Elle
“Help me,” Silas wheezes, his white knuckles curling around the bars. “They’re going to kill me. Slowly.”
I can barely understand him. His words are muffled and raw, yet wet like his throat is chaffed, but his bleeding gums are keeping his mouth moist.
My stomach clenches, and I can hardly bear to look at him.
“How long have you been here?”
“I can’t tell in the dark, but they took me on Thursday.”
“That was three days ago. How did they take you?”
“From the estate. They came in the night, and when we left, the sun was just rising…”
“Did they use the Packard?”
He nods like it hurts to even do so. “Help me.”
“You need to help me first.”
“How?”
“You have a son with Madame.” At his confused expression, I say, “Marisol.”
He says nothing, but his eyes say everything.
“I’m not letting you out until you tell me the entire truth, and what choice do you have now? Just me, and unlike you, I can walk out of this room and never come back.”
“You’d leave me here?”
“You choked me. Call me a whore. Your wife accused me of fucking you in the very car that killed her sister. Would I leave you? I wouldn’t even think about you once I crossed that threshold.”
“I didn’t know Marisol was pregnant,” he says finally. He shakes his head, tears rolling down his filthy chin. “I loved her, and she shattered my heart.”
When his eyes flash up to mine again, they’re filled with bitterness, misery and anger. The same anger that led him to kill her.
“She ran away, and she never told me or her parents about the baby. By then, I think she was brainwashed by them. Convinced that I could never be a good partner or father. She came back like nothing happened; even her parents didn’t know she’d given birth. She rejoined society four months later rail-thin, the perfect standard for ballet. No one questioned it.”
“It sounds like she was depressed over leaving her newborn.”
“Depressed?” he hisses. “She was already in a new relationship. She announced her engagement to Bart within two months. I couldn’t believe it. She caved to her parents’ wishes of marrying a blue-blood.”
He can’t believe it? As if he didn’t do something worse.
“And what did you do? Propose to her sister?” I ask in disgust.
“No.” He shakes his white-blonde hair, the strands crusted to his skull in blood. “Even before she ran away, I was working on my future, our future, and fortune. I became someone worthy of her love and her parents' acceptance through real estate. When I approached her again, I knew I had everything in order, finally. I asked her to leave Bart. I asked her to marry me instead, but do you know what she said? That she was happy for me, but that I was no Bart Auclair and that I never would be. After all that time. All that wealth, I still wasn’t good enough for her, but you know who I was good enough for?”
“Delphine. Let me guess, she was right there with a waiting shoulder for you?”
“Delphine was obsessed with her older sister. Her parents were too. She was just the spare.”
That’s what Gant had called himself. He’d related to Delphine. He’d understood her, but would he have understood if he knew what she’d done to Marisol?
“She wanted everything Marisol had. The title, the fame, the accolades. Me. a son. Just like her sister.”
“I thought no one knew of the son? You said you did at first, and neither did her parents.”
“But Delphi knew. She knew Marisol in and out. She couldn’t hide anything from her, much less a baby. Somehow, she found out. ”
I freeze. “Wait…so when did you find out about the baby?”
“Delphine told me the night Marisol announced her engagement to Bart.”
“She didn’t know about it beforehand. She’d been blindsided just like me.”
“And she wanted revenge just like you.”
He nods slowly. “The engagement, compounded with the secret baby, made her spiral. She felt like Mari would never stop punishing her for their parents finding out about me. But had they not found out, I wouldn’t be who I am now. I wouldn’t have become filthy rich just to keep her. Her parents were right about me, I was complacent like my brother.”
Jarett. He still doesn’t know who I am.
“It was Delphine’s idea that we date. She wanted to torture Marisol for everything: their parents favouring her even after her betrayal, Marisol never forgiving her throughout her engagement, marriage, and the birth of her son, Gant. And she could think of one way to do it. To have the son Marisol couldn’t, with me. To have the marriage, Marisol couldn’t have with me. She took the life Marisol dreamed of at some point. And she was right. It worked because once Marisol found out, she never spoke to either of us ever again. Not that Delphine cared. She knew she’d won.”
Revulsion rolls through me. “Don’t put it all on her. You’re sick, too. You wanted to torture her, too, for moving on.”
“She tortured me too! She kept my son away from me!”
“I don’t know why she did that, but her intuition about you was right. You’re a monster.”
“We both were monsters. I was revolting. She was revolting.”
“At least she never tried to kill you.”
He looks at me then, his eyes boring into me. “I never wanted Mari dead. I never stopped wanting her. Even decades later.”
“And yet you never divorced her sister,” I say in disbelief, not that it’d make things right.
“I tried,” he whispers. “I can’t. Delphine is unstable. I was terrified of what she’d do.”
“To little old you?” I snort.
He shakes his head again. “To Marisol.”
My stomach drops. “ What? ”
“When we got married, I swore to her that I’d never speak to Marisol again. It seemed easy enough, she’d cut me off for years at that point. I figured she didn’t care about me either way, so I agreed, and I kept my promise for years until…” he drifts off, suddenly finding the left corner fascinating.
“Until she fucked your brother?”
He nods slowly, a humourless laugh escaping his lips. “I guess everyone knows about that. Their sex tape was leaked after all.”
