My mother believes in a receiving line at her events, though I can tell this one is about to break apart. At the end of the line, Daphne is already glancing at the crowd, her eyes bright. Carter and Sophia stand next to her, Carter looking like he’d rather be alone with his books and Sophia with impatience written all over her face. Sophia is the wildest of my sisters, and the most likely to be somewhere unsavory, but she’s here tonight. Lucian and Elaine are closest to my parents.

An old, old instinct quickens my pace on the way to my father and mother. Always best to approach the dangerous thing at speed. Though—there’s an argument to be made that I’m the threat now, not him. My father holds his hand out for me to shake. His eyes stay on Haley.

He is not on his best behavior, then. Wonderful.

I crush his hand in mine, drawing his attention to me. “Merry Christmas.”

He opens his mouth, his eyes sliding back to my fiancée in her gown, her face open and hopeful and not at all Morelli. She wants them to accept her, and I don’t know how to tell her that acceptance from the Morellis as an institution is nearly impossible to achieve and not worth the cost. “That dress is—delicious,” he says, eyeing her cleavage.

“It’s fucking perfect.” I lean in, close enough that I could be about to hug him or kill him. Alcohol hangs in the air around him. “And my fiancée is wearing it, so let’s use our manners, shall we? Keep your eyes where they belong.”

My father glares. I’m taller than he is now. More lethal. No doubt he hates it, like he hates that Lucian has taken over at Morelli Holdings. I no longer care what my father hates. I only care that he keeps his hatred and his violence to himself. Thirty seconds inside this house and I want to throw the nearest object. Anything porcelain or glass, anything that will shatter. But instead I hold his gaze until he pulls his hand out of mine and claps me on the shoulder. This is for the benefit of all the people at the party, not for me.

I move Haley with me to my mother, who has a distant confusion in her eyes. Two of her sons have come here with Constantines. Maybe she’s wondering where she went wrong. Her acting was far better at the engagement party, so perhaps it’s something between the two of them. I can’t pretend to care. My mother was a bystander. Not the innocent kind.