Page 102 of Guilty as Sin

Connor snorts at me, sipping from his beer.

“I signed an agreement,” I say stubbornly. “I’m going to abide by it until it’s no longer valid.”

But it’s never been valid, thanks to my name change. It’s my final remaining card against the O’Sullivans, and I’ve been biding my time before playing it.

“You care about him,” Connor accuses.

“I care about⁠—”

“You asked if he was safe, not if he was alive or dead.”

I take an angry gulp of beer, upset that I’d given myself away. Apparently, thinking about Brady makes me sloppy, and I can’t have that.

“Admit it,” he persists. “You still care about him.”

“How can I possibly care about a man who wanted to murder my brother?”

“He thought I was a traitor.” Connor picks at the label of his beer. “You know how important loyalty is in our world.”

“You’re defending him now?” My voice goes high-pitched.

“I’m saying I understand why he did what he did. And I was going to pass his stupid fucking test anyway, so he wasn’t actually going to kill me.”

I scrub my hands over my face. The fact that Connor’s justifying my husband’s sick actions makes each spike in my heart dig deeper.

“Run me through it again,” I say.

Connor groans. He leans back, propping his feet on the coffee table as he recounts the conversation he had with Brady and his brothers in their golf suite. We’ve been over it countless times. It explains why Brady became so furious during our stakeout that night at the church, but it doesn’t explain how the false intel got leaked.

I stand up so I can pace the cramped living room.

“I bet it was Finn,” Connor says sourly. And as much as I’d like to believe him, I can’t.

“He’s an ass, but he’d never betray his family like that. He didn’t snitch.”

“I’m not saying he snitched. Hear me out.” My brother takes a dramatic sip of beer as I turn to face him. “Those weren’t Seven’s SUVs you saw that night. They were sent there by Finn to frame me. He was in on feeding me the false intel, and he wanted to make me look guilty.”

I give my brother a long look. I almost want to laugh, but his expression is so earnest.

“Finn is not nearly smart enough to come up with something like that,” I say. “And even if he did, he wouldn’t have fooled Brady.” My husband’s the smartest of the bunch.

Connor frowns, put out that I shut down his idea so quickly.

“It’s an interesting theory,” I say with a sigh.

I don’t tell my brother that it’s too outlandish. The correct answer is usually the simplest, which means that Connor probably relayed the information by accident somehow.

I go back to pacing. Connor doesn’t talk to anyone except me, our parents, and occasionally our sister. I obviously don’t like that he’s still in contact with our parents, but he only speaks to them once a week. He’s even offered to let me check his phone, but I trust him. He’s been taking our father’s calls less and less frequently, partly because of my influence, and partly because our father keeps pestering him about upholding the sacraments.

I freeze. My blood goes cold as I turn to my brother on the couch. When he sees the horror on my face, he sits upright, and his feet drop from the coffee table to the floor.

“Connor,” I say slowly, trying to keep my voice calm. “Did you go to confession that day?”

His eyes go wide, their two-toned blue so much like my own. Then he puts his face in his hands and groans. I try to maintain my steady reasoning, to go easy on my little brother who’s already wracked with guilt. It’s difficult.

“Why on earth would you talk to a priest about a drop?” I ask, and Connor pulls his hands from his face to gesture wildly.

“I don’t know, it came up! I literally had nothing else to talk about, I’d just been sitting around the apartment all day every day. Going out to that golf place was the most interesting thing I’d done in weeks, so that’s what I talked about.”