Jack, Cain’s former lover.
Now there was a pair of secrets Gary North would give his left nut to reveal,he thought, glancing back at the reporter who was still eyeing him.
It was a sad irony that Cain suspected which of those sins would be most damning in the eyes of the Family Ethics people, and it wasn’t the murder.
Senator Shaw had killed his own best friend - a betrayal so heinous Cain could still hardly believe it, despite having accidentally overheard Jack’s confession with his own ears, along with Cam Seaver and the pilot Jack had framed for his crime, the very-gorgeous and very-much-alive Damon Fitzpatrick.
And still, the moral code of Emmett Shaw and his Family Ethics cronies was crystal clear. Three amazing people dead, a dozen or more lives destroyed, but by God, no dicks touching.TheSenator Shaw would have been lucky to get a job washing William’s luxury imports if that truth had come out.
Fortunately for his father’s political career, the truth had been buried six feet under… and so had Jack, killed in prison before he could testify.
Cain’s fingers clenched into a fist, and he was positive that he’d come out of his own skin if he had to stand in that spot a minute longer. He checked his smile to make sure it was firmly in place, and bent to whisper in his mother’s ear. “I’ll be back.”
Lucy, who’d been watching the shakedown of William Fassbender excitedly, turned to look at him. “Where are you going?” she demanded.
“Bar. Again.” He shrugged helplessly. “It’s dry in here.”
She pursed her lips. “You know what we discussed. No alcohol. This isnotthe time for you to indulge in any of your questionable behavior.”
Cain felt rage gnawing a hole in his gut. He was twenty four years old. It had been months since he’d touched a drop, and that had beenhisdecision, completely unrelated to his father’s campaign. Still, he didn’t allow his smile to slip. “Only water,” he said brittlely.
“Fine. Five minutes,” she warned, like he needed her fucking permission.
Then again, who could blame her for thinking that way when he’d fallen in line with every other ridiculous dictate and demand his parents had laid down recently? He hadn’t balked when he’d been told he’d be taking a semester off law school - perhaps not surprising, since he’d only chosen law as the path of least resistance in the first place, and didn’t give two shits about missing a semester. But then he’d been told he’d be coming on this months-long campaign tour, raising the senator’s national profile in preparation for his possible presidential run. Surely his mother had to have been suspicious when he agreed tothat, since he made no bones about the fact that he considered small-talk to beSaw-style psychological torture.
He wondered if his father had ever explained to his mother exactly how he’d ensured Cain’s compliance, or if it was just another of Senator Shaw’s many secrets.
Maybe his mother thought it was his weak nature that had him agreeing to all thisbullshit.
Cain was pretty sure that’s what Cam and Sebastian Seaver had thought when he’d told them he wouldn’t be going to the authorities about the crimes Jack had confessed to.
“Cain,” a voice said as he approached the bar, and he turned to find Drew McMann, wearing an immaculately cut suit and his trademark wry grin. Cain smiled, and Drew embraced him like a brother. He and Drew had never been close when they were growing up, despite traveling in the same circles and having parents who were close friends. Funny how adversity and kept secrets had a way of binding people together even more tightly than shared history.
“Hey,” Cain returned, before asking the bartender for another water and adding a hefty tip to the glass on the counter. “Didn’t expect to see you here tonight.”
Drew lifted his chin in acknowledgment.
“Notmy idea. My mother’s.” Drew shrugged as though this were explanation enough, and Cain nodded because Mary-Alice McMann and Lucy Shaw had been cut from the same cloth.
“How’s everyone? Seen Bas and Cam?” Cain asked. He winced internally.Yeah, bring up Cam Seaver, who dumped Drew just a few months before getting a new boyfriend. Smooth, Shaw.
But Drew smiled warmly as he took a sip of brown liquid from his glass. “Yeah, they’re good. And I can’t seem to get away from them - I see them at work every day.”
Cain nodded. Right.Duh.Drew worked at Seaver Tech, the company Cam and Sebastian had inherited from their father. In fact, as the senator liked to remind Cain, Drew was head of the legal team already, despite only being thirty, because that’s what ambition looked like.
“Cam’s got Cort working at Seaver, too,” Drew continued, referring to Cam’s new boyfriend who, through some coincidence Cain didn’t totally understand, was Damon Fitzpatrick’s brother. Drew rolled his eyes, but there was no bitterness in them. “His asshole-good-humor’s growing on me.Like a fungus.But he makes Cam happy, so.” He shrugged.
“And Bas?” According to the senator, Bas Seaver, head of Seaver Tech, had been pretty much steamrolled by grief and depression after the crash, and had only recently emerged from his self-imposed exile. “Poor boy will never be the same,”the senator had told Cain’s mother sadly, and Cain remembered thinking that his jerk of a father couldn’t be all bad if he could feel so much compassion for his friends’ son.
Lying asshole.
“He’s fine, I—. Hey, you okay?” Drew asked. His dark eyes looked concerned and a frown marred the handsome face below his trademark-perfect brown hair.
“Yeah.” Cain swiped his water off the bar and nodded to the bartender before turning back around so that he and Drew could watch the party together. “Just, you know. I can’t stop thinking about shit.” He shook his head in frustration at all the things he couldn’t say.
How was he supposed to live with his father, knowing what the man had done?
How could he toe the line they’d laid out for him, when he hated himself more every day?
