Page 387 of Double or Nothing

“Security.”

“Obedience isn’t security,” I say. “It’s a trait that only makes you weak. She isn’t beholden to her family anymore. Whoopty fucking doo. Let her go and congratulate her.”

Parker’s eyes narrow.

“You have no idea how our family operates. No fucking idea at all.”

I’m getting to the sonofabitch without even raising my voice, and that’s deeply satisfying. His idea of family can go fuck itself.

I think of Bryce holding my hand in the back of a cab. Alice’s mug in my cupboard. The Calder portrait opposite Bryce’s side of my bed. Toasties at sunrise. Red and purple.

Yellow.

“I’m learning quite a lot about what Alice needs from family,” I tell him.

He laughs.

“You couldn’t provide what Alice needs. Not in a million years.”

“That isn’t my decision to make. It’s hers.”

“I’m her father, you disrespectful cunt. Alice Rose is my daughter.”

Eli’s gaze sharpens from across the room. I feel the spikes.

“Be careful,” he says to the wanker.

Parker spins to face him.

“Is that a threat?”

“An observation. You appear to have confused fear with loyalty. An easy mistake for a man who values family status above the family itself.”

Parker says nothing. They stand-off in silence.

I get a stab of pain when I look at Eli. The friend I’ve known for almost a decade. I know how he recognises Alice’s dilemma. He’s lived it for himself.

A small-town church he grew up in. A father who treated the family name as holy property. A boy expected to smile while respectable people praised the vicar and concealed every resentment beneath their Sunday manners.

Eli learned to read hypocrisy before he learned to read cards.

Parker, with his lectures about duty and reputation, must feel horribly familiar to him. A vile similarity.

“Alice will come home,” Parker says. “I’ll make sure of it.”

“If she wanted to be with you, she wouldn’t have left,” Eli says.

“Her home is with our family. You have no idea what you’re involving yourself in.”

“I know exactly what I’m involved in,” Eli says. “And rightly so, since you’re standing in my property.”

I rise from my chair to bring the tension back my way, and seem to pick the perfect timing, since movement sounds out from the corridor.

They’re here. Finally. I hear Bryce’s voice talking to the people outside.

Eli stands aside and opens the door. Bryce enters first, wearing dark trousers and a shirt with no tie. His hand remains behind him, holding on to someone in the corridor.

When Alice steps through, wrapped up in my coat, the sight of her punches the air from my lungs.