by Megan Crane
“You weren’t a kid when your father supposedly died,” Isaac said, very calmly, because he wasn’t immune to the low blows Caradine liked to dish out, but he could take them in stride. “You were twenty-two. About to graduate from college. That and the fact you’re standing here in Alaska ten years later, while your old life burns down buildings and chases you across Maine, suggests to me that unlike Templeton or Kate, you weren’t exactly innocent.”
Something shifted in her gaze, and he had the strangest idea that she’d gone hollow. “If you’re expecting me to defend myself to you, you should probably let that go. I’m not going to.”
“The explosion killed most of your family,” Isaac continued, pitilessly, no matter if she was hollow or not. He wasn’t the one who’d done this.
“I know,” she said softly, her eyes glittering. “I was there.”
Another kind of sigh went through the room, but Isaac kept his gaze trained on her. The biggest threat he’d ever met, and not because she was related to a notorious arms dealer.
He knew what to do with dictators and monsters. She was a whole other kind of problem.
“The hit on Mickey Sheeran was considered an act of revenge. One of Boston’s crime families took credit, but despite their best efforts, the FBI could never prove they actually did it.” Isaac waited for her to chime in, but she only stared back at him stonily. “The body count was only ever an estimation. Because the damage was so intense and the fire so hot it was impossible to be certain.”
Again, no response. Though he thought he saw something glitter in her eyes.
“Complicating matters was the fact that no one knew exactly who was in the house that night,” he said. “Your father liked to conduct business over Sunday dinner, so officials had to wait and see which dirtbags and relations stopped showing up. Over time, they landed on a particular group of ten. Your parents. All three of your brothers. You; your younger sister, Lindsay; and three lowlifes who worked either for or with your father. But here you are, Julia. All in one piece.”
That name sat in his mouth and tasted sour.
“For all you know, I was resurrected,” she replied, standing there looking cool and unbothered. “My mother was a devout Catholic. Her prayers alone should have delivered me straight into the life of the world to come. That’s how it works, right?”
“You were an adult,” Isaac said, trying to match her unbothered tone. Trying to pretend he could have been talking about any regular case. “Witness statements from your friends at college attest that you left your dorm that night and told at least two people you were going to your father’s house. Were you going for dinner? Or did you always plan to blow up your entire family?”
“Oh, come on,” Everly snapped.
Caradine didn’t glance her way. She kept her gaze on Isaac, and there was no trace of vulnerability on her face now. No glimpse of anything like uncertainty, or hollowness. She lifted a dark brow. “You tell me, Isaac. I thought you knew everything.”
“Do I think that it’s possible that a twenty-two-year-old woman could meticulously plot to murder her entire family?” He shrugged. “Why not? Do I particularly think that Mickey Sheeran’s daughter could or would do such a thing? Without question.”
“Exactly how well did you know my father?” Caradine asked.
“Mickey made no secret of his feelings about women. The FBI takes it as fact he beat your mother, though she never pressed charges.” He regretted that, too. But she looked only vaguely bored, not hurt in any way. “He treated all of his mistresses the same, and suspicious overdoses seemed to follow them around when he was done with them. I don’t even know that I would blame a person for taking extreme measures to escape a man like that, because what must he have been like to his daughters?”
“I thought this was an ex-military tribunal, not a therapy session.”
“Is that what you did?” He wanted her, just once, to tell him something of her own accord. “Did you take the nuclear option?”
Caradine smirked, and something flashed in those cool blue eyes. “Do you really think that I’m a mass murderer, Isaac? Or are you mad that I won’t date you?”
Isaac forced himself to keep his gaze on her, because the surprise wasn’t that she’d said something like that. The surprise was that she hadn’t started there. And he did not look around the room. He most especially did not look at Templeton or Jonas.
The studied nonreaction of every single person there was telling enough.
Great, he thought. But it was the least of his concerns.
“The Caradine Scott that I’ve known for five years was running from something,” he said quietly. “I would have sworn that she didn’t have murder in her. But you’re not Caradine Scott, are you?”
“No.” Her smirk took on an edge. “Caradine is a character I play. And when I leave here, I’ll create another character. And next time, I won’t be stupid enough to sleep with a clingy, dramatic stalker who doesn’t know how to let go. If anyone needs therapy, Isaac, it’s you.”
Isaac smiled. “You can’t embarrass me.” That wasn’t as true as he would have liked, but it was close enough. “I told you before, I don’t have secrets. And that’s not really the point, is it?”
“I don’t know.” Her eyes were glittering, and he braced himself, because he knew what that meant. She was taking a swipe. “I, personally, would find it difficult to take orders from a man who claims to be the biggest and the baddest around, yet found himself whipped by a woman he now thinks is a killer. But what do I know? I’m not a mercenary. Maybe it really is all about the money.”
No one made any particular noises at that, egregious as it was. But then, they didn’t need to. The tension in the room rose like a temperature.
“Does it give you pleasure to insult all these people?” Isaac asked.
Her head tilted slightly to one side. “Yes.”