“Sylo never told you that I was the one that leaked it?”
His eyes snap to mine. “You did? Why?”
“I wanted my mother to see how unfaithful my father was.”
“No…”
“Yes.”
“You’re Jarett’s daughter?”
“That’s beside the point. You say you didn’t want to kill her, then why did you show up at the ballet studio on the night of the leak? To dance with her?”
“I didn’t go to the studio because of the leak. I’d already seen the video a week before. Marisol had sent it to me from a number I couldn’t respond to. It could only message me, taunt me. Bart knows if you don’t believe me. He took my phone when he kidnapped me.”
Wait, if Marisol sent him the video herself, then it wasn’t me who caused this domino effect. A weight, ever so slight, lifts from my chest.
“But if Marisol hadn’t spoken to you for all these years, why did she suddenly crave revenge?”
“Delphine enrolled Silas into Beaulieu while Marisol was still working there. She tried everything for the board to reject his audition, but Silas was a prodigy like Gant. They wouldn’t go for it, so she quit and started her own company. But Silas was still in school with Gant. I don’t doubt Marisol wanted him to transfer, but Gant was, is, at the top. So she left it. Well, no, she didn’t. She knew what Delphine was doing, hoping Sylo and Gant would become close so she could worm her way back into Marisol’s life to cause more chaos.”
“But why? She got her revenge. You, her son.”
“Nothing’s ever enough for Delphine. It’s why she wants Gant under her wing. It’s why she’s out there in the dining room in a backless dress and emerald jewellery, just like Mari used to wear.”
I freeze. Like Mari?
“She…she wants Bart now too?”
“And Gant.”
“But….you, Sylo…”
“Now that Marisol’s gone, I’m no longer an object of affection. She won’t even kiss me.”
“That’s…vile.”
“They both were. Because Delphine pulled that stunt with Sylo by enrolling him into Beaulieu, Marisol wanted the last laugh. She knew if she fucked Jarett it’d get a rise out of me for more than a few reasons. One is the obvious. Of course, I’d be jealous, but two, is because I’d never even told Mari I had a brother. We were separated into different orphanages because Jarett was a failure to thrive. They thought he held me back, and they were right. When I was with Jarett, I was Jarett. I had excuses for everything.”
“So you were utterly worthless?” I say, unsurprised.
“A menace to society. I still don’t know how she found out that we were related.”
And then it hits me. “It was me. I fell into her palms. She saw Jarrett’s last name on the application, did some digging, and figured it out. You were still a Crewely when you met Marisol?”
He nods.
Me . It was me applying for that summer scholarship that brought this all on.
“Why don’t you speak to Jarett any more? He idolizes you. Talks about you all the time.”
“Does he? Or does he talk about my money? My job? We haven’t spoken or seen each other in decades, so he must’ve read some articles I was featured in.”
I grow silent because we both know the answer.
“I can’t believe you’re his kid.”
“Do you know your kid? Marisol’s baby?”
“No. I’ve told Bart this a dozen times since he abducted me. I don’t know what this boy’s name is. What he looks like. What country he’s in. I don’t know anything about him other than that he exists. Or he did. I don’t know.”
And I’m not telling him.
“Wait…” This is too much information at once. “If Delphine is out there partying, does that mean she isn’t even looking for you?”
“Why would she? She knows I’m here.”
At my puzzled look, he says, “The cameras. She saw the car, the Packard that caused the accident, leaving the garage. Plus, Gant and I were suddenly gone. I know she hasn’t reported me missing.”
A thought strikes me.
“You said Bart and Gant took you in the Packard?” A lie? Because Gant can’t —
“No. Bart took Gant and me in the Packard. He tied Gant up. Gagged him. I didn’t understand, I thought that maybe we both were victims. Him more so than me at that moment because he, he cried. Cried the entire way here. They had to sedate him once we got inside. But I was put in a cage and him in his room.”
My chest tightens. “Who sedated him?”
“Bart held him down while the blonde boy injected him.”
“Blonde boy?”
“The kid who cooks.”
Zedd.
“He was irritated at how childish Gant was acting over a car ride. Told him to get the fuck over it already.”
Get the fuck over his mother’s death, yeah, that sounded like Bart. And Zedd. But I don’t have time to dwell on it.
“But why? Why did Delphine just let them take you? Is it because she wants Bart now?”
“Partly. She’ll let Bart do whatever the fuck he wants to me because she’s almost won.”
“Is he seriously falling for her?”
“That, I don’t know, but that’s not what I’m talking about. I know her secret, and if I die, it dies with me. I haven’t managed to spill it yet.”
“Spill it now, or I leave you here to die with it.”
“I hit you that night after I argued with Marisol over the tape, then I raced home, thinking better of it.”
“Better of what?”
“Delphine. She stalks me. Or she did. When the leaked tape went viral, I knew she’d be watching me even more. I knew she’d see where I was. So I left in a rush.”
“After nearly killing me.”
“My own niece,” he nods slowly as if in disbelief. “I got home, and she was already in the garage, waiting. The second I hopped out, she hopped in. I didn’t hit Gant and Mari that night. Delphine did.”