His hand comes up before anyone can speak, one finger raised, flat and final and the room understands it immediately. You don't talk over Cain. You never talk over Cain. Every single person in this room learned that lesson at some point and I learned it the hardest.
I think about the training. The specific, deliberate, suffocating training that Cain put me through when he decided I was going to be useful and useful meant being broken down first. Six weeks of it. Every morning before anyone else was awake, every evening after everyone else was sleeping. The sessions that left me on the floor not because he wanted to hurt me but because he wanted to make certain I understood that pain was not a reason to stop, that emotion was not an excuse to deviate,that the body would do what the mind told it if the mind was disciplined enough.
He made sure I understood that. He made sure it was carved into me.
And I broke it anyway.
"I always said," Cain says, his voice completely even, "never let a woman get in the way of business."
He looks at me.
Not a glance. A look. Direct and completely without flinching, the kind of look that has always made me feel like every thought I've had in the last month is written on my face in permanent ink.
I hold it.
I owe him that much.
"There is always a plan." His voice doesn't rise. It never rises, and somehow that makes it worse, makes every word land with its full weight undiminished. "I have everything set. Every corner is covered. Every detail in every file exists because I have sat down and thought through every possible variable, every possible complication, every possible thing that could go wrong and I have planned for it." He puts his hand flat on the table. Then he slams it. The glass jumps. The bottle shakes. Lileah flinches beside Mum. "A plan. So that when it's done it stays done. So that nobody in this room ends up behind bars or in the ground because someone didn't follow the fucking plan."
The echo of it settles over the room.
"But you—" His finger comes up, pointing across the table at me, and I don't move. "You thought it would be good to do your own thing." The finger doesn't waver. "Over a woman."
The room is so quiet I can hear the clock on the mantelpiece. I can hear Olivia breathing in the armchair. I don't look at her.
"If you wanted him dead," Cain says, pulling his hand back, refilling the glass. "You come to me."
"He was never on the list." The words come out of me before I've decided to say them. Not defensive. Just true. "He was never going to be on the list."
Cain looks at me, then he laughs.
It's a short sound. There’s no humor in it. He shakes his head slowly and he looks down at the glass in his hand and he laughs again. It’s quieter, like he's had this argument with himself already and lost it.
"And you think," he says, looking back up. "That for you, I wouldn't have put him on it."
The words hit somewhere I didn't know was undefended.
I look at him.
"You didn't give me the chance." He sets the glass down, precise and deliberate, and the quiet that follows it is total. "You didn't come to me. You didn't tell me. You made a decision alone, in the dark, without a file, without a plan, without a single variable accounted for and you pulled a trigger, you walked away and you thought it was done." He shakes his head. "It wasn't done." Now those three words he shouts.
"For two weeks," Cain says, "I’ve been cleaning your mess. Leo Holt's body was found before I could get anywhere near it. Do you understand what that means? What that set in motion?" He doesn't wait for an answer. "An investigation. Eyes I didn't want on anything connected to this family. I had to call in favors I’ve been holding for years, fucking years to redirect those eyes. I had to dismantle a timeline. I had to build another one in its place." He pauses. "And when I needed someone to stand in that timeline, someone to take the blame for what you did?—"
He stops and looks at the glass, filling it up, then drinking it in one go.
"I went into the Pit," he says quietly. "I went in myself to find someone. To fight for someone who would take it." His jaw moves. "And someone did. Someone who trusted me enough tosay yes, and who’s now dealing with consequences that belong to you."
"I didn't do it for her," I say. My voice comes out steady. I need him to hear this. I need it to be steady. "I did it for me. You look me in the eye and you tell me you don't understand that."
Cain looks at me for a long moment. Something moves through his face. Not softening. Cain doesn't soften, not here, not now.
"Then you should have come to me," he says quietly.
He picks up the glass.
He drains it again, stands up.
He looks around the table one last time, at my brothers, at my parents, at the girls, at all of us assembled in this room that has held this family through everything and his voice when he speaks is completely final.