And Isaac shouldn’t have been surprised to see Kate stifle a grin, back by the door, because that sounded not only honest, it sounded like Caradine.
“Okay,” Jonas broke in, which was surprising. Since generally speaking, Jonas went out of his way to avoid talking whenever possible. “Let’s try to keep this conversation productive.”
“Is this a conversation?” Caradine asked, her voice acidic. “I was under the impression I didn’t have any choice in the matter. Which makes it less a conversation and more of an interrogation, in my view. But then again, being kidnapped and forcibly restrained might have messed with my head.”
“It must have,” Isaac agreed. “Or you wouldn’t have tried to shoot me.”
There was another electric moment of silence. While all around him, Isaac was well aware, everyone was digesting that little tidbit.
Until Templeton laughed. Long, deep, and as infectious as ever.
It broke the taut, breathless thing that had Isaac and Caradine in its grip. Suddenly, there was a lot of shuffling. Shifting in chairs. And Isaac knew that his team didn’t need to release their nervous energy in that manner.
This was different. This was Caradine.
And Isaac knew that he wasn’t the only one who was already coming up with rationalizations for why she might have done this thing. Why it was okay. He could see Everly and Mariah looking at each other, working up a defense where they sat.
“I’m going to need to hear a whole lot more about you shooting at Isaac,” Templeton said when he finished laughing. He tipped back in the chair he was sitting in, lounging as if he were settling in to watch a movie. “But first, I don’t think it would kill you to give an accounting of what happened in Boston ten years ago.”
Caradine didn’t look like she’d released any tension. “Maybe I don’t want to give an accounting of anything. Ten years ago or since.”
Templeton shrugged. “It feels like we’re past that. I know you want to keep poking at him,
and I support that, but we need to know what we’re dealing with here.”
“You’re not dealing with anything,” Caradine gritted out. Maybe with the faintest hint of desperation. “I don’t want your interference. Just because Isaac doesn’t know how to take a hint, I shouldn’t be forced to—”
“I get that you don’t want to accept help from me,” Isaac threw at her, louder than necessary. Louder than he could remember being. Ever. “But for God’s sake. Accept help from someone. You’ve fed every single person in this room a thousand times. Not one of us wants to think you’re capable of this. But even if you are, don’t you get it? This is a family matter.”
And that was the first time he saw a crack in her armor. She blinked and looked down. He thought he could see that softness to her lips that was the only sign he’d ever seen that Caradine, the real Caradine, was in there, no matter how she was acting or what stubborn, prickly thing she was saying.
“To clarify,” Templeton drawled, “I’m not opposed to putting a family member in jail if warranted.”
“Amen,” Kate agreed, and they looked at each other with a little more heat than Isaac thought incarceration fantasies warranted.
Templeton continued, “But I would argue some extenuating circumstances for Mickey Sheeran’s daughter.”
“Caradine,” Everly said quietly, “you’re not alone any longer. No matter how badly you wish you were.”
Isaac thought she might run then. He braced himself for it.
But Caradine took in a deep, visibly ragged breath, then blew it out. She looked around as if she were only then noticing where she was, though Isaac doubted that. Then, instead of taking the chair he’d set aside for her, she moved to sit in the armchair where he usually sat, if he sat during a briefing. She lowered herself gingerly, making him wonder what it had cost her to stand so still and proud, despite everything. He knew grown men who wouldn’t have been able to handle it.
Or maybe it was the fact they’d all basically excused a mass murder she might have committed—or said they would consider excusing it—that was getting to her. Or maybe the simple, obvious truth in what Everly had said.
Caradine pulled her legs up under her in the chair and gazed out at the gathering. At these people who’d called her family.
And were acting like one. Not the kind many of them had suffered through, but the kind they’d all wanted.
“You’re asking me to break a promise,” she said after a moment. With no trace of her trademark smirk. “And breaking that promise could be nothing short of catastrophic.”
And Isaac couldn’t very well demand that she make herself vulnerable when he wasn’t willing to do the same thing himself. Could he?
He thought about the catastrophes he’d lived through already and figured one more couldn’t hurt.
“Baby,” Isaac said deliberately. Outing himself—and her. He didn’t care that he was confirming whatever suspicions remained, and that half the people in this room had money riding on it. All he cared about was the woman sitting in that chair, looking, if not precisely vulnerable, something like bruised instead. He could do the same, if that made the difference. She didn’t have to do it alone. “Catastrophic is what we do.”
Caradine cleared her throat. She laced her fingers together in front of her, and for a long moment, stared at them.
Then she lifted her gaze. She looked at Isaac, then took in the rest of the room.
“I didn’t kill my family,” she said, her voice still quiet but sincere. “But I would have. If I’d thought of it, I would have done it happily.” She pulled in another breath, another ragged sound. “Because there was no other way to survive in my father’s house. One way or another, he was going to kill us all.”
Eleven
Caradine felt hungover. There was a headache pushing at her temples, her mouth was alarmingly dry, and everywhere else she felt raw and heavy at the same time.
