Chapter 35 #2
“Who are you?” Owen asked, seemingly unaffected by the cold metal pressed into his side.
“I am the son who loved our mother, while you are the son who murdered her.”
“I am my mother’s only son.” Owen smiled tauntingly at his brother.
Oscar’s hand trembled with rage, and Ivy broke out in a cold sweat, silently begging Owen not to antagonize him too far.
“You may be her only recognized son, but my blood is purer than yours. Her affair with a marquess produced me, while your father was only a viscount. She was taken from me because you and your pathetic father were jealous of her love for me.”
“That is not true.”
“He told me! He told me it was your idea to poison her. He said that you hated her as much as he did for her betrayal. She gave you life, and you mixed arsenic in her tea as your gratitude.”
“My father said that?” Owen did not have to fake his fury. “You met him?”
Oscar’s lips pressed into a cruel smile.
“I spent many years watching you live the life I should have had, and when all your privileged plans dissolved and you fled the country, my focus returned to my mother.
I was desperate to learn more about her, to supplement my fading memory.
I wanted to know what her life had been like before she succumbed to gastric fever.
I decided I was done skulking in the shadows, and introduced myself to your father.
I had hoped for a miniature of her, for any token by which I might remember her, but he dismissed me with scorn.
He bragged to me about her death and about how he slowly poisoned her for her unfaithfulness, that the poison was your idea.
He delighted in the fact that I could not do anything with the truth because I was nothing but a ‘penniless bastard.’
“He underestimated me. Mayhap he would not have taunted me had he known my true lineage. I had a grave robber dig Mother up, and a doctor examine her remains for poison.”
Ivy blanched. He had exhumed his mother’s body?
“From that moment on, I blackmailed your father until his grand estate was crumbling around his feet. I sent him unpleasant gifts. I broke in and tampered with the rare Scotch that only he, the greedy fool, was allowed to drink. And then, after many years of being terrorized, he died.”
Ivy swallowed. “You poisoned him, too.”
Oscar’s eyes flicked to her, as if only then remembering her presence. “The soon-to-be viscountess. I have a score to settle with you, too.”
“Why did you wait so long to kill him?” Owen demanded, drawing his brother’s attention back to him.
Oscar’s smile was so calculating that Ivy knew she was witnessing pure evil.
“He died of incremental arsenic poisoning and suffered greatly every day. It was a fitting and just death. Once he was gone, I knew you would soon return to the country. I had destroyed your friendship out of jealousy, but that was not enough punishment once I learned what you had done. I needed to ruin you so that you would be as much an outcast as I.”
Oscar’s blink was reptilian. “Although I had the funds from your father, it was important to take on investors in order to make the ton complicit in your arsenic scheme. That way, when it was revealed that you were poisoning their wives and daughters, they would turn on you out of shame. Even the best horseflesh cannot be sold to a man whose daughter you sent to the sanitorium. I wanted to poison your life as thoroughly as you poisoned mine and Mother’s. ”
Owen turned to face Oscar, surprising his brother, who reacted by pressing the muzzle into Owen’s now exposed front. “I did not kill our mother,” Owen said softly. “I loved her, and I was devastated when she died.”
Doubt flickered in Oscar’s eyes for a single moment, but it was just as quickly extinguished.
He could not believe Owen without reconciling that he had hurt so many people under a misconception.
His sickness and self-preservation would not allow it.
“You lie,” he hissed. “You are going to walk quietly into the alleyway.” Oscar pointed his chin to an alleyway ten feet ahead.
It was narrow and dark, and once inside and concealed by the shadow of the buildings, they would not be noticed by any passersby.
This was not Mayfair, but the industrial part of London, where a few scuffles were better left unnoticed.
“There you will swallow the arsenic I have in my pocket, and you will die in agony, watching while I sully your woman. I had planned to leave you alive to endure the full effects of your ostracization. I wanted you to break under the humiliation and know that while you suffered, your brother was long gone and laughing with his pockets full. But this morning’s papers said nothing about you claiming innocence.
There were no foolish and convenient accusations of a secret half-brother ruining your life, and I was left to wonder if you were really so stupid as to have not figured out who I was.
Did you truly think all this was nothing more than a terrible case of mistaken identity?
The idea that you did not know it was me who had destroyed your life in her honor was unacceptable. ”
Ivy considered her options while Oscar talked.
She could attempt to disarm him here, but he might shoot Owen first, and there were too many people on the street.
So despite the threatening looks Owen sent her, she followed the brothers to the entrance of the alleyway.
Owen opened his mouth, no doubt to tell her to run, but before he could, Oscar said, “If she runs, I shoot her.”
Their uncanny ability to think alike would have been disconcerting if Ivy had not known that Owen stood for the opposite of everything his twisted brother did.
Left with no choice, Ivy followed them into a narrow alleyway that stank of rubbish and human refuse.
Something scurried past her skirts, and she breathed through her mouth, calming her nerves.
The cobblestones were uneven, and several had partially lifted, making the alleyway a pathway of pitted earth designed to twist an ankle.
As they edged into the shadow, a plan formed in Ivy’s mind.
The deputy police commissioner, Wright Davies, was supposed to have been tailing Owen throughout the day, but it seemed he had been held up, and none of them had expected Oscar to approach Owen so quickly after leaving the factory.
That meant that she and Owen were alone, and it was up to them to save themselves.
When they reached a cluster of barrels, Oscar motioned for her to stand beside Owen. As soon as she did, Owen stepped in front of her, shielding her with his body as he stared down the eye of his brother’s pistol.
“You do not have to do this, Oscar. We can still be brothers. You have been acting under a misconception, but now that you know I loved our mother as much as you, that it was my father who poisoned her and who poisoned you against me, we can create something new. We do not have to let him continue to destroy our lives.”
