Chapter 26 Conrad
Conrad
Bull River Bridge wears the night like an expensive suit, all clean lines and black water. I idle on the shoulder just before the rise, lights off, engine ticking down. The beam of his sedan’s headlights sweeps the guardrail, then finds me. He slows out of instinct and rolls to a stop.
I step into his headlights.
He lowers his window two inches. “Conrad,” he says, like an invitation to behave. “What in the world are you… Move the car.”
“No.” I walk closer, hands visible, gun undrawn. I want him to look at my face when he lies. “You’re not going to the island. You’re going to talk to me.”
A small sigh. “If this is about the latest crisis—”
“It’s about the men you pay to steal women,” I say. “It’s about the containers. It’s about Rafe Collier and the system you built to make it easy.”
He studies me like I’m a quarterly report that might pull through. “You’ve always preferred melodrama when a summary would do.”
“Then summarize,” I say. “Did you pay Rafe? Did you help take her?”
He rests two fingers on the steering wheel.
His rings catch the headlight in white points.
“You have no idea what it takes to maintain an empire. We create jobs, Conrad. We protect families. We keep the wrong kind of men from setting the rules and rising to the top…taking what’s not theirs.
That means we work with the men who can get things done.
It means our hands are not always clean. ”
“Human trafficking.” I rub the toe of my shoe into the asphalt, disgust spearing through me. “Drugs through the kitchen. Kickbacks to uniforms. You call that protection?”
“I call it math.” He lifts his gaze to mine, righteous and certain. “We arrange for what we can control to be in our hands instead of theirs. You’ve benefited from that since you were old enough to sign your name.”
“I don’t want it.”
He smiles, thin. “You do. You just want it without a receipt.”
My jaw locks. He watches, pleased he can still find that old switch.
“Text messages,” I say. “Years ago. Phoenix leaves me two weeks after we make plans. Her words don’t sound like her. They sound like someone coached her through how to most effectively hurt me. Was that you?”
He doesn’t blink. “Yes.”
Two inches of glass. Two inches is enough to admit the part he likes saying out loud. He shifts in his seat, settles, gives me the speech he’s rehearsed for the day I grew the spine to ask.
“She was a variable we couldn’t afford,” he says. “You were a boy with a legacy and no judgment. She would have cost you everything. I tried to keep you away in the only language you understand: removal. She left because I made sure she understood she didn’t belong in your world.”
“Because she was poor? That makes no sense. You and Mother both were poor once—”
“That’s not the reason.” His hands tighten on the wheel, and he looks away, through the windshield. It’s almost as if he’s unable to meet my eyes.
“Then why?” I don’t like the plea in my voice, but I have to know.
“Because she’s your goddamn sister!” he explodes. “And because I won’t have a scandal on my name.”
Sister.
The span of the bridge swells and then tightens around the car. The air thins. I hear the river under us, steady. He continues talking, delivering the rest like he’s patting my shoulder for taking bad news well.
“She’s a Masterson,” he says. “Not by my wife. I wasn’t certain, of course—I didn’t have a paternity test and couldn’t figure out how to gracefully extract DNA. But I was pretty sure. I had blood drawn on the ship, and that confirmed it. She’s mine.”
I put a hand to my head. “I don’t understand—”
“What is there to understand? I fucked her mother. Little bitch didn’t even want to tell me she was pregnant—she was married to that moron and pretended the baby was his—but I knew.”
“You had an affair with Phoenix’s mother?”
He sneers. “Of course I didn’t have an affair. She was cleaning my suite one night, and…one thing led to another.”
“You raped her?”
His eyes narrow. “She wanted it.” He waves a hand. “But Phoenix was a mistake that could be turned into something useful, once she learned gratitude. I wanted you away from her long enough for us to decide how to place her. You wouldn’t listen. So I removed your options.”
My hand is steady, even though horror is roiling through me.
I see Phoenix on a hotel corridor floor, mouth open around the shock of air she can’t pull in, a dog bleeding on tile because he tried to stop a man with a badge.
I see Danner’s pig eyes. I see the container.
I see the way she said my name in her sleep at the safe house like she was afraid it would be taken if she didn’t keep saying it.
I see her body, arching under mine, responding to mine, and I squeeze my eyes closed for a moment.
Sister.
I’m gonna be sick.
“You sent me those texts,” I say, making him repeat it without words.
He nods once. “I did what was required.”
There is a part of me that catalogues everything: the angle of his wrist, the weight distribution of the car, the way the headlamp throws light across the safety strip. The rest of me is simple. It makes a decision that’s been a long time coming and then carries it out.
I draw. He starts to lift his hand—appeasement, command, I don’t care.
The shot is a flat, loud answer. The back of his skull hits the headrest and then slumps forward like a puppet cut from its strings.
Blood is an ugly color on leather. I put the car in neutral and steer it with my forearm and his sleeve until the bumper kisses the rail.
I open his door. The river is closer now.
The night smells like salt, oil, old tide.
“I told you not to come for us,” I say, because I did, once, when my voice was a boy’s and he called it disobedience.
He’s heavy with money and age. I drag him out and over. The bridge is high enough. The splash is smaller than the noise in my head. The current takes the rest.
I wipe what I have to wipe, throw the gun as far out into the river as I can, and leave what I need to leave. This isn’t a disappearance. This is an end. The cops will find him, eventually, but I’ll figure all that out later.
I walk back to my car. I sit and let my pulse find something like normalcy. I text no one. I drive back to the Tybee house.
The gate opens, and the driveway curls out before me. Beyond, the house lights glow low. Inside, the world is the opposite of the bridge. It is warm and soft and smells like vanilla and coffee and the dog’s clean fur and her.
