Page 6 of Forbidden Bond

“Are you fucking insane? You called me! You put me there. What exactly was the threat to my life? Silvio walked out, no threat. Conn wasn’t holding a gun; he wasn’t the one shooting people. And I can guarantee, if he’d been armed, you’d be lying dead on that floor right now. You think I’d give a fuck? My guy would be balls deep inside me, listening to me scream for more, scream my thanks for taking your repulsive, vindictive ass off the board!”

Her guy once told her not to leave him alone with Ronald if they discovered he had foreknowledge of the Manzani attack that put her in hospital. How could she have thought, for even a second, that her father wasn’t complicit in that assault?

As for the meet at her grandpapa’s, her father put her in that room. He hadn’t asked for Conn’s presence. No, that was on her. His demise was on her.

“We have to fix this!”

“How do you want to do that, Dad?” she asked, rattling the cuff on the headboard. “You plan to keep me cuffed and quiet for the rest of my life?”

“You’ll say nothing.”

“Why would I keep your secrets? You’re a murderer!”

“It was necessary!” And the wild, deluded light in his eyes proved he believed that. “I did it for the city! I did it for you!”

“What do you want, Dad? Huh? You want to go back there and pretend nothing’s wrong? You want to stride on into your office and resume your role? You murdered your father. A city alderman. You’re a murderer, Ronald.”

“Because he was going to ruin everything, ruin careers, you don’t know the pressure I was under. People looked to me, they begged for help, begged me to stop him asking questions.”

His allies, those on the Manzani payroll. Not the kind of people Superintendent was supposed to serve. It made her sick.

“He was your father,” she pleaded, but got a harsh slap as the words sank in.

Right there, in that moment, she was looking at her father. Hers. If someone put a gun in her hand, would she hesitate to pull the trigger? No. After what he’d done, how could he ever be forgiven? She would kill her father, just as he killed his. Maybe murder was in McLeod blood.

“The situation got out of hand. It wasn’t meant to—if he’d just listened—”

“You deserve to go to jail!”

“And what about the man you brought to our meeting?” Either he couldn’t say Conn’s name or he was disassociating.Maybe he didn’t see her love as worthy of a name. “What did he deserve?”

“Not death.”

“Hasn’t he killed? Hasn’t he murdered people? Would you have put him behind bars?”

No and she couldn’t deny the hypocrisy. Whatever their crimes, she accepted Conn’s world and the people in it. Even Strat and his boys once lived on the shadier side of life.

“Conn never hurt anyone I loved.”

“Those he did hurt were loved by someone.”

Somewhere. Maybe. What about Pietro? Had he been loved? She’d stood there while life slipped out of him. What had she done about that? Nothing. She hadn’t objected. In fact, she went straight to the murderer’s bed.

“I figured out you were responsible for Grandpapa because you didn’t care about finding the murderer. When we were in Stag, everyone else was working hard and offering help, you just sat there. Because all along, you knew who did it.” She scoffed in an ironic laugh and sat on the edge of the bed. “Conn said you might not know the trigger man, but you knew more than you were letting on.”

Now she wondered if he’d been protecting her from the truth.

“You talked about me?”

“We talked about everything,” she said, fighting her urge to snap at his affront. “He was the man I planned to marry. The only man I’d ever consider having a family with. You took that away from me. From us.”

“You grieve now,” he said, calmer than before. “In time, you’ll see I did the right thing. I saved you from him.”

She exhaled. “Does it matter? If we can’t go back to the city together, you’ll have to get rid of me too. How will you explainmy disappearance, my murder, to Lachlan? You won’t be able to blame it on Conn now, he’ll have been found.”

God, she needed that to be true.

And there in lay the rub. Her father inhaled and closed his mouth, slowly letting the breath go from his nose.

---