is already taken.”
“Leo can get untaken. He’s more her age. Jesus Christ, she’s practically a goddamned kid.”
My father shoved his hands in his pockets. “Don’t be an idiot, Tam. I don’t have time for this shit. The girl is twenty-one.”
“And I’m thirty-four.”
“I’m ten years older than your mother,” he pointed out.
“That’s different.”
“How?”
I didn’t have an answer for that.
My father continued. “If you want us to have any strength against the Gilligans when the time comes, we need this alliance.”
“You’re wrong. We don’t need them.”
“Don’t argue with me, Tam! I’m still the head of this family. Respect that or you know where you can go.”
Respect needed to be earned. My father must be getting soft in his old age. I remembered Samuel Cornell as being fearsome while I had been growing up. No one would have dared to cross him. But now someone had murdered one of the sons of our family, and nothing was done about it. When I was the head of the family, I wouldn’t allow families like the Gilligans to get away with it unpunished.
“And what about the girl? What does she make of this situation?”
I’d met Hallie Wynter one time before all of this, when she’d only been eighteen. We’d shared a moment back then, but it wasn’t something I’d planned on repeating, especially when I’d been thirty at the time.
He shrugged. “She will do what her father tells her, just like you should be doing.”
I snorted. “Her father should take pity on her. What man would want his daughter in the hands of someone like me?”