Clearly, Antonio didn’t feel well-compensated or respected enough in this city. He got greedy, and that will be his downfall.
I get what Lachlan is trying to say. So does Connor.
“There’s no telling how far we go,” Connor says, darkly gleeful. “With our power aligned? We’ll be unstoppable. We’ll take half of Boston.”
Finn interrupts, something dark flashing in his eyes. “We can’t trust him.”
“We don’t,” Lachlan replies evenly. “That hasn’t changed.”
“We can’t trust him even a little,” Finn says sharply. He leans over his legs as if he’s talking across the table from Lachlan, trying to impress upon him how much this matters.
Finn is contradictory. He always has been. For someone with an addictive personality, it’s strange to me that he’s so adamant about being careful now.
It makes me feel like he knows something, or like he has some kind of premonition.
“He could try to go back on the deal,” Finn continues. He slumps back in his seat, but the motion is agitated. Like he has to move or he’ll go crazy.
Connor shrugs. “And? We have the dirt.”
It’s like Finn doesn’t even hear him.
“He could try to fuck us. He’s a fucking rat, obviously,” he mutters, waving a hand around. “I mean, he said yes because he had no choice. Who knows what the hell he’s doing now that we’ve left?”
“Pissing himself,” Connor says, smug. “Probably checking his will.”
“If he thinks he has nothing to lose by it, he’ll do what he did again. He’ll kill one of us. Or maybe more.”
Finn’s voice is gruff, and I share a look with Lachlan before glancing over at our younger brother.
Our father’s death fucked us up. It was awful, but we were getting by, until six months after his funeral when our mother had a heart attack. Her heart stopped, and the world stopped with it. She became unresponsive, as lost to us as our father but still alive.
Barely.
The doctors call it a vegetative state, but we know it as a waking death. Barely half a year on the heels of our father’s murder, it was too much.
Finn spiraled.
The rest of us weren’t doing well either. We could hardly manage our father’s empire, our grief, and our mother’s care, much less Finn. The few moments we managed to get him alone didn’t go very far.
He was always out at a bar or a club or a brothel, maybe trying to get away from the memories. He definitely tried to drink them away.
It became less common to see Finn sober after our mother’s health failed. He was always just a little bit fucked up, just a little bit distant from the world. Some days it was worse, and he couldn’t even stand. Other days it was barely noticeable, just a hint of whiskey on his breath.
Now, with our father’s murderer in our grasp, the cracks are beginning to show. Finn is sober today because maybe this is the one thing he can sober up for, but I can feel in my heart that he’ll probably get trashed tonight.
This is digging at old wounds for all of us.
“He’s not wrong,” I say. I mean it.
Despite whatever trauma or fear is informing Finn, he’s not wrong to be worried.
Connor sighs. “Yeah.”
I tap my fingers against my knee. “We can’t trust Antonio to comply. We know he once risked everything to murder another head of the Assembly. He cheated the Ravens. There’s nothing that snake won’t do.”
Lachlan turns the steering wheel. We’re driving over the river now, the water lazily running under us. I can remember visiting as a teenager, before the death of our father. We used to hang targets on the trees and practice throwing knives at them.
“We need insurance,” Lachlan says. He has the voice of a man who’s already made up his mind.
