Chapter 18 #2
“Your father was Alden,” Lucien said. He had known it.
Had pieced it together with Verity in the small hours before the confrontation, tracing the shape of the betrayal until it led them, inevitably, to his uncle.
But knowing it and hearing it from Max’s bloodied lips were different things entirely.
Max’s eyes burned. “Alden Northwood. The man who should have inherited the title, the estate, all of it. Until yer father and yer grandfather put a silver musket ball through his heart and buried him in the woods like a dog.” His cracked lips twisted.
“And my mother, a village girl pretty enough to warm a Northwood bed but not fine enough to stand beside one at the altar. He promised to marry her. Give their child the Northwood name. And then yer father killed him, and she was left with nothing.”
The hatred was raw and bottomless and so long suppressed that hearing it spoken aloud was like watching a wound finally split open after years of festering beneath the skin.
Lucien did not protest, but he knew from the journals that Alden had had many pretty girls warming his bed.
There was no possibility that the spoilt lordling he had read about was going to lower himself to marry a village girl.
“I grew up in your stables.” Max’s voice was fading, the words coming slower now, each one dragged up from some dwindling reserve. “Mucking out stalls. Carrying hay. Watching ye ride past on yer fine horse … wearin’ yer fine coat … bearin’ the name that should’ve been mine.”
His breathing turned ragged, a broken rattle in his chest.
“Alden’s son. The rightful heir. Reduced to a servant in his own father’s house.” He swallowed hard. “My ma told me the truth when she lay abed dying, all those years ago.”
“The killings,” Lucien said quietly. “The crofter. Old Mr. Milton.”
“That was the wolf.” Max’s teeth were stained dark. “But I did not weep for them. They were Northwood tenants. Yer people. Everything ye touched … everything yer cursed family touched … was mine by right. And I wanted to take from ye. The way ye took from me.”
“They were innocent men, Max. They had no part in what happened to your father.”
But Max was beyond argument. The hatred that had sustained him was guttering now, the flame consuming the last of what it had to burn. His gaze drifted past Lucien’s face, fixing on something beyond the cellar ceiling, beyond the frozen earth and the winter sky.
“I should have been … the earl,” Max whispered. “I should have been …”
The light left his eyes with the quiet finality of a door closing in a room already dark. His chest settled into stillness, and the cellar fell silent.
Max Dray was dead.
The cellar held the silence of it, absolute and unforgiving, broken only by the occasional whimper from Ronan and the distant drip of water outside.
Lucien remained kneeling, his hand upon Max’s chest, feeling the warmth depart. He waited for the rage to come. The betrayal demanded it. Years of false friendship, days of chains deliberately loosened, two innocent men dead in the snow. He waited for the fury, and it did not arrive.
What came instead was grief. Not for Max alone, though that was part of it, but grief for the boy who had mucked stalls and swallowed his bitterness and never been told the truth of his blood.
Grief for Alden, the uncle whose restless, brooding presence destroyed Max before he was even born.
For his father, who had killed his own brother and borne the silence of it for decades.
For every Northwood who had chosen to suffer alone rather than admit what he was.
The curse had done this. Generation after generation. The same silence, the same shame, the same catastrophic pride.
And Lucien was tired of it.
He was tired with an exhaustion that went beyond the transformation and settled into the marrow of his soul. Tired of the dread that colonized the days before each moon. Tired of the chains and the cellar and the lonely mornings in the snow.
There was so much time between the moons. Twenty-five days of every month in which he was simply a man. Flawed, grieving, capable of love. He had been squandering those days, surrendering them to a despair that honored no one.
No more.
He lifted his hand from Max’s chest and stood. “None of us has eaten or slept, and there is a long day ahead. Ephraim, will you see to him? I will have Mrs. Harrow prepare food and tea.”
The gamekeeper nodded once, heavily.
Verity fell into step beside Lucien after he drew on the remnants of his clothes, and the wolfhounds arranged themselves without instruction.
Braccus at Lucien’s left with his torn ear held stiffly, Eirin ranging ahead, Ronan pressing his flank against Verity’s leg.
Their footsteps echoed in tandem, and neither spoke, because the silence between them was the quiet of two people who had nothing left to prove to each other and no need to fill the space between them with words.
Mrs. Harrow had laid fires and set out breakfast with the supernatural prescience of a woman who had kept this household through stranger things than she would ever acknowledge. She looked at their hollow-eyed state, and asked nothing. Hot water was ordered. Food appeared.
They ate in the morning room, consuming cold ham and bread and strong tea with the ferociousness of people who had forgotten hunger until sustenance was placed before them.
Lucien ate as he always did after transformation, ravenously, without ceremony, and watched Verity across the table and thought that he did not deserve her, and that the question of deserving had never been the one that mattered.
When they had bathed and changed, Lucien into clean linen and a coat that felt almost absurdly civilized against his battered skin and Verity into a fresh gown fastened with fingers that still trembled faintly, they met in the corridor outside the countess’s apartments.
Lucien took Verity’s hand and felt her fingers lace through his with a sureness that steadied something deep within him.
“Ready?” she asked.
“No. But I do not think readiness is required.”
He knocked, and they entered together.
Lady Blackfen was in her chair beside the window, a shawl of Kashmiri wool about her shoulders, her silver hair pinned beneath a lace cap.
The winter light fell across her face, illuminating the web of lines that mapped a lifetime of beauty and loss and the intelligence that still flared behind her wandering manner.
She looked up, and her gaze moved from Lucien’s face to their joined hands.
“Ah,” she said, and the syllable contained everything she needed to say.
Lucien drew a chair close and sat, still holding Verity’s hand. “Mother. Max Dray is dead.”
Lady Blackfen received the news without flinching, though the light in her face dimmed. She was quiet for a moment, her veined hands folded in her lap.
“Poor boy,” she murmured. “Poor, wretched boy.” Then, with a clarity that pierced the quiet of the room, she asked, “He was Alden’s, was he not?”
“You knew?”
“I suspected. He had his father’s jaw, that stubborn and angular set. And the same hunger in him. Alden was like that too … before the end. Always reaching, never at peace.” Her gaze drifted toward the window. “What happened?”