20. Jamison
CHAPTER TWENTY
JAMISON
The most humiliating night of my life started with basil. Unfortunately, it kept fucking happening. That was the part no one warned you about. Humiliation, if attached to family, did not arrive once.
It developed a schedule, with calendar alerts.
At 11:47 p.m. Harrison and I stood outside Marcel’s kitchen garden dressed in black, armed with gloves, a trowel set, three replacement herb trays. And the kind of silence men usually reserved for disposing bodies. Except there were no bodies.
There was however, a lot of dead fucking herbs.
Harrison crouched beside the planter and stared at it.
“Fuck me,” he muttered. “She got to the parsley.”
I rubbed a hand over my face, and looked down at the plant.
This was my life now.
I ran Harlan’s syndicate. Men crossed streets when they saw me. And yet here I was, in Marcel’s side garden near midnight, replacing Emmie’s herbs because no one had the heart to tell her she could not keep a plant alive.
Not one.
I looked down at the tray. Basil. Parsley. Rosemary. Thyme. Two pots of something leafy I had been told was coriander, though it looked exactly like every other fragile green bastard Emmie had managed to kill with love.
The woman could survive Marcel’s moods, and a marriage that required nerves of steel.
But herbs defeated her.
Repeatedly.
Harrison dug his gloved hand into the soil and pulled out the dead basil by the roots.
“Christ,” he muttered. “This one’s crispy.”
“You were supposed to replace it last week.”
“I did replace it last week.”
“Then why is it dead?”
“Because Emmie owns it.”
We both looked toward the kitchen windows.
The house was dark. Marcel’s wing was quiet. Emmie was asleep upstairs, hopefully wrapped around my brother and unaware that two grown Crow men were crouched in her garden conducting a late-night herb heist because none of us could handle her being sad over dead leaves.
We hated Emmie sad.
All of us.
Marcel became homicidal when she cried. Harrison became sharp and pretended he was joking. I became apparently available for illegal landscaping.
Family had become deeply inconvenient.
Harrison reached for the fresh basil. “Hand me the little shovel.”
“I’m not your assistant.”
“You’re literally standing there holding gardening supplies.”
I handed it to him. He smirked. I considered stabbing him with the little shovel.
“This whole operation could be avoided,” I said, “if Emmie would install the watering system.”
“We tried.”
“I know we tried.”
I crouched beside him and started loosening the soil around the thyme. The ground was damp, but unevenly. Emmie watered according to emotion. She insisted they spoke to her. Some days the herbs drowned. Some days they died of thirst while she forgot they existed.
I handled rosemary and thyme. Harrison handled basil. Marcel handled pretending to be shocked by the miraculous recovery of the planter every few weeks. There were worse things men had done for women.
I set the new thyme into place and packed soil around the base. “I’m considering blacklisting her from plant nurseries.”
Harrison paused. “Go on.”
“Every nursery, garden stall in Harlan. Put her name on a quiet refusal list.”
Harrison’s mouth twitched. “What, the next time she gets an idea involving soil, some poor employee tells Marcel Crow’s wife no?”
“Yes.”
“And survives?”
“We can script it.”
“She’ll cry.”
“She won’t cry if they say it’s for ecological reasons.”
“She’ll ask questions.”
I nodded. Good point. I clicked my fingers. “We’ll invent a fungus.”
Harrison stared at me for a long second, then nodded slowly. “A city-wide plant fungus prevention protocol.”
“Exactly.”
“Bans her from herbs?”
“All plants.”
“Indoor too?”
“Especially indoor.”
He looked impressed despite himself. “That’s not terrible.”
“It’s excellent.”
“It makes the employee the bad guy.”
“No,” I said, pulling the dead parsley out by its roots. “It makes science the bad guy.”
Harrison took the corpse from me and dropped it into the black disposal bag. “I love when science carries family burdens.”
Marcel had tried to install a watering system, which meant he had approached it in the most alarming way possible by having three discreet landscape engineers assess her herb beds while she was at lunch. Emmie found the proposal on his desk and became offended before dinner.
