Chapter 27
“Explain.”
It was just one word from Cassian, but it carried so much weight. Everything hinged on what Kit would say.
Kit looked at them both—his former friend and his sister, standing amid the wreckage of a room that smelled of blood and rot. For once, he did not reach for charm or deflection. He simply looked tired. Older than his years. A man who had run out of roads.
“You might not believe me, but I knew nothing about the illegal nature of the business. I was led to believe it was legitimate. I was floundering and needed something quick to earn Hawthorne some gold,” he began.
“That might be true, but I am certain the money never reached the estate,” Juliana interrupted, crossing her arms.
The time to coddle him was over. Although she never wanted him dead, she would no longer tolerate lies. No more.
“Yes, I know. I ended up using the money to gamble. The debts I was supposed to pay kept growing until I thought I was drowning. I was overwhelmed with how much I had to pay.”
“And your solution was to gamble some more,” Juliana finished for him, her voice flat with the particular weariness of someone who had this conversation in her head a hundred times and was only now saying it aloud.
The anxiety he had put her through crashed down on her all at once.
The years of it. The letters from creditors she had intercepted before their grandmama could see them.
The sleepless nights. The careful, exhausting arithmetic of making something from nothing.
It was difficult being the female Hawthorne, even though she was the responsible one.
“Precisely what I did,” Kit admitted, his voice without excuse, only acknowledgment.
“But I truly did not know I had ended up involved in something illegal. I am not a criminal! I swear on our father’s and mother’s graves, Juliana.
” He pressed his lips together. “I know what that sounds like. I know I have given you very little reason to believe anything I say. But I swear it.”
Kit slumped against the wooden table, no longer caring about its filth and cracks. He looked faded, like the dying candle perched in the corner, burning down to its last inch with nowhere left to go.
“They tricked me,” he continued, his shoulders shaking as he stared at the wood as if confessing to it.
“I thought everything was legitimate. I was happy to earn something, anything, that might slow the bleeding. Yes, I know I was not paying all my debts with what I earned, but I thought more was coming. I kept telling myself more was coming.” He exhaled.
“I know it was foolish. When the collectors came knocking on our doors, I had an answer for them, and I thought that was enough. Then, when I finally realized what the business truly was, I was already drowning in interest. They had their hooks in me. I could not pull myself free without a sum I did not have, and every month I waited, the sum grew larger, the men grew less patient, and I—” He stopped.
Pressed his hand flat against the table.
“There is no good reason for any of it. Only the reasons I had, which were not good enough.”
Silence settled over the room, broken only by the distant sounds of the tavern beyond the ruined door.
Kit straightened himself and looked at his sister.
What Juliana saw in his face was not the managed remorse of a man trying to talk his way out of consequences, but something rawer and considerably less comfortable.
Genuine shame had a particular look to it, she had learned, and it looked nothing like the performances she had watched her brother give for years.
“I would not have had you involved if I had known it was dangerous,” he said, his voice low.
“I thought it was simply a delivery of goods. Parcels.” He shook his head.
“I… I never thought. That has always been my particular failing, and you have always been the one to pay for it.” He looked at her then, and she saw his eyes were bright.
“I am sorry for having you go through all of that. I am sorry for being a worthless brother and for making you clean up after my mess when it was my job, as the older brother, to clean up after yours. You never even got to make mistakes of your own.” His voice cracked.
“You spent your whole youth being my mother when you should have been my sister. I am so sorry, Juliana. I am so deeply sorry.”
Juliana felt the truth and weight of his words. She had rehearsed her anger for so long that she had forgotten there might be something else beneath it. It was true. She had not gotten to enjoy her youth.
But she had time now.
It almost felt as if Kit selling her to Cassian had been a blessing in disguise.
Still, the intention behind it stung.
She pressed her lips together and said nothing, because she did not yet trust herself to say the right thing. For once in her life, she was going to wait until she did.
Meanwhile, Cassian stood a few feet away, still and watchful as he had been since Kit began speaking.
He had let the siblings speak without interruption, which had cost him—she could see it in the whiteness of his knuckles around the head of his cane and in the careful set of his jaw.
His face was unreadable, but the tension in him was undeniable.
Kit finally turned to face him.
“I loved Marta, Cassian,” he said, his voice dropping to a barely audible murmur.
“I truly did. I know you have every reason to doubt it. I know what it must have looked like… what it still looks like. But I loved her.” He pressed his fist to his chest, briefly.
“When I heard she and our baby had died, something in me broke. I lost all interest in living. I lost myself. I told myself the debts, the gambling, and the danger were just the way things were, but the truth is I did not particularly care what happened to me.” He paused.
“I know that is not an excuse, and there is nothing I can say that will undo any of it. I know that.”
He stopped, as if he had run out of breath.
His hand went to his chest, rubbing the spot there.
He looked at both Juliana and Cassian. His eyes pleaded in a way his words no longer could, and Juliana could not help the small sound that escaped her.
Was this another performance, more polished than the rest?
She did not think so. She had known this man her entire life, and she knew the difference between Kit performing remorse and Kit feeling it.
“Please,” he said quietly. “Give me a second chance. Not to be who I was. I know that man is not worth another chance. But to try to be something better. For you, Juliana.” He hesitated. “And for Marta.”
Cassian stared at him for a long moment. His jaw was still clenched. His knuckles were still white. Juliana held her breath.
Then Cassian looked at her, and something in his expression softened by a degree that only she would have known to look for.
“I am leaving the decision to Juliana,” he said, his voice quiet and controlled. “You have hurt her more than anyone else in this room, and she is your flesh and blood. She will decide what to do with you.”
She stood there and let it all move through her.
The irresponsibility, the debts, the errors, the years spent cleaning up after him, the night he had looked her in the eye in that place and told a room full of strangers he did not know her.
All of it. She let herself feel it fully, for perhaps the first time, without rushing past it or tucking it away for later.
And then the memories came, the way they always did whenever she thought she had made up her mind about Kit.
Him lifting her onto his shoulders at the village fair so she could see over the crowd.
Him sitting outside her door the night their mother died, not saying a word, simply being there because he did not know what to say.
He had never been wise. He had not always been kind. But he had loved her in the clumsy, insufficient, entirely his own way that Kit loved people, and she had loved him back.
She reached for his hand.
“Do not make me regret this, Kit,” she said softly.
Like most Stonevale carriage journeys, this one was silent.
Cassian could not help it. His leg felt as if it had been torn apart by devils.
He tried not to grunt in pain, not wanting to worry his wife.
She sat next to him, her hands clutching his as she rested her cheek on his shoulder.
A tear might have slid down to wet his shirt, but he could not be certain.
She did not want him to think she was weak. In that, they were similar.
He looked down at the top of her head and thought about what she had been through tonight, what she had put herself through for a brother who had given her very little reason to, and felt something move through him, equal parts exasperation and a tenderness so profound it bordered on pain.
He tightened his grip on hers, and she pressed closer. Neither of them said anything, because nothing needed to be said.
Across from Cassian sat the man he had hated for years.
He was also the man who had once been his friend. He looked at Kit now and tried to reconcile the two versions of him. The friend and the betrayer. The man who had made Marta laugh and the one who had left her to grieve alone.
He did not know yet whether to trust him. He suspected he would not know for some time.
But he would try.
Kit stared out the window at the passing darkness, his expression unreadable. He had not spoken since they left the tavern. Cassian had not encouraged him to.
The question that sat heaviest in his chest was not about Kit at all.
It was about Marta.