“You’ll have to forgive me; I can’t say the same,” she says, her voice level and dry as the West Texas air. “My father never mentioned your existence.”
Senior throws his head back and laughs.
Around the bar, the Kings shift.
“Silas was always very good at protecting people from the parts of his life he thought would scare them,” Senior says, settling back. “It’s what made him so weak.”
“My father isn’t weak,” Harper says, voice still calm and measured. But I feel the tightening of her body through my palm.
Senior just keeps that easy smile. “You look like her, you know,” he says. “Your mother’s sister. Melissa.”
The name lands. I watch Harper receive it—the slight deepening of her stillness, fingers pressing harder against her thigh. I feel it.
She didn’t know that name. Senior knows she didn’t know it.
His expression doesn’t change, but something behind his eyes does—he’s recalculating.
He’s been studying Harper Tucker for years, I realize.
ThroughZ.
“Melissa was the most beautiful woman in three counties,” Senior continues, voice going distant like he’s recalling a memory.
“Naturally, Silas wanted her. And just as naturally, she wanted Silas back. He was the golden child, you see. Everybody loved him. Our parents, our teachers… every girl who ever looked his way. Have you heard the story of Cain and Abel?”
The biblical reference makes my skin crawl. My eyes immediately dart toward the exits again. Forty-two feet. If I throw Harper over my shoulder, it might take seven long strides?—
“What’s with the speech?” Harper cuts him off, voice hard. “We’re here to sign some papers and make a deal. Not listen to your life story.”
Senior bellows another laugh. Several of his men shift again. One of Isaak’s bodyguards steps closer to our table.
“Melissa had a sharp tongue too,” Senior says, still grinning. “It was one of the things I loved most about her. That fiery refusal to bow down. It was an even greater delight, you know,” he shifts an elbow forward on the table, “to break the bitch until there was nothing left of her for your father.”
The words land hard, and my stomach lurches.
“That was just the first of many things of his that I broke,” he continues, leaning forward the slightest bit more.
His cologne is overpowering. My teeth clench with the need to shove him backward, but I force myself to take my cues from Harper, who relaxes in the seat beside me even as his voice lowers and becomes more menacing.
“Breaking the things my brother loves has given my life its true meaning. Its purpose. Every time I see that look in his eyes—that devastation—it feeds something in me that nothing else can touch.”
This time it’s Harper who smiles athim. Jesus. This isn’t the first monster she’s sat across a table from, is it?
This is the part of her world that Z always understood better than I could. The part of Harper that can face off eye to eye with a monster without flinching, because sheexpectsa world full of monsters.
He’s not finished. “Because it wasn’t fair that everyone loved him more. From the time we were children—our mother would send us to weed the garden, and I yanked out the flowers while Silas obeyed and kept to the weeds. He studied at school and was kind, while I pulled little girls’ hair and knocked them down on the playground. Everyone thought he would make great things of himself, and I was just the delinquent the teachers always sent to the principal’s office.”
Senior leans in, and I can see something broken and twisted in his eyes—a childhood wound that only festered with time.
“When our father looked at us, I knew he loved one son and not the other. Just like his father before him.
“That’s why our father introduced the anti-fratricide clause in his will in the first place. Because he’d killed his own brother for his inheritance, you see, and was afraid I’d do the same to Silas.
“Because he saw himself in me and hated me for it. We were just children, Harper. It’s unnatural not to love your own child.”
One side of his mouth quirks up—the only real smile we’ve seen all afternoon, I realize now, because this smile is cruel.
“So I made sure to try to makeyoufeel what I felt,” he says, almost gently. Almost kindly, like he’s explaining a favor he did for Harper. “Since I couldn’t kill him, all I could do was visit the sins of the father upon the children, and the children’s children. My mother taught us the Bible, you see. And I always did like the poetry of it.”