Kate Hewitt - Bad Blood

Her wary eyes searched his face, and he saw her swallow, as if fighting for calm. Oddly, that small sign of discomfort eased him. It made him realize that this woman—who knew something about hiding herself in plain sight just as he did—could understand. That he wanted her to understand.

“What happened to you here?” she asked in a soft voice, as if she feared he would not like the question.

He looked at her for a long moment, and then back out the window. The night was dark and blustery, with no hint of moon or stars. He could see only the wind-tossed branches of the trees across the lane, and the impenetrable country blackness beyond. But he still knew precisely where he was. He still knew that the Wolfe estate began just on the other side of the deceptively bucolic river that wound through the town, that the manor house hunkered out there in the dark, empty and brooding and marked, as far as he was concerned—forever marked as soulless and evil as its former owner had been.

What had he been thinking, to return here?

“I had the misfortune to be born William Wolfe’s son,” he said, a hollow laugh escaping him. “That is what happened to me. Do not let the tales of his fame, his great charisma and cult of personality fool you, Grace.” He shook his head. “I’ve managed to put him from my mind for vast swathes of my life—but that does not work here, apparently. The things he did and the kind of man he was hang in the air in this village like smoke.”

She was quiet for a long moment, and Lucas felt that ache inside of him expand. As if he had never known loneliness, not really, until this moment. But then she brushed past him, and sat down on the couch just beside the window and faced him, tucking her long, bare legs beneath her. She tilted her face toward him, and he saw … nothing. No judgment. No arch, inside knowledge she might use against him. Nothing but her warm, steady gaze.

“He was a monster,” Lucas said baldly. He felt his mouth twist and turned away, staring out the window once again, though what he saw was the past. He shrugged, as if he could will it away.

“And …” Her voice was hesitant. “Your mother?”

“I never knew who she was,” Lucas said, on a sigh. Funny that the truth could still sting, when he should have long since ceased caring about a relatively meaningless fact like that one. “He told me only that she could not stand the sight of me, and that was why she’d left me on his doorstep.” He smirked a little bit then, ignoring the small noise she made. “I grew up rather amazed that what people saw when they looked at me was this remarkable face I’d been awarded in the genetic lottery, when I knew the truth about how ugly I was. So ugly it repulsed my own mother, who was never heard from again. So ugly it made my father hate me. Quite a dichotomy.”

“And you had only your father’s word on that?”

Grace asked, and it was the lack of pity, the simple calm in her voice that made it all right, somehow, that he was telling her all of this. No matter that he still did not know why.

Lucas remembered then, unwillingly, the night he’d confronted William in his study with the birth certificate he’d found after hours of searching. He’d been a mere teenager then, angry and bitter that all of his siblings knew their parents—even Rafael, the other bastard son who lived in the village yet out of William’s view, had the comfort of his mother’s presence to ease William’s rejection of him. But Lucas had nothing. Only William’s lifelong loathing and a birth certificate with the mother’s name blanked out.

William had reacted predictably when Lucas had waved the document in front of him, and Lucas had still been too emotional, too small yet to fight back as he might have done later. It was only when William had him pinned to the wall that he’d relented at all—in true William Wolfe fashion.

“