Apparently, automatic watering made her look like a bad gardener.
She said she wanted to care for them herself. Marcel told her, very gently, that care could include support systems.
Emmie told him he could install a support system for his own plants when he grew some.
Marcel did not grow plants.
Marcel grew fear of upsetting his wife. Which is how the watering system died.
Now Harrison and I took turns replanting the evidence. I dug out the thyme while Harrison held his phone flashlight over the planter.
“Angle it lower,” I said.
“I am.”
“You’re lighting the wall.”
“I told you we need headlights.”
I paused. “I told you. I will not wear a torch on my head while replacing fucking herbs.”
He grinned.
The man was terrible for my fucking blood pressure.
We worked in silence for several minutes, removing the dead herbs and replacing them with healthy ones from the crate. Harrison tamped down dirt around the rosemary.
That was another problem. If the plants looked too healthy, Emmie got suspicious.
We had rules now. Moderate health. No visible flowering unless the previous plant had buds. Never replace all herbs in one night unless catastrophic.
Tonight was catastrophic.
“Parsley in,” Harrison said.
I placed it.
He tilted his head. “Too upright.”
“Parsley grows upright.”
“Emmie’s parsley never has.”
He had a point. I nudged the plant slightly left.
Harrison nodded.
The humiliation deepened.
We cleaned the soil off the stones, collected the dead herbs, and disposed of every trace in the black bag. Harrison took a photo for comparison. We were about to leave when Harrison stopped near the side door.
“Disaster room,” he said.
I closed my eyes.
“No.”
“We have to check.”
“No, we don’t.”
He looked toward the dark house. “Yes, we do.”
The disaster room was Emmie’s sun room.
In theory, it was beautiful. Marcel had built it for her on the east side of the house where morning light came in through tall arched windows. In practice, it was where hobbies went to die.
Emmie had the attention span of a goldfish and the imagination of a woman who watched one Veil tutorial and immediately believed she could master any craft by Thursday.
She bought supplies. Started, then she got bored, upset by a difficult instruction, or lured away by old films and Marcel’s lap. After that, the unfinished hobby sat in the sun room until the shame of it made her avoid the room.
Once Emmie avoided the room, she became sad, and Marcel became dangerous.
So Harrison and I had created a limit. Eight unfinished hobbies. At nine, intervention.
I followed Harrison into the house through the side entrance because apparently my night had more suffering scheduled.
We entered the room.
The things I had finished in this room would destroy my reputation if Harlan ever found out.
There were men alive only because they feared me. That was not an exaggeration. Harlan ran on reputation as much as blood.
If those same men found out I had once glued tiny pearls onto a handmade picture frame at two in the morning because Emmie wanted it to look “vintage but hopeful,” the balance of power would shift.
Harrison picked up an embroidery hoop on the table.
I pointed at him. “Put that down.”
He lifted a brow. “You said that about the knitting.”
My eyes narrowed on him.
We did not speak of the knitting.
There were rules in this family. Some were written in the dead stare one brother gave another when a forbidden topic crossed the room. The knitting was one of those rules. I stared at him until his smile faded.
“The week your hand broke,” I said, “was very convenient.”
“I broke it in a fight.”
“You broke it three hours after we agreed to come
back to finish the blanket.”
“It was an important fight.”
Harrison placed the embroidery hoop back down. “We agreed never to speak of it.”
“You spoke first.”
“I regret it.”
The memory remained one of the darkest in our family history.
Because I had spent two nights finishing a soft ivory blanket with my sleeves rolled up, my phone on silent, and a tutorial playing at half speed on a private screen while Harrison sat on the sofa with his broken hand and being fucking useless.
He claimed he could not help.
I claimed he had planned the entire injury.
I finished it.
But, I did not knit.
I executed a textile recovery operation.
Since the knitting incident, I had made sure Emmie’s Veil account was never shown knitting or crocheting again. I had missed embroidery.
That was a tactical failure.
Harrison walked the perimeter of the table and counted under his breath, because apparently we were inventorying shame now.
