Page 89 of Crowned in Sin
I stand there and take it, every word, because there isn't a single piece of it I can call a lie.
"You could have come to me," I say.
"With what? With Frank's photos of my own body? You want me sitting across from you at dinner explaining what your world already thinks I am?" She shakes her head. "You want me telling you that if I don't hand something over, my mother stops breathing?"
"Yes." My voice comes out low. Hard. "That is exactly what I want. Every time. Every single time, Lydia, you come to me first."
"Why," she says, and it isn't a question; it's a blade, "so you can decide what to do about it the way you decide everything. So you can handle it your way."
"Because I would have handled it."
"You mean you would have killed him."
I say nothing.
"That's what I thought," she says.
I feel the old grief rising in my chest before I can stop it, thick and specific, bigger than the money or the club or even Frank right now. It's the day I brought her through those doors and walked her past the merchandise floor, the liquor license, and the staff schedules. Then I took her up to the mezzanine and told her about Vinny. About my brother building something clean with his own hands because he wanted one good thing to leave behind in a family built on dirty money. I told her that in a voice I saved only for her. I let her all the way into the one part of my life that stayed clean.
"You know what guts me," I say. "It's not the club. I can rebuild a club."
"Then what."
"That was the one place I ever let you all the way in." My voice doesn't rise. It goes quieter instead, and that's worse. "I told you about my brother in that office. I never told anyone about my brother. And you took that place and you handed it over."
Something crosses her face, grief of her own tangled up with a fury she isn't ready to put down yet.
"You want to talk about what you let me in on," she says. "Let's talk about that."
"Lydia."
"No." She's moving now, off the counter, closer, and her voice has stopped shaking. "You want to stand there and act like I'm the only one in this kitchen who's been keeping something. I know what you did to my father."
The room goes still in a different way.
I don't say anything. I don't move. And I feel it happen inside her, watch it happen across her face in real time, the moment she understands what my silence actually means.
"You're not even surprised," she says slowly. "You already knew I knew."
My jaw tightens. No words come.
"How long." Her voice climbs. "How long have you known that I know?"
"Since you told me his name," I say. "At the club. The second you said Harry Mitchell out loud, I knew you'd figure out the rest."
Something in her face goes very still, more dangerous than the shouting was.
"Were you ever going to tell me?" she says. "Or was I always going to have to find every piece of this myself and hand it to you before you'd admit any of it?"
I don't answer that. Every version of the truth confirms exactly what she's afraid of.
Her breath comes out shaking. "God. You weren't. You were just going to let me live next to it for the rest of my life and never say a word."
"What did you want me to say."
"I wanted you to say something. Anything. Instead you just... let me carry it."
"I killed your father," I say, flat, because there's no version of this where softening it helps either of us. "Eleven years old. That's what I was, a blade shoved into my hand and my father's voicebehind me telling me to finish what I'd started. You think an eleven-year-old boy says no to Don Leo and walks away from it?"