It was not true, and even Ivy knew it. Oscar’s mind was too warped.
Oscar cocked his head. “Tell me, brother, how can a shadow take form? Because that is what I am. A ghost. From the moment I first took breath, I was a secret. My mother was the only person in the world who loved me, and yet her other family would not allow her that joy. Mayhap if she had sung me to sleep every night like she did you, or brushed her hand over my hair each morning, or looked upon me with love every afternoon, then I would exist, too.”
“We did not know about you,” Owen argued. “I could not have—”
But it was the wrong thing to say, because Oscar’s face flattened until his expression was nothing but a mask. “You know now, brother. When you see our mother, tell her I miss her dearly.”
Before Oscar could fulfill his deadly promise, Ivy wriggled so that her head was poking out from behind Owen. “Did you vomit blood?”
Oscar blinked and tore his gaze from Owen’s face. “What?”
“Did you vomit blood, after I beat the daylights out of you on the road?”
Owen squeezed her arm, silently begging her to shut her mouth.
“You little viper,” Oscar said, the corner of his mouth lifting.
The smile was so like Owen’s that her skin crawled.
Except even when Owen’s was sardonic and grudging, it was always genuine, whereas Oscar’s smile was a parody of the action.
“You are a formidable woman, but even you cannot best poison. I believe I have a debt to repay you.”
He held the pistol with a steady hand as the other slid inside his coat and pulled out a small brown bottle, no doubt filled with potent, arsenic-laced liquid. “Come here, wench.”
“No.” Owen’s voice was so hot with fury that Ivy knew if he had the chance, he would rip his brother apart with his bare hands.
Ivy tugged on his sleeve until his eyes met hers. “I love you,” she said softly. “Do you trust me?”
His throat bobbed. “I love you, too, Ivy.”
“But do you trust me?”
His jaw flexed, and he gave her a curt nod.
“Be ready,” she murmured, just as Oscar fluttered his lashes and said, “A touching scene, to be sure. Come here now. I have not before made a concentration so toxic. I suspect death will be swift, but not without pain.”
Ivy slid around Owen. He grabbed her arm at the last moment, but at her gentle smile, peeled his fingers off and watched as she walked toward Oscar. Oscar stopped her with the pistol pointed at her belly, and held out the vial. “Swallow half.”
Ivy figured a normal person would be trembling and crying and begging for her life, so she shivered theatrically and said, “No, please, anything but that.” She heard Owen shift at her back and prayed he would hold off, that he would trust her to be all right.
Oscar’s pale green eyes swept dispassionately over her face. “Take the vial.”
Trembling, Ivy took a step closer so that she could reach for the vial.
She squeaked as her foot caught on one of the loose cobblestones and she pitched forward, her shoulder slamming into Oscar’s belly.
As she made contact, she whipped her arm stiff, knocking the hand holding the pistol to the side just as it fired.
The shot went wide, and before Oscar could aim again, Owen was on top of him.
The vial and the pistol went skidding into the refuse scattered along the side of the alley, and while the two evenly matched men traded blows that made bone and cartilage crunch, Ivy sprang to her feet and scrounged for the revolving gun.
When she found it, she swung around and aimed it at them, but they were a blur of movement and she did not have a clear shot. She did not want to hurt Owen, and she had never shot a revolving gun before.
Her eyes tracked them, and she winced when Owen took a hard strike to the jaw, only to return it a moment later with a punishing blow that broke Oscar’s nose.
Blood dripped from Oscar’s upper lip as he staggered menacingly toward Owen, the opening to the alleyway at his back.
Oscar’s hair was mussed and his eyes were wild, his teeth pink from the blood streaming from his nose.
“You cannot best me, brother. You never have, and you never will.”
Ivy lifted the pistol. Oscar was far enough away that she had one chance to take aim. Her hand was trembling as she started to pull the trigger, but before it fully depressed Owen tackled his brother. If she had taken the shot, he would be dead.
“Oh, heavens,” she muttered with frustration, tossing the weapon aside.
The men rolled, and Oscar ground his palm up and into Owen’s still-healing shoulder wound. Owen made a noise of agony, and in an instant Oscar was on top of him, raining down punishing hits.
Every ounce of protectiveness inside Ivy roared to life. Without a second thought she leaped onto Oscar’s back and wrapped the crook of her arm fully around his throat and squeezed, compressing the flow of blood to his brain.
He tried to shake her off, his hands lifting to rip her arms apart, but Owen snatched his wrists before he could, and Ivy pressed harder, using every bit of strength in her body. A few moments later Oscar slumped over Owen, unconscious.
Owen was breathing hard as he rolled Oscar’s body off him, scrambled to his feet, and yanked Ivy into his arms. Blood dripped from his face, and he was sweaty and filthy and his clothes torn, but he was alive.
He tilted her face and pressed frantic kisses to her forehead, her nose, and her lips in an act that she was becoming familiar with after danger had passed. “Are you hurt? Are you well?”
“I am perfectly fine. Are you?”
“As long as you are safe, I will always be fine.”
“I see you have taken care of our brother without me,” a woman’s soft voice said, and Ivy jerked out of Owen’s arms. Standing in the mouth of the alleyway, a pair of wrist-irons dangling from her fingertips, stood the detective, Mrs. Emily Denholm.
By the time a panting Deputy Commissioner Wright Davies arrived several minutes later, Oscar was already shackled and propped against the brick wall, his breathing steady even though he had not yet returned to consciousness.
Once the commissioner had caught his breath, he stared down at Oscar and shook his head in amazement. “The resemblance is uncanny, my lord. The papers will be in a proper frenzy over this one.”