"Yes," Dad says simply.
Mason stares at him.
"Is it because of the business?" Miles asks carefully. "The lockout, is he shutting it down? Is something coming that we don't know about?"
Dad looks at him for a moment.
"Everything that happens in this family," Dad begins, "has a reason behind it. You know that. You've always known that." He pauses. "Cain doesn't do anything without a reason."
It's not an answer. It’s, somehow, completely an answer.
I haven't said anything since we walked into the room.
I’m standing in this room listening to my brothers ask questions I already have the answers to and I’m saying nothing.The weight of that is sitting on my chest like something physical, like a hand pressing down. I can't move it and I can't speak, and I can't do anything except stand here and hold it.
"When will he talk to us?" Declan asks.
Dad is quiet for a moment.
Then he picks his glasses up from the desk, and he holds them in his hand. "Soon," he says.
"That's not?—"
"Soon," he says again. Already knowing when Cain will be back.
I haven’t been able to relax, the wait for Cain is horrible. I’ve seen him when he’s in a bad mood.
The front door opens and my whole body tenses up, I’ve seen Cain pissed off, just never at me.
Cain walks in. He doesn't look at anyone immediately; he goes straight to the whiskey cabinet in the corner like it's the only thing in the room and I can hear my heart hammer in my ears.
That's when I see his face.
The light catches it when he turns to take the bottle out, and I go very still.
His lip is split, healed but recent. There's a bruise along his jaw that has gone yellow at the edges. A cut above his left eyebrow, closed now but deep enough that I can see the shape of it from here. His knuckles, when he wraps them around the neck of the bottle, are scraped and scabbed.
He's been in the Pit. Not running it. In it.
He carries the bottle and a glass to the table and sets them down, the sound of the glass hitting the wood is loud in thecomplete silence of the room. He pulls out a chair, sits down and pours two fingers of whiskey. He looks at the glass for a moment and then he looks up.
He looks at all of us.
We know Cain, we know every version of him, every mood, every temperature he operates at. We know what he looks like when he's working through something, when he's calculating, when he's cold, when he's satisfied.
We know what he looks like when the bomb hasn't gone off yet.
This is that.
Nobody speaks.
Mum's hands are folded in her lap. Lileah is very still beside her. Olivia hasn't moved in the armchair, and I can feel her eyes on the side of my face, but I can't look at her right now. I can't look at anything except Cain sitting at the table with a split lip and two weeks of something I caused on his face.
He picks up the glass, downs the drink, and sets it down.
Then he says one word.
"Rules."
