Chapter 45 Emory #2
“If you can’t handle it, I’ll take Miri with me,” Emory said.
Jack’s eyes snapped to him. “When did I say I couldn’t handle it?”
“When did you show me you could?”
“How about tonight? Risking my life to save her fucking hide again!”
Jack flung a hand toward Amelia’s bedroom upstairs. A wave of anger seized on Emory. His blood coursed hot with savage visions of squeezing Jack’s neck the way he’d squeezed Ivan’s.
“Enough!” Liam barked and inserted himself between them. “I can’t have you two squabbling over trivial bullshit.” He swung around to Jack. “Amelia is one of us now and Emory’s queen. You’ll respect her as such and shut the fuck up about it. End of story.”
“And you.” Liam turned to Emory. “It’s embarrassing it took you this long to realize Jack and Mirabelle are together. Your sister is a grown woman and could do far worse than Jack. Count your blessings, and quit your bitching.”
In the subdued light, Emory and Jack locked eyes. He looked remorseless and vindicated. For what, Emory didn’t know.
“You two will leave tomorrow afternoon,” Liam said. “We can’t be scattered forever, so this is just until we sort out our own.”
“What about you?” Emory asked. “You pulled it out tonight, but you’re not a young man anymore. You need to be with me or Jack.”
“This is where I belong. If that little shit shows up here, I’ll kill him myself.”
Liam’s eyes crinkled at the corners with a hollow laugh. It momentarily dispelled the tension until a knock sounded at the door and Mirabelle peeked inside.
“Sorry to interrupt,” she said. “Emory, can I talk to you?”
With nothing left to discuss, Emory waved her in as Jack and Liam said their goodnights and left. Mirabelle stood at the room’s center as Emory took up Liam’s spot at the mantle.
She’d washed off her makeup and changed into pajamas, her hair still wet from the shower. Something in her hesitation and doll-like features—big eyes laden with regret and a mouth drawn into a pitiful frown—reminded Emory of when they were kids.
“I’m sorry,” she said carefully, as if dipping a toe into turbid water.
When Emory refused a response, Mirabelle stamped her foot and halved the distance between them.
“I said I’m sorry!”
He glared at her. “I heard you the first time.”
“And you won’t forgive me. Amelia’s upstairs, afraid but alive, and you won’t forgive me.”
“I owe you nothing!” Emory bellowed and slammed the mantle with his fist.
The vase tottered off the edge and shattered on the floor. Mirabelle swatted away tears with a shaky hand.
“How can you be this cold?”
“I can’t forgive you right now, so stop saying you’re sorry if that’s all you’re after.”
Mirabelle knew him better than that. He wasn’t surly for sport, just quick to anger and slow to forgive. For her, a rebuffed apology was an open wound she’d pack with bandages and wonder why it festered. “You gotta let things breathe,” Emory often told her. Forever her folly, she never listened.
Emory toed the vase’s porcelain pieces into a pile. Remorse would come later. The only shame he felt was for the perverse satisfaction of breaking beautiful things.
“You saw him?” Mirabelle asked, her morbid fascination entirely transparent.
She wanted a post-mortem of grisly details, but the night came back to Emory in ink-blotted memories, misshapen at the edges and parts of it haphazardly redacted altogether. He didn’t care to run down the gaps.
“I did. He got away before I could kill him.”
The lie took the air out of the room. Mirabelle’s gaze sharpened, and her duality emerged; the childlike need for protection juxtaposed with an ability to peer into him with cutting clarity.
Kill Ivan or save Amelia. One or the other, he’d had to choose. The others didn’t know and hadn’t seen that he could’ve had both.
Mirabelle knew, though. Somehow, she knew. She inched closer and Emory stood tall, poised to defend himself against the accusations he deserved. He’d had his chance to end it but didn’t.
“He’ll be waiting for us, Emory,” Mirabelle said ominously and, though it wasn’t all that revelatory, her resigned certainty chilled.
“You think I don’t know that? Of course, he will. What do you think he was doing those years we thought he was dead? He planned this, all of it.”
“Not all of it. There’s a part you don’t want to talk about.”
Emory rubbed his cheek that throbbed worse than before. At least his teeth weren’t broken.