She was breaking her promise, when she’d always believed that was impossible. That it was a line she wouldn’t cross. It was like a shattering inside her, sharp and painful, making every breath hurt.
But she’d started down this road, and she didn’t think she could stop now.
Everly had said she wasn’t alone, which almost canceled out the hugging. Catastrophic is what we do, Isaac had said, all that silver and steel in the gaze he’d leveled on her. The gaze that had held her up, even if it wasn’t all that friendly.
He’d called her baby, in public, and what was she supposed to do with that?
The real truth was that she wasn’t as upset about breaking her promise as she should have been. What had keeping it ever done for her except keep her alone and scared and on the run?
“I guess it never occurred to me that people would think I was capable of killing,” she said now, slowly, carefully, because these were stories she didn’t tell, and the words felt precarious against her tongue. “I don’t know whether to feel insulted or complimented. But then, I’ve learned a lot about myself in the past ten years. Caradine Scott can and will do what she has to do. But Julia Sheeran?”
There was something deeply humbling in the way all these people hung on her every word, watching her solemnly, as if they’d been waiting a long time to hear what she had to say. Five years, maybe. “Julia was the worst kind of sheltered. I was. Because it didn’t matter what books I read in college or what bright futures I imagined for myself. My father was never going to let me go off and live my own life. Never. I was the property of the family, and he ran the family. It was always going to end badly for me.”
Isaac had used that word. He’d called her family, and he hadn’t meant bruises and threats. He meant . . . this. This thing that had been happening all this time she’d been in Grizzly Harbor that she’d been denying and pretending wasn’t there.
She’d had to sit down to keep from being knocked flat.
Caradine had defenses against everything else, and a thousand contingency plans. He could have interrogated her for hours. He could have tied her up again. He could have called her a murderer, everyone else could have agreed, and all of them could have arrayed themselves against her and flung accusations left and right. She had been prepared for all of that. She could have wisecracked for days.
But he’d called her family.
There wasn’t a single attack she couldn’t fight. Maybe she’d win or maybe she wouldn’t, but she would fight until she dropped.
She had no idea what to do with the opposite of an attack.
She had no idea what to do with family.
Or being claimed by Isaac Gentry in full view of all his friends and colleagues. All his people.
Your people, too, she dared to think, but it made her whole body clench down tight, in fear or longing or something else she couldn’t name.
She concentrated on the task at hand. Telling the story so it wasn’t a terrible secret any longer. So maybe she might have a shot at being a little less sick.
“I knew exactly who my father was,” she said into the surprising quiet of so many usually big, loud personalities, all of them waiting for her to get there in her own time. “My brothers were a part of the business, but my sister and I were supposed to obey. Silently. I didn’t always do that and I paid the price.” She made herself meet Isaac’s gaze. “He beat up everyone. Or he had someone else do it. Not only the women in his life.”
“You knew what he did?” Blue asked.
He was sitting across the room, but the intensity of the way he studied her made it seem as if he were a lot closer. Caradine was having a hard time seeing these people who had joked with her, eaten her food, and even claimed to find her crankiness entertaining, for who they really were. She didn’t know quite where to place it. Or the obvious reality that they’d all spent their entire adult lives dealing with situations like this—and men like her father.
Blue kept going when she didn’t answer immediately. “What I mean is, did you know he was a dirtbag or did you know, specifically, that he was an arms dealer with links not only to crime syndicates in the U.S. but across the globe?”
“I always knew he was a very unpleasant man. The details of what he did were something I learned over time.” She shifted in the armchair, resisting the urge to hug her knees to her chest. “I Googled him when I was twelve, and it was eye-opening. But also not entirely surprising.”
“Did your mother know?” Bethan asked from the far door, and when Caradine looked over at her, she couldn’t help noticing the way Jonas’s dark gaze fixed on her, too.
“She must have,” she said, forgetting about Jonas and the brooding way he always looked at the other woman. “My sister and I debated that for years. My mother was . . . I don’t want to say weak. Because, yes, he beat her up, treated her like crap, and talked to her like she was either a child or an idiot. But there was a part of her that thrived with him.”
Caradine considered the thorny, enduring problem of Donna Sheeran. “I’ve had a lot of time to think about it, and maybe it’s as simple as she never expected any better. My grandfather wasn’t that nice himself.”
“Mario Iannucci,” Oz contributed from behind his laptop. “Rumored to have been behind the hit on Freddy Marinelli that changed the power structure of the Zenato crime family in the mid-Atlantic region twenty years ago.”
“Not everybody gets to use the FBI’s most wanted list for genealogical research,” Caradine said dryly.
“I prefer it, personally,” Kate said in the same tone.
Caradine smiled despite herself. Then pushed on. “There’s no getting around the fact that my mother took a deep pleasure in martyring herself. When my father would go off on one of his rages, she would provoke him further. Not to protect us, because she did nothing to prevent him from coming at us. In fact, when he was done, she liked to get her own hits in, too, and she was vicious.” She looked at Blue. “Sometimes I think she knew. Sometimes I think she knew everything, and liked it. Other times I think she was another one of his victims. I don’t know.”