“Embroidery. Candle molds. Dollhouse conservatory. Pressed flower coasters. Watercolour landscape. Clay ring dishes. Beaded napkin holders. Tiny painted herb markers.”
“Herb markers?”
He pointed to a tray near the shelves.
Six small ceramic plant markers sat half-painted, each with little crooked flowers along the edges and blank spaces for names. One had BAS written on it and then stopped.
I hated this room.
We sat at the worktable. Harlan’s most dangerous men, painting herb names onto tiny ceramic stakes under low lamplight while the city slept.
Humiliation had layers.
Harrison pulled the tray closer and studied Emmie’s unfinished letters. “Her handwriting is too round.”
“I know.”
“You can copy it?”
“Unfortunately.”
He dipped a narrow brush into green paint and began finishing the tiny leaves around the top of one marker.
The key with Emmie projects was not to be perfect.
Too perfect and she knew Marcel paid someone.
So the project had to look as if Emmie had finished project with enough imperfection to feel believable.
Controlled whimsy.
I hated knowing that phrase.
Harrison painted one violet.
I wrote BASIL.
“This is Marcel’s fault,” I said.
“Most things are.”
“He should tell her no.”
Harrison laughed quietly. “Marcel? Tell Emmie no?”
“He tells syndicate men no all the time.”
“Syndicate men don’t blink up at him and say they only wanted to make the kitchen feel cheerful.”
I painted THYME on the second marker. “Marriage has ruined him.”
Harrison gave me a look.
“What?” I snapped.
“You’re angry because you’re next.”
“I am angry because the Bellemeres replaced my fiancée with her cousin.”
The brush bent in my hand. I put it down before I snapped it.
There were many things a man could break in Marcel’s disaster room without consequence. A paintbrush was not one of them. If Emmie found a broken brush, she would make that little wounded face and say something horrific like, “Oh, I must have pressed too hard.”
Then Marcel would look at all of us like one of us had shot her.
No, thank you.
“Sienna left this morning? Are you going to tell her?” Harrison’s voice softened by half an inch.
No. I was not going to tell her. Not when this was all my fucking fault.
Sienna would take the information and, think she had been replaced because she had not been enough. She would apologize for no longer holding value to people who never deserved the first piece of her. I could already hear it in her voice.
She’d attended Emmies birthday with me. I’d apologised. She listened. I even messaged her good morning, and good night now. I had too many screenshots of her replies.
The day after Emmie birthday, Sienna left for her families retreat. It was the same day, I’d received notification that Celeste Bellemere was being presented beside me at an event on the weekend.
“I’m going to fix it before she has to carry it,” I painted PARSLEY too hard and made the stem crooked. Harrison silently took the marker and fixed it. “I’ll tell her when I have the solution.”
“It’s still going to suck if Sienna doesn’t come back to us.”
I looked at him. “Maybe you’ll finally pay attention to the dates you bring.”
“I stopped bringing anyone serious years ago.”
I frowned. “Why?”
“Because they got jealous of Sienna.” Harrison shrugged.
Immediately something old and angry took notice of the conversation.
“I’d spend half the night making sure your fiancée wasn’t abandoned, starving.” He added, giving me a sharper look. “Dates didn’t like that. One told me I looked at Sienna more than I looked at her. She wasn’t wrong.”
A strange, ugly feeling moved through my chest. Harrison saw it and looked away first, which was either mercy or him saving himself from my mood.
“Before you get that look. She was just…” He paused. “Ours, a little. Family, even if you were too stupid to act like it.”
My brothers had been kinder to my fiancée than I had. I regretted that deeply and would fix it. I would fucking fix it. Celeste Bellemere was technically being presented beside me tomorrow night. I had every intention, on making it clear that wouldn’t happen. We finished in silence.
I pulled out my phone.
We had a shared reminder.
That was not a sentence I enjoyed living with.
Emmie Herb Check — every six days, 11:30 p.m.
I adjusted the next alert to account for the new basil, then added a note: inspect rosemary. I put the phone away. We slipped out through the side door and back into the garden.