Page 97 of Forbidden Dark Vows

“How’s Ruby?” The question catches me off-guard, completely out of the blue.

“She’s… Why do you even fucking care?”

ARSENIC…

“That’s what I’m trying to tell you.” He touches the back of his head tentatively, testing the damage. “I needed to check the report for myself. To be sure.”

“After you poisoned Ruby? You could’ve fucking killed her.”

I can’t even look at him. He did kill someone: my mom. And the thought of Ruby’s cold lifeless body on a slab in the morgue is more than I can bear.

“I’ll ignore the accusations after the way I spoke to Ruby.” He swallows, his lips drawing away from his gums. “But I will not accept my own fucking son believing that I killed his mother.”

“Who did then?”

“Not now. I’m not doing this now.”

He clambers onto his feet and blunders past me, back into the study. He walks around the desk, opens a drawer and pulls out a half-full bottle of whisky and two glasses. He pours a large slug into each and hands one to me which I accept mechanically. My hand trembles as I raise it to my lips.

My dad downs his shot in one and refills his glass. “I was having you followed. I wanted to scare you; make you think twice about marrying into that family.” This isn’t his first drink of the day—his words are already slurred. “I’ll hold my hands up when I’m wrong, and I was wrong about you and her.”

“Her?” Hysteria gurgles in my throat and threatens to erupt. “Ruby?”

He shakes his head and rubs his hand across the week-old stubble on his chin. “Seems I was wrong about a lot of things. Your sister…”

“What about Melanie?”

“I know you instructed a PI to find her.”

This is too much, too soon. What else has he been keeping from me? “How?”

“Bank transfers. You made it too easy.” He takes another swig. “She’d have come back if that’s what she wanted. Took you longer to figure it out than I anticipated. All those bum leads, and still you kept chasing them.”

It takes me a beat too long to understand.

“Yep, that was me too.” He slugs back his drink and refills the glass. “I never wanted to marry your mom.”

My hackles are up. The fucking asshole is going to offload his shit onto me so that he can get a decent night’s sleep, no more secrets weighing him down.

“You are some fucking piece of work,” I growl.

He ignores me, lost in his memories. “I had no choice. I either married her or kissed goodbye to everything I’d worked so hard to build. They knew they had me over a fucking barrel—I could never have done it without them.”

“Them?”

“The family. Our connections from back home in Ireland.” A puff of mirthless air escapes his lips, and he turns damp eyes towards me. “I turned my back on love, devoted myself to my wife and our kids, and kept my head down. It’s what’s expected of a Mafia boss. I take over, I pass it on to you. I don’t expect you to believe me, Harry, but I tried my best to love her.I grew to love her. She was … a wonderful woman who deserved fucking better than she got. She deserved fucking better than a ruthless Mafia king.”

That’s the truest thing he’s said so far.

I set the drink down on the desk. I need to get this straight, and I need to be able to think clearly. “Who poisoned Mom?”

Tears well in his eyes, and it’s like a punch in the gut. I’ve never seen my dad cry, not even after Mom died. “Isn’t it obvious?”

I stare at the report. I don’t need to read it to see the words printed underneath the heading: Cause of death. I already know the answer. The common denominator between the two families, and the only person who could’ve poisoned Ruby and avoided having the finger pointed at her.

Her mom. Celia.

“No.” I pick up my glass and swallow a mouthful of whisky—it burns as it goes down. “No. She wouldn’t do that to her own daughter.”

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