“Say it then, Mirabelle. What is it?”
She hesitated and made herself small again. He hated how she did that—waxed when she pleased with pointed declarations then waned sheepishly in anticipation of his response.
“He’s found a vulnerability in you. As long as Amelia is here, she’s a risk.”
“To who? You and Jack?”
Emory barked a laugh, but Mirabelle shifted uncomfortably on her feet. He’d struck the lode and followed that vein to the crux of the matter.
“She figured it out, didn’t she? She knows about you two, saw it before I ever could, right? No wonder you both want her gone.”
Emory cantered off to fetch the dustpan from the kitchen. The questions still rang when he returned to the room. He didn’t need Mirabelle’s answer. The silence alone said what she couldn’t.
“How long have you two been sneaking around?” Emory asked.
He liked to think he knew. It’d become obvious earlier in the year when they couldn’t exist in the same room without tension that stifled. Around that time, Jack’s foul moods held a stunning correlation to the days Mirabelle wasn’t around.
Mirabelle cradled her elbows and blew out a hard breath. “Seven months. I was gonna tell you. I just didn’t know how.”
A volley of cutting remarks welled up inside Emory. He bit his tongue to ward them off. Despite his best effort, the hurt still masqueraded as anger.
“Don’t fucking talk to me about risks or keeping secrets.
I’ll shoulder the blame if this goes south, but Amelia belongs with me.
End of fucking story. I don’t wanna hear shit about it from them.
” Emory ripped the brush from the dustpan and pointed the bristled end at Mirabelle.
“And I certainly don’t wanna hear shit about it from you.
I will walk away with her and leave this place in ashes if I have to. ”
His threat echoed in the room and the foyer beyond. Good, he thought bitterly. Let them all hear.
Mirabelle lifted a hand to mollify. “I’ve only ever wanted what was best for you.”
Emory squatted with the dustpan in one hand and brush in the other. “This can’t be the thing that tears us apart, Miri.”
“It isn’t. You’re my brother, and I love you.”
“Then why do Jack’s bidding?” he asked and swept the vase’s broken pieces into the pan. “Why lie for him and keep his secrets?”
“Same reason you put your secrets into her,” Mirabelle said, awfully brave when he wasn’t looking.
“You love him?”
Mirabelle considered the question for far too long. Love was a litmus test. Yes or no, the answer immediate.
“I do,” she said but added on condition, “not when he drinks, though. He’s different then.”
Emory set the dustpan aside and sat on the floor. The fire warmed his back as he stared up at Mirabelle. She looked too sad for a woman in love and garnered no giddiness for having admitted it.
“I knew the day would come when I’d have to let you go,” Emory said. “I just never wanted it to come like this. We’re leaving tomorrow. You’ll go with Jack and Corey back to Vegas. Amelia and I will head for California.”
Mirabelle drew a long breath as if enduring a blow but didn’t protest.
“I told you not to get involved with a Moriarty man not because I want to meddle in your love life, but because they don’t make for good partners.”
“What does that say about you then?”
Emory had already thought it through and pardoned himself as the exception. He had an off-ramp, in blueprints, but an off-ramp still.
“Nothing. I deal with my bullshit and keep things squared away. I don’t want you cleaning up after someone else’s mess or having to answer for their choices. You can’t fix whatever is broken in Jack. Don’t lose yourself trying.”
“You were supposed to end up like our dad—a simple man, a family of your own, a quiet life. How squared away can you be saddled with all of this?”
Mirabelle gestured to the mansion around them, the enduring symbol of a crumbling empire. How fitting it wasn’t really Emory’s. He didn’t want Liam’s house, no more than he wanted his legacy.
“I have to live with the cards I’ve been dealt,” Emory said and left it at that. Mirabelle’s irony wasn’t intentional. She didn’t know that the only simple and quiet pleasures their father ever knew were in death, not life.
“Maybe someday you’ll fold.”
“Maybe,” Emory agreed but felt the clouds roll in again, on-call to cloak the light. “Go to bed. All will be well.”
He had a lot of nerve saying something like that on the wrong side of midnight. Mirabelle stooped down to kiss his cheek and did as she was told, but clearly didn’t buy it.
Neither did he.