Page 11 of Sin

“Why don’t you pray for me then, Dad?” I add on the term that I never use except to irritate him.

“You’re beyond the reach of prayers,” he spits out. His eyes are blazing as he leans across the desk. “I told your mother you were born wrong. That the devil lived in you, but she refused to listen.” He shakes his head in a poor imitation of grief. “It cost poor Amelia her life.”

The always shaky control I have over the volcano of fury toward my father is threatening to erupt. “Don’t talk about her,” I warn, my voice losing its false drunken slur and coming out quiet and threatening.

For a second, my father looks at me cautiously. He should. If he knew how many times I’d contemplated throwing away my carefully laid plans for his downfall in favor of wrapping my hands around his throat and slowly depriving him of breath as I tell him I know what he did to my mother. My hands shake with the desire to give in to the hate boiling within me.

He watches me for a moment, and then he dismisses his unease. Once again underestimating me. He lets out a long-suffering sigh. “I’m in no mood for your drunken histrionics. I need to speak to you about your brother.”

The mention of Cassidy’s name focuses me. I need to know why he brought him back home. A slither of unease goes through me every time I think about the small pile of misfunctioning albuterol inhalers on Cassidy’s bureau.

Cassidy had said his mother sent them to him. I doubt Sheila is ever sober enough when she’s not busy playing the perfect preacher’s wife to even remember her son has asthma, let alone be maternal enough to go to the trouble of sending Cassidy a care package of his meds. That kind of thing would fall under Mrs. Fenton’s job responsibilities, and she reports directly to my father.

I don’t like it at all.

“What about the runt?” I ask, putting every ounce of disdain I can manufacture into my voice. It’s important that my father thinks Cassidy is nothing more than an annoyance to me.

“His dean contacted me last week. He’s finished all of his coursework to graduate early, and between the college classes he’s already taken and those he tested out of, he’ll be able to enter college as a junior.”

I keep the grin off my face at Cassidy’s accomplishments as pride sweeps through me for my brilliant little over achiever. “So?” I challenge in my best don’t-give-a-rat’s-ass tone. “What’sthe big deal? We all know he’s a nerd who doesn’t have anything better to do than study.”

“I pulled some strings and enrolled him in Thurston. He’ll be starting the new semester with you on Monday.”

Since Cassidy rejected my bribe, I have to make sure my father changes his mind about Cassidy staying in Nashville. I need to keep Cassidy safe and far away from here. “There’s no fucking way. He can’t stay here.”

Predictably, my father bristles. “It’s my house. I decide who stays here.”

Still off kilter from my father’s revelation, I can’t help but shoot back, “Actually,” I say, giving him my best fuck-you smile, “It’s mine.”

Pure satisfaction runs through me at watching my father’s face puff up and his eyes bulge in response.Guess Botox can only do so much.He can’t stand the fact that my mother—unknown to him—changed her will shortly before she died and left me her family’s old money fortune and the ancestral house and land that he’s built his church and compound on.

“I’m Cassidy’s legal guardian. He stays where I want him to stay.”

And checkmate. My father wins this game. Until Cassidy turns eighteen, he’s under my father’s rule.

Two months, three weeks, and four days until Cassidy’s birthday. Once he’s eighteen, I’ll be able to begin to carry out my plans to topple my father and the mega-church he’s created into his own empire of greed and corruption. The wait seems eternal, but I’ve survived twenty years of him—I can endure the few months that remain between him and his destruction.

Until then, I just have to make sure Cassidy stays safe.

“We made a deal three years ago,” I remind him. “I didn’t want Cassidy living here then, and I sure as hell don’t want him here now. Send the nerd to another college.”

“Deals run out,” my father says like the sheisty bastard he is.

“Of course, I could always decide to send him to my friend Jefferson’s charter school like I wanted to three years ago.” He watches me closely, detailing my every reaction.

Over my dead body.I’ve heard horror stories about what happens at Jefferson House. I know my father, though, and if I object, he’ll be on the phone to Jefferson immediately.

I shrug, “Better than him being here.” I call his bluff.

He pretends to mull it over. “As much as I think Cassidy could use some toughening up, I want him here, and that’s the end of it.”

I swing my legs down from his desk, scattering the rest of his sermon to the floor, and stand up. “We’ll see about that,” I throw out behind me, right before I head out the door.

After the mind-fuck of a meeting with my father, I go to one of the few places on this property where my father hasn’t erased all proof that my mother ever lived. Maybe because it’s because he can’t swim, but the pool and its accompanying bungalow have been left out of his manic need to renovate and put the Gideon Brandt stamp all over her legacy.

I fill a glass with ice and then pour whiskey in it until it reaches the top, and sit at one of the bar tops that offer a view of the valley below. The sight doesn’t catch me like it usually does. Instead of hill greenery and the blood-orange sunset in front of me, large hazel eyes with specks of blue that never fail to take my breath away, and dark messy curls are all I see.

I hadn’t been prepared for Cassidy to come back into my life. Hell, I hadn’t been ready the first time he showed up in my life either.

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