Chapter Eighteen
He didn’t belong here.
One of the advantages of being locked in the vault was the fact that one had a great deal of time to think about how things had gone awry.
How a seasoned, dedicated knight had ended up on the other side of the coin—jailed instead of the jailor.
No longer a trusted commander. There was nothing but time in the vault, and Carr was using that time to his advantage.
He had a lot to think about.
Loyalties.
He had been thinking a lot about loyalties.
He thought about days long ago, in Ireland.
When he’d come to England with Dermot, he was comforted by the fact that he hadn’t come alone.
Another Irish knight had come with him. They were a pair, he and Dermot, and as the years passed, he came to trust Dermot like a brother.
And that was where he had been wrong.
For years, he’d been wrong. He was still trying to come to grips with the fact Dermot had been sent to spy on him because of whom he’d been married to.
Never, in all the time he’d known Dermot, had he suspected that the man was an enemy and not an ally.
He and Dermot had shared good times as well as bad times, and in Carr’s mind, they had bonded.
He felt that Dermot was someone he could trust and depend on.
It was a harsh dose of reality to be told that was not the case.
Not strangely, Carr felt very alone. He was surrounded by a thousand men and fellow knights, but he still felt so very alone. Now, with Andromeda here, the very last thing he should have felt was loneliness.
But he did.
It was loneliness of his own making.
Carr’s time in the vault was something of a crossroads for him.
Everything he thought was truth was, in fact, a lie.
The biggest lie of all was something he’d pushed to the back of his mind all those years ago, a secret he’d been hiding.
He’d been perpetuating the lie to cover the secret his entire adult life.
The life he’d left behind in Ireland was at the heart of the lie, and it was finally catching up to him.
He thought that he would get away from the lies by coming to England, but they followed him.
She had followed him.
Carr never thought he would have reached this moment in his life, but here he was.
Sitting in a dark and lonely vault and wondering if he was going to spend the rest of his life here.
The lies had found him. That was why he’d been so angry, so unreasonable in a situation that should have invited his understanding.
But he’d had none, at least none for his daughter, and he knew why.
But he hadn’t wanted to face what she really represented to him.
Perhaps it was time to reexamine everything.
And finally admit the truth.