Page 74 of Delta Force Defender

The two women looked at each other.

“Absolutely,” Lindsay said.

“The backyard wasn’t accessible from the street,” Caradine said. “I mean, there was this big, locked fence. And besides, it would have been on fire.”

“Then who was closest to the door in that room?” Jonas asked.

“Two people.” Lindsay cleared her throat. “Francis, because he liked to stand there so he could watch what I was doing. And then punish me for it later if he felt I was looking at anyone the wrong way. Or not looking at him the right way.”

“I hope it’s Francis,” Koa said softly. “Because I don’t think going up in a bomb is enough. Not for him.”

“He hated Dad enough,” Lindsay said, her gaze bleak. “That was part of why he liked to punish me.”

“Who’s the other one?” Isaac asked, though he agreed with Koa.

Again, the sisters looked at each other.

“Our brother,” Lindsay said after a moment.

“Not Danny, the drug addict,” Caradine said, in a way that made it clear this was something they’d discussed before. Or something so obvious they’d never had to discuss it. “Or Patrick, who was always in debt to someone or something, because he liked to gamble.”

“It was Jimmy,” Lindsay said flatly. “The oldest. And the meanest. And if I had to guess, the only one who was capable of going against Dad like that.”

Twenty

“Let’s say it is Jimmy,” Isaac said, his voice so cold and focused that Caradine almost forgot that they were sitting on a Hawaiian island. “Does he think that you have some kind of information? Does he think that you being alive means that you’ll blow his cover? Why would he come after you?”

“Don’t be ridiculous.” Lindsay laughed a little. “Jimmy was a pig. It would never occur to him in a million years that we could harm him in any way.”

Her sister laughed a lot, Caradine thought, and she didn’t quite know where to put that. It felt like an indictment of the way that Caradine had spent these past five years. Locked down. Hiding. Pushing anything that felt like a real life away while Lindsay had been out here... actually living.

What she couldn’t figure out was if she was jealous—or if the very notion scared her half to death.

Or, more likely, both.

“Jimmy once told me that he thought Dad was toolenient with me,” Caradine said, trying to focus on the point instead of all the things she’d lost. Or made herself give up. “If it was up to him, he wanted me to know, he would have nipped my attitude in the bud long before I got so full of myself I actually went to college.”

“Was college really such a bad thing?” Koa asked, sounding charmingly baffled. “Isn’t it supposed to be a life goal?”

“Only if you believe women get to think for themselves.” Caradine arched a brow. “Do you?”

“He’d better.” Lindsay grinned at her husband. But her grin faded almost as quickly as it came. “And as I remember it, Jimmy didn’t just talk about nipping things in the bud. He was happy to jump in and do it himself.”

“The problem with Jimmy was that he was smart.” Caradine remembered her oldest brother’s mean, dead eyes, so much like their father’s, and repressed a shudder. “He could wait. Our other two brothers, and freaking Francis, for that matter, had impulse-control issues. But not Jimmy. He was patient.”

“He could hold a grudge forever,” Lindsay agreed. “If you said something to him that he didn’t like when he was ten, he would hold on to it and make you pay for it when he was thirty. You wouldn’t even remember it, but he would. In detail.”

“Jimmy was a psychopath,” Caradine said flatly. “It makes my stomach hurt to think that he’s still alive and coming after us, but if it’s a member of our family, it would be him.”

“Because he would take it as a personal insult that we dared to live through that explosion and then ran away on top of it.” Lindsay made a face. “He never reacted to personal insults very well.”

“If he wanted to kill his entire family, why would he care if a couple of them got away?” Blue asked. “Out of sight, out of mind, I would have thought.”

“You’re not thinking like a raging psychopath,obviously.” Caradine settled into her seat. She glanced at her sister, then back at their audience. “If you were, you’d know that it’s all about him. He decided to make a power move that he no doubt thought he richly deserved.”

“Or he was mad at Dad for whatever reason,” Lindsay chimed in. “Maybe Jimmy wanted the business. Maybe he just wanted to kill people. Hard to say.”

Caradine nodded. “Obviously, once he made this decision, if his two sisters defied him in any way, they would need to be punished. Severely.”

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