It’s everything I want, and everything that’s threatened now.
Her door is ajar, and she’s wearing my shirt.
She’s on the bed, on her side, knees drawn up, hair shoved into a knot that lost the war.
The hem rides high on her thigh, the collar slipped wide at the shoulder.
She’s reading by lamplight with her mouth slightly open.
She looks like the place I want to live the rest of my life.
“Hey,” she says, and smiles like there’s nothing wrong in the world. She doesn’t ask where I went. She doesn’t have to. She closes the book and puts it on my nightstand like it belongs there. “Come here.”
I stand in the doorway longer than I should and try to build a sentence that won’t break her. Nothing comes that isn’t a wrecking ball. So I do the thing I can do right. I go to her and don’t pretend this is anything but the last time I get to be this selfish.
“I missed you,” she says.
“I’m here,” I answer, because it’s not a promise, it’s a fact.
She sits up and swings her legs over the side of the bed. The shirt falls between her knees. My name is stitched over the pocket, a neat thread I’ve wanted to cut out since the day I got it. She sees me looking and rubs her thumb over it.
“Are you okay?” she asks. It’s like she can feel the knot in my chest.
“No,” I say. “But I will be. After.”
Her eyes flicker—heat and worry and something that lives between them.
She scoots to the edge and hooks her fingers in my belt to pull me in.
The kiss is slow on purpose. It’s a language we invented when we were too young to understand the penalties.
I let my hands find her waist and then her face.
I keep them there. I make the first minute about nothing but her mouth and the sound she makes when I breathe against it.
“Tell me what you want,” I say.
“You,” she answers simply. “Soft.”
It knocks something loose in me, the trust in that one word.
I take my time, refusing to let need make me cruel.
I peel the shirt over her head and let it fall on the bed beside us.
I don’t look away when I see the fading marks that remind me how close I came to never getting this hour.
I kiss them like a vow. I praise, because the world has taken too many things from her that didn’t praise her first. My hands map the same ground I’ve memorized a hundred times and act like it’s the first time because it deserves that.
“You’re perfect,” I tell her. “I’m never fucking letting you go, Princess.”
She shakes her head, eyes worried. “I’m never leaving.”
“Always mine.”
When I slide my mouth lower and fasten my lips around her clit, she threads her fingers in my hair and says my name like a prayer. I almost do something stupid like cry, but I don’t, burying my face in her heat and wetness instead.
I run a hand down her thigh and feel the tremor there and anchor her with the other hand under her knee. When she pulls me up, I go. When she says yes, I listen. When she asks for more, I give it without negotiating. When she asks me to stop, I will stop.
She doesn’t ask me to stop.
When I’m over her, I keep my weight on my forearms. I keep my mouth on her mouth.
I make the rhythm a conversation, not a demand.
Soft. Slow. Then slower. She holds the back of my neck and drags me closer and I go because there is nothing I will ever refuse her in a bed when she asks like that.
She comes with her eyes on mine, not a scream this time, but a quiet breaking shudder that I feel all the way down my spine.
I follow with my jaw pressed to her shoulder, the place I always hide so no one else gets to see me this undone.
After, I don’t roll away. I gather her closer and breathe her hair. I let the quiet do the thing it’s supposed to do. I count five heartbeats. Ten. Twenty. I let myself pretend I can keep this.
I can’t.
“Phoenix.” My voice doesn’t want to cooperate. I make it.
She shifts, sleepy and smiling. “Hmm?”
“I have to tell you something.”
She opens her eyes and braces without realizing she’s doing it, her fingers slipping down to tap against her thigh. I cover her hand, stilling the motion.
“What is it?” she asks.
“My father.” I swallow. My mouth tastes like metal and mint. “He was the one who broke us up when we were the kids. The one who sent the messages.”
“What? Why?” She sits up a little, sheet sliding. “Why does he hate me so much?”
My chest stutters. I say it because leaving it unsaid is worse than the blow.
“He needed to keep us apart. He said… he said you’re his daughter.” The words come out rough and wrong. “He said you’re a Masterson.”
Her face empties. No dramatics. It’s a clean wipe, like she didn’t hear me right and her brain is trying to reload the sentence. “No,” she says, flat. Then again, like maybe repetition will change it: “No.”
“I didn’t want to say it like this,” I manage. “I wanted to find a better way. There isn’t one.”
She pushes back from me, sheet clutched to her chest with one fist. She’s breathing too fast. Her mouth opens and stays that way because there’s no room for anything else to come through it.
“He’s lying,” she says, but it’s not conviction. It’s a plea.
“I hope he did,” I say. “I hope there’s a test that tells us he was trying to break me one last way. We’ll do it. We’ll do all of it. But I can’t let you not know tonight. I can’t touch you again without you knowing what he said.”
Silence. The house makes a faraway sound, like someone closing a cabinet three rooms away. The river is a faint rush through the window. My heart bats itself stupid against my ribs.
“But you just…we just—” She motions to the bed. A tear trickles down her cheek, and all I see is devastation.
I stand. I can’t stay in the bed while her world tilts. I reach for my shirt on the floor and don’t pull it on. I leave it there for her because I can’t take it off her twice. At the doorway, I look back.
She’s still sitting up, sheet pulled tight, hair falling, eyes wide and seeing nothing, mouth open around a word that hasn’t found its shape. It looks like a film still, the moment before the cut to something else that will hurt.
“I’m sorry,” I say. It’s not enough. It’s all I have.
I walk out before I take the choice away from her again.