Page 66 of Sins of Arrogance

Which is true, if not for the rea­sons she’ll as­sume.

The sound of a soft foot­fall near the door alerts me to the pres­ence of some­one else in the en­trance hall. A cou­ple of sec­onds later, the sol­dier re­spon­si­ble for lock­ing up at night looks into the room.

I flick my hand at him, telling him to get lost. Like the well-trained sol­dier he is, he quickly walks away.

“I’m glad, Micky. I feel like we’ve barely had any time to­gether since I ar­rived.”

“You’ve only been here a few days,” I re­mind her.

She sighs again and looks at me through her lashes. “Maybe we could have lunch to­mor­row, just the two of us? I know fam­ily din­ner is sacro­sanct.”

“It’s im­por­tant to Maeve.” And I re­spect that.

Kara’s grand­mother is a plain­spo­ken Irish­woman who does not suf­fer fools.

I have no doubt that if I had ever harmed her grand­daugh­ter, she would not have hes­i­tated to try to kill me. She might even have suc­ceeded.

“Kara’s grand­mother doesn’t like me. No one here likes me, ex­cept you, Micky.”

“No one knows you well enough to like or dis­like you.” Which is a bla­tant lie.

Sure as cer­tain, Dier­dre has man­aged to get the back up of ev­ery woman liv­ing in this house, not to men­tion my son.

But her ego will al­low her to be­lieve my words.

“I guess.” She shrugs. “I’d still like to have lunch though. Can you make time to­mor­row?”

Not usu­ally, no. But this is busi­ness. Lunch with her is ex­actly what I need to lull Dier­dre into com­pla­cency and let­ting things slip.

“Aye. Be ready at two o’clock.” Get­ting her away from the house will both feed her ego and pro­vide an en­vi­ron­ment more con­ducive to her talk­ing.

One of our busi­nesses is an Irish pub in Queens. I’ll send Rory over in the morn­ing to doc­tor a wine­glass and wa­ter glass for her use at lunch.

A sin­gle drop of a benzo com­pound de­vel­oped by one of our Triad con­nec­tions low­ers in­hi­bi­tions bet­ter than a shot of sodium pen­tothal.

Ad­min­is­tered orally, it takes about ten min­utes to kick in. Mix­ing it with al­co­hol en­hances the speed and ef­fec­tive­ness though. Rory can make sure the pub has a bot­tle of Dier­dre’s fa­vorite wine on hand.

And we’ll have plenty of time for it to reach full ef­fi­cacy over lunch.

I stand. “I’ll see you to­mor­row.”

She stands with me, step­ping into my per­sonal space and lays her hand on my chest and reaches up to kiss my cheek. “I’ll look for­ward to it.”

I step back be­fore her lips con­nect to skin.

Her laugh tin­kles, but her eyes don’t show amuse­ment. “That’s right, you don’t go in for the tra­di­tional kiss on the cheek.”

I don’t go in for be­ing touched by any­one but my wife and son.

I lock the door to the pa­tio in case our sol­dier for­gets to check this room now that he’s done his usual rounds. “Good­night, Dier­dre. Don’t go out­side now the house is locked up.”

“Am I in dan­ger here?” she asks like she’s not a shark in a tank full of gold­fish.

I an­swer with truth. “Only if you lie to me.”

Dier­dre laughs like I’m jok­ing. I don’t laugh with her. I don’t even give her one of my fake smiles.

She should know bet­ter than to be­lieve I’ll show any mercy if she’s here to harm my fam­ily. In any way.