Page 153 of Sins of Arrogance

He missed the point of what his daugh­ter just said to him. I didn’t.

For the first time since com­ing upon my wife and Dier­dre in our apart­ment, I con­sider that Dier­dre Kelly is ego­tis­ti­cal enough to be­lieve she can get away with harm­ing my wife and son.

I thought she was too smart to sign her own death war­rant, but if she threat­ened Fitz, that’s ex­actly what she did.

“Mick.” Kara says my name, try­ing to get my at­ten­tion.

As if ev­ery mol­e­cule of my body isn’t al­ready con­sumed with her and only her.

I turn my head and our gazes col­lide. Hers is filled with emo­tion. Pain. Grief. De­ter­mi­na­tion.

“What do you need, mo chuisle?”

Her lips twist like she’s just sucked on a lemon wedge. She doesn’t like me us­ing en­dear­ments with her?

Tough.

She is the beat of my heart and if she is gone, so is my heart. Then no one is safe ex­cept my son.

I will kill them all. Start­ing with her fa­ther.

“You said you watch me on the video feeds some­times.”

More like all the time. “Aye.”

“You have cam­eras in our apart­ment then, right?”

“Aye.” There is no point in hid­ing the level of my ob­ses­sion any longer.

Af­ter tonight, she is go­ing to see how fix­ated I am, how tight I am will­ing to hold her to me.

“Do they pick up sound, or only im­ages?”

“They have sound.” I like to hear her voice, es­pe­cially when she’s talk­ing to our son.

There’s a soft­ness in it I crave.

“Do you record, or only livestream?”

“Record.” I have an 8-ter­abyte ex­ter­nal hard drive filled with my fa­vorites.

“Can you ac­cess the min­utes be­fore you walked in on me with my foot on Dier­dre’s neck on your phone?”

“Aye.”

“Thank you.” She’s tak­ing my will­ing­ness to do it for granted.

As she should.

Like she should take for granted that she is mine and I am hers and that is not go­ing to change.

It takes a minute, but I find the seg­ment she wants me to play. As­sum­ing she wants her fa­ther to hear what was said, I put my phone on speaker and start the video.

“Your best-case sce­nario is to be put on the first plane back to Dublin.” Kara doesn’t sound wor­ried. She sounds an­gry.

Dier­dre’s snide voice fol­lows. “Why would he be­lieve you? Your past ir­ra­tional jeal­ousies make your take on any sit­u­a­tion be­tween Micky and an­other woman un­re­li­able.”

“What­ever gos­sip you’ve heard is old news. My fa­ther has no rea­son to doubt my word.” Dier­dre wouldn’t have heard the lie in Kara’s voice, but I do.