“I know it sounds ridiculous to you,” she rushed to add. “After all, it’s a well-known fact my parents have never been faithful to one another. Their marriage is considered a sham in most social circles of New England. But for me, it means something. It means a lot, actually. Growing up, I knew I had the stability of Avebury Court Manor. Even though Mother and Da weren’t a functional couple, they were still a couple in their own strange way. Believe it or not, Sam, they worked. I know I’m not an impressionable teenager anymore and worse things happen to twenty-seven-year-olds. Some people lose their parents, their partners, even their children, but I just don’t understand…” she shook her head, tears hanging on her lower lashes for dear life, refusing to fall “…how everything escalated so quickly. One moment we were leading a normal life—as normal as life could be for us—and the next everything exploded. The provocative pictures of Da and that … that woman materializing out of nowhere, the poisoning. Someone is trying to ruin my father, and Athair thinks it’s my mother.”

I stared at her, offering no words of explanation or encouragement. What could I say?

Actually, now that you mention it, I’m behind the operation. Jane is merely collateral damage. Be thankful it’s not you I’m throwing under the bus. And by the way, this isn’t even the tip of the iceberg, so buckle up, sweetheart, because I’m about to make him remortgage your childhood house and bleed him dry of his billions.

“Do you really have no lead?” she asked, signaling me with her hand to pass the bottle.

I did, shaking my head.

She sipped the brown liquid like it was tea, returning the bottle to me. “That’s weird. You are usually so resourceful. I can’t recall the last time you couldn’t help my family when we got ourselves into trouble.”

I was marginally amused by her attempt to trick me into working harder on the case. A case that I’d created all by myself.

“Patience, Nix.”

“Are you a patient man?”

“I don’t hold myself to the same standards I hold you to.”

“That’s convenient.”

“I lead a convenient life.” I saluted her with the bottle, taking a sip. “Anyway, look at the bright side. Two houses. Two parents. Two Christmas trees. Two sets of presents and so fucking forth.”

“I’m not a kid.” Her eyes flared with rage.

I elevated a brow. “You sure act like one where your parents are involved.”

“What would you do if you were in my position?” Her eyes zeroed in on mine, sharp all of a sudden.

Lower myself to my knees and have you take my balls in your mouth again.

“Let them sort this shit out by themselves. They are grown-ups, and you are not the parent. You’re the kid.”

Perhaps because I was more focused on Aisling recently, especially during Thanksgiving dinner, I couldn’t help but notice how her mother had asked Aisling to pour her drinks for her and join her in the bathroom to help her with her zipper. Jane didn’t treat Aisling much better than a maid. I couldn’t remember when that dynamic had started, and now I wondered whether I chose to turn a blind eye to it all along or I didn’t want the facts to get in my way of seeing Aisling as a spoiled brat.

“I am sort of my mother’s parent,” she admitted. “She relies on me … mentally.”

“That, to use the technical term, is fucked-up.”

“Maybe, but it’s the truth. My life is … not as pretty as it seems from the outside.” She scrunched her nose, reaching to pluck one of the bullets from the jar and rolled it between her fingers, examining its initials. She put it back. Took out another one. I resisted the urge to lash out at her, tell her I was now going to have to wipe her fingerprints from each of them individually, in case someone ever found them. I could tell she was close to tears and wanted to avoid becoming a wailing woman at all costs.

I grew up with Sparrow and Sailor, two women who weren’t prone to dramatics. In fact, I could not recall them crying at all. I was sure a tear or two was shed at family funerals and such, but they had always carried themselves with the quiet strength of women who knew the underworld inside and out and ruled it as their unchallenged goddesses.

Usually when I heard women cry, it was in bed and for all the right reasons.

“Boo-fucking-hoo, sweetheart. You’re young, beautiful, and rich enough to buy happiness. So your parents are about to get a divorce and hate each other’s guts. Welcome to the twenty-first century. You are officially joining fifty percent of people in the U.S.”

I really was a bottomless source of fucking sunshine, wasn’t I? But there was nothing I could do to help her. I wasn’t going to change my plans to spare her feelings.

Nix’s eyes narrowed at me, but surprisingly, she didn’t look like she was about to bawl.

“My life is not as charmed as you think,” she insisted, whispering hotly. “For one thing, growing up I never saw real love. A healthy relationship between a man and a woman. At least you had Sparrow and Troy. My childhood was an endless stream of arguments, object tossing, and my parents disappearing to Europe for months at a time, together or alone, leaving me with the nannies.”

I stared at her blankly, showing her she hardly mustered enough pity in me to inspire me to get up and grab her a Kleenex.

“Then I lost someone I really cared about when I was seventeen, in a pretty … brutal way.” Her throat bobbed with a swallow, and she looked around, uncomfortable all of a sudden. I didn’t ask whom it was.

Rule number one was to not get attached. It clouded your judgment.

“What else have you got for me?” I yawned, leaning back, making a show of checking the time on my phone.

“My first time …” She hesitated, biting down on her lower lip. My interest piqued, and I found myself sitting upright. “I lost my virginity to my professor.”

“How old was he?”

“Forty-one.”

“And you?”

“Nineteen.”

“That’s—”

“Disgusting?” She smiled sadly, her eyes shimmering with tears again. I was going to say hot as fuck, but of course that was out the window now. “Yeah, I know. Wanna know the disgusting part?”

“I thought I already knew. He was forty-one.”

She shot me a tired smile.

“I found out three weeks after we started sleeping together that he was married with a kid. See, he didn’t wear a wedding band and lived in an apartment complex on campus, alone. He looked young and stylish and hung out with the students so often…” she picked a cuticle around her fingernail, tugging on it nervously “…I wanted to lose my virginity to someone with experience, and I knew he had it. We continued seeing each other after we had sex. Until one day he just disappeared into thin air. Stopped answering my calls. Just got up and left. He didn’t even complete the academic year. I needed some sort of closure, so I found him. And, well, I found out why he left. Because of me. Because his wife, who taught at another university two states away, had found out and dragged him back home by the ear. When I found his new address, I made the mistake of driving down there and knocking on his door.”