Page 11 of Sins of Arrogance

Kara threw a fit and de­manded her fa­ther fire the lawyer. Bro­gan re­fused.

I found my wife un­con­scious on the floor of our bath­room three days later. She’d taken nearly a full bot­tle of sleep­ing pills.

Now, I pay at­ten­tion when Kara shows any­thing more than mild an­noy­ance. Not be­cause she’s ex­hib­ited jeal­ousy since then, but be­cause since that time, her feel­ings have been al­most as locked down as mine.

“You know there’s busi­ness I don’t share with you.” I watch closely to gauge her re­ac­tion to my words.

Her kiss­able lips twist in a frown, but there’s no fer­vor of banked fury in her hazel eyes. “Are you say­ing her rea­son for be­ing here has to do with busi­ness?”

“I don’t know.”

“And if it’s not, will you tell me then?”

“Is it im­por­tant to you that I do?” I ask, my senses on high alert.

Kara sighs again and her shoul­ders sag. “No, I sup­pose not. What’s one more se­cret be­tween us? It’s not like we love each other.”

I’m not ca­pa­ble of lov­ing her. Ob­ses­sion may be part and par­cel to my na­ture, but not love.

How­ever, Kara used to be­lieve she loved me. She never said it, but it was there. Both her fa­ther and grand­mother com­mented on it dur­ing Kara’s jeal­ousy episodes.

How­ever, some­where along the line, she stopped.

I don’t know why ex­actly, but it doesn’t sur­prise me. A heart as pure as hers can’t stay fix­ated on a mon­ster. Even one she doesn’t know ex­ists.

At some point her atavis­tic in­stincts must have sounded the alarm to her heart.

~

“I’m sorry I didn’t come for the wed­ding.” Dier­dre looks up at me through her lashes. “It would have been too hard to watch you marry an­other woman.”

I in­cline my head, not con­vinced. Sure, there’d been plenty of craic about me and Dier­dre get­ting mar­ried one day.

We dated. We had sex. But I wasn’t her first and she wasn’t mine.

There was no ro­mance. No great love.

The only per­son I have ever loved is my son. I’m not sure Dier­dre has ever loved any­one.

When my da got the chance to tighten the ties be­tween the Nor­thies and the pow­er­ful Shaugh­nessy Mob in New York, he took it.

Mar­riage to Kara of­fered me some­thing mar­riage to Dier­dre never could: the chance to be­come sec­ond in com­mand.

And I didn’t even know it would go down that way when I agreed to the mar­riage.

The pro­mo­tion from as­sas­sin for my for­mer mob to cap­tain, run­ning my own crew un­der Derry Shaugh­nessy – Fer­gal’s old­est son and un­der­boss, was enough in­cen­tive to leave Ire­land.

The death of both Fer­gal and Derry in the same year of­fered me some­thing more. The chance to be un­der­boss and even­tu­ally, the Boss of the Shaugh­nessy Mob.

As his “dis­turbed” youngest son, my fa­ther would not have made me a cap­tain. And there was no chance I would ever be sec­ond-in-com­mand in the Nor­thies, much less the boss with­out my older broth­ers dy­ing.

I don’t have a lot of scru­ples, but killing fam­ily is one of them.

Don’t think my da knows that though. He was as happy about get­ting me out of Dublin as he was about the mar­riage al­liance with the Shaugh­nessy Mob.

I make him ner­vous.

Da is one of the few peo­ple who knows the real me. He rec­og­nized my lack of the moral re­straints other peo­ple are born with be­fore I started school. He’s the one who taught me to project a re­lat­able per­sona to cover the so­ciopath within.