Page 81 of Forced Vows

"If both your father and grandfather promised you would not be used in a political alliance, why did your uncle force the matter?" Can Shaughnessy be trusted?

If he'll break a promise to family, he'll break them to us in a heartbeat.

"The promise from my grandfather was based on my father becoming the next boss."

"There was some doubt?" Derry Shaughnessy was the oldest and heavily involved in the mob's business at that point.

I've done my research.

"Dad loved my mom and he blamed grandfather for her death."

"Their marriage was arranged." Not sure why I feel the need to remind her of this.

We're not going to have a marriage like her parents. For one thing, no way in hell am I going to let her get shot like her mother.

Róise will have the same number of men in rotation as Catalina.

"Gabriel required a blood alliance before he would go into business with my grandfather."

She calls her grandmother mamo, an Irish term like grandma, but never refers to either grandfather with affection.

Róise sighs. "My mother believed marrying my dad was the best thing that had ever happened to her."

And then she was killed by a stray bullet meant for her father-in-law.

"So your dad threatened to do what? Walk away?"

"Sort of. He told grandfather that if he signed a contract on my behalf, my dad was going to take me to Ireland and fill the position one of his second cousins had been tapped for. Kara's marriage was an exchange, with one of the Shaughnessy men going to Ireland to marry the daughter of the mob boss in Dublin."

A proud man, her grandfather would have been livid at the idea of her father stepping down into a lower position and becoming a soldier for another boss. In Ireland, or elsewhere.

"When your dad didn't become mob boss like his father wanted him to, the promise was negated." Shaughnessy did not go back on his father's word.

"That's how my grandfather and uncle saw it. I guess this alliance was actually my grandfather's idea."

"But he didn't approach my father." I would know if he had.

"No, but he planted the seed in Uncle Brogan's brain for a strategic time."

Or when he had no choice but to offer up the alliance.

The cartel's plans for our territory wouldn't have succeeded even if war had broken out between the Irish and us. But there's no denying both syndicates will be stronger for the formalized connection.

And both would have suffered losses if we'd gone to war like the cartel wanted us to.

"It's done. Can you accept it?"

She looks away, not toward the water, but toward the trees that shield part of the backyard from the wind off the bay. "I don't have a choice."

"No, you don't." I could sugar coat it with some pink fairy dust, but that isn't going to help Róise come to terms with our reality.

Only truth can do that.

And maybe logic. "You were all raised with the knowledge that some kind of alliance marriage was in your future."

I'm sure of that. For fuck's sake, her own parents were an alliance marriage. As no doubt Brogan and his dead wife were as well.

"Knowing it's a possibility and being promised to a stranger at the age of sixteen and then shoved down the aisle at eighteen is not the same thing."

---