Chapter 56
CHAPTER 56
B ELLE
Shaking, because now I know Beast has kept so much from me and I’m not sure what it means, I tuck the photo into my jeans pocket.
Determined to find out the truth, I rip open the bedroom door but walk straight into my husband.
“Little one?—”
I hold up the photo and his expression changes.
“This is me, isn’t it.”
He takes the photo and studies it.
A second passes.
Then two. Then three.
“I’ve looked at this picture a thousand times,” he says finally.
He swallows, and I watch his Adam’s apple bob in his throat.
“Is it me?” I ask, watching his reaction and feeling the emotion I can see on his face.
“And me.”
I shake my head. “How is that even possible?”
He lifts his gaze. “Belle?—”
“Tell me,” I demand.
“I can’t.”
“Can’t or won’t?”
“It’s not time.”
I duck around him. It’s one of the advantages of being tiny in comparison to my gigantic husband.
I flee along the hallway and up the stairs toward the old turret.
Unfortunately, he catches up to me outside the forbidden room.
“Belle.” His deep voice rumbles my name.
But I slay him with a glare. “Open the door.”
He thinks for a moment. Our gazes locked, I notice the rapid pounding of his pulse in the thick vein of his neck.
Without a word, he unlocks the door.
I don’t wait for him to stand aside, I shove past him and storm into the forbidden room.
The room is vast with stone walls and ceiling-to-floor arch windows. It’s been set up like some kind of office or a den. I scan the walls in the dim light. Pieces of paper stuck to the brickwork grab my attention and I charge over to them.
They’re photos.
Of me.
And there are a lot of them.
I feel Beast come up behind me, but I don’t turn around. “You were following me?”
“Yes.”
“Since I returned to St. Bon.”
It’s not a question. But he answers anyway. “Yes.”
I stare at a photo of me in the doorway of Julian and Dani’s home. Then another of me glancing over my shoulder as I walk down the street.
And that’s the moment it clicks.
I turn around to face him. So I can see his eyes if he is telling the truth. “The night Gaston stopped us in the street, you were following us.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Do you really not remember?”
I frown. I’m so tired of feeling like I live in a riddle. “Remember what?”
“This place. Us. Me .”
“What are you talking about?”
“You were born into the club, Belle. Until your mom and dad died, you used to live here. Your father was a Knight. Your mom was an old lady. You were a club brat.”
My heart begins to pound rapidly. “No,” I whisper.
Out of nowhere, a fractured image flashes across my mind’s eye. The flight of a car going over the edge of a cliff. The glitter of a shattered windscreen. The feeling of falling. The rush of the sea coming for me.
No, that’s just a nightmare.
A stupid nightmare that’s haunted me for years. Except this time I see the moment before the shattering of the windscreen. A motorcycle swerves on the road in front of us, and my father yanks the steering wheel to avoid him, sending us over the edge of the cliff.
“How could I know that? I wasn’t there.” I say it more to myself than Beast, because it doesn’t make sense. My whole life I was told I was at my uncle’s house the night my parents died. It was date night, so Uncle Maurice was babysitting me.
“You were in the car, Belle.”
A cold dread trickles through me. “No, I was with my uncle.”
“No, you were with your parents.”
“How do you know?”
“Because Dodger told me.”
My eyes snap to his. “Dodger…how would he know?”
“Because he was there.”
“Dodger…why?” Another piece of the puzzle tumbles into my head and I pause to watch it play out in front of me. “A motorcycle swerved in front of the car.”
Beast swallows. He’s very still. “Yes. It was Dodger.”
“He caused the accident?”
“Yes.”
“On purpose?”
“Yes.”
My chest feels tight. “He admitted it?”
“Yes.”
“Why?” I’m struggling to make sense of everything while my head churns with all the information. “What could possess someone to want to annihilate an entire family?”
“Because your father became a threat to the club.”
“Why, what was so bad about him?” I ask, an edge to my voice.
“Your father was a Knight. His name was Hangman.”
I shake my head. “My father wasn’t a biker.”
“He was, Belle, and you used to play on the clubhouse playground and come to cookouts. But then there was the car accident and I never saw you again.”
Frowning, I try to remember something from my early childhood. Anything . But it’s no use. My earliest memory is a random day at school when I was five or six years old. Not playing at a clubhouse or hanging around men on motorcycles. “I don’t remember.”
“You were just a kid.”
“Oh boy,” I say shakily. My mind scrambles to make sense of what he’s telling me. But there is no sense in it.
“If what you are saying is true, then explain it to me, from the beginning.”
“Hangman—that was your father’s road name—he was our records keeper. He liked genealogy and tracing things back to their roots. He didn’t realize it until he started to poke around, but he was a descendant of one of the landowners who sold the land to the club. He discovered it by accident but dug deeper into it. It’s how he discovered a flaw in the original contract between the Knights and the landowners back when the land was purchased in 1918. It was unsigned by his great, great grandfather, meaning the rightful ownership was compromised. He spoke to a lawyer. Found out he had a claim for ownership. He approached Dodger, said he wanted compensation from the club or he was going to sell the land.”
“Dodger told you this?”
“Yes, he admitted everything.”
“About running us off the road?”
“Yes, Belle. It was a hit.”
The shattering windscreen. The feeling of falling. The rush of the ocean toward me.
A cold lump forms in my throat. Beast’s father murdered my parents and tried to murder me as well.
It’s a lot to try and make sense of.
Beast points to one of the many newspaper articles pinned to the wall next to the photographs. It’s a news headline, and I lean in to read it.
Family Killed in Tragic Car Accident. Search continues for missing five-year-old daughter whose body the police believe was swept out to sea.
That’s me. I’m the five-year-old daughter who they thought was lost at sea.
How is this even possible?
My stomach churns, and my hands begin to shake.
“How am I still alive?” I don’t understand.
Beast points to another smaller article. Missing child found two days after fatal road wreck.
The cynic in me acknowledges the size of the tragic headline when mentioning the accident and missing child. It was front page news. But the article about finding me was much smaller and squished into the corner of page six.
That’s when I notice the dates. The accident happened on May seventeenth. The article announcing my survival appeared in the paper on May nineteen.
The day in between was May eighteen—the day of the fire that almost burned St. Boniface to the ground.
With all the local devastation to report on, news of finding me clinging to life on the cliff face was relegated deeper into the newspaper.
It’s probably the only thing that saved my life.
Now I’ve gone very still. I’m afraid to move. Frozen to the spot. Because if what Beast says is true, then my nightmare was never a nightmare, it was a memory of my parent’s death.
“This can’t be real,” I whisper.
“It’s the truth, Belle.”
I turn away from him. It’s a lot to take in.
Then it clicks. If what he is saying is true, then none of this was happenstance. This was all orchestrated. The meeting in the street. The size of my uncle’s debt. Oh God, did Beast send Gaston after me so he could play the hero and save me?
I can barely talk around the cold lump in my throat. “This is why you insisted on marrying me. It wasn’t about the money my uncle owed. It was about saving the clubhouse. I’m the rightful heir and you knew it.”
More and more pieces tumble into place.
Oh my God, I feel used.
No, I feel… stupid .
“Belle—”
I cut him off. “Did he find out? Did Dodger ever find out I survived?”
I notice the slight change in Beast’s demeanor.
“Yes.”
A chill runs through me. “What did he do?”
“He instructed me to murder you.”