“No.” I walk closer, hands visible, gun undrawn. I want him to look at my face when he lies. “You’re not going to the island. You’re going to talk to me.”
A small sigh. “If this is about the latest crisis?—”
“It’s about the men you pay to steal women,” I say. “It’s about the containers. It’s about Rafe Collier and the system you built to make it easy.”
He studies me like I’m a quarterly report that might pull through. “You’ve always preferred melodrama when a summary would do.”
“Then summarize,” I say. “Did you pay Rafe? Did you help take her?”
He rests two fingers on the steering wheel. His rings catch the headlight in white points. “You have no idea what it takes to maintain an empire. We create jobs, Conrad. We protect families. We keep the wrong kind of men from setting the rules and rising to the top…taking what’s not theirs. That means we work with the men who can get things done. It means our hands are not always clean.”
“Human trafficking.” I rub the toe of my shoe into the asphalt, disgust spearing through me. “Drugs through the kitchen. Kickbacks to uniforms. You call that protection?”
“I call it math.” He lifts his gaze to mine, righteous and certain. “We arrange for what we can control to be in our hands instead of theirs. You’ve benefited from that since you were old enough to sign your name.”
“I don’t want it.”
He smiles, thin. “You do. You just want it without a receipt.”
My jaw locks. He watches, pleased he can still find that old switch.
“Text messages,” I say. “Years ago. Phoenix leaves me two weeks after we make plans. Her words don’t sound like her. They sound like someone coached her through how to most effectively hurt me. Was that you?”
He doesn’t blink. “Yes.”
Two inches of glass. Two inches is enough to admit the part he likes saying out loud. He shifts in his seat, settles, gives me the speech he’s rehearsed for the day I grew the spine to ask.
“She was a variable we couldn’t afford,” he says. “You were a boy with a legacy and no judgment. She would have cost you everything. I tried to keep you away in the only language you understand: removal. She left because I made sure she understood she didn’t belong in your world.”
“Because she was poor? That makes no sense. You and Mother both were poor once?—”
“That’s not the reason.” His hands tighten on the wheel, and he looks away, through the windshield. It’s almost as if he’s unable to meet my eyes.
“Then why?” I don’t like the plea in my voice, but I have to know.
“Because she’s your goddamn sister!” he explodes. “And because I won’t have a scandal on my name.”
Sister.
The span of the bridge swells and then tightens around the car. The air thins. I hear the river under us, steady. He continues talking, delivering the rest like he’s patting my shoulder for taking bad news well.
“She’s a Masterson,” he says. “Not by my wife. I wasn’t certain, of course—I didn’t have a paternity test and couldn’t figure out how to gracefully extract DNA. But I was pretty sure. I had blood drawn on the ship, and that confirmed it. She’s mine.”
I put a hand to my head. “I don’t understand?—”
“What is there to understand? I fucked her mother. Little bitch didn’t even want to tell me she was pregnant—she was married to that moron and pretended the baby was his—but I knew.”
“You had an affair with Phoenix’s mother?”
He sneers. “Of course I didn’t have an affair. She was cleaning my suite one night, and…one thing led to another.”
“You raped her?”
His eyes narrow. “She wanted it.” He waves a hand. “But Phoenix was a mistake that could be turned into something useful, once she learned gratitude. I wanted you away from her long enough for us to decide how to place her. You wouldn’t listen. So I removed your options.”
My hand is steady, even though horror is roiling through me. I see Phoenix on a hotel corridor floor, mouth open around the shock of air she can’t pull in, a dog bleeding on tile because he tried to stop a man with a badge. I see Danner’s pig eyes. I see the container. I see the way she said my name in her sleep at the safe house like she was afraid it would be taken if she didn’t keep saying it.
I see her body, arching under mine, responding to mine, and I squeeze my eyes closed for a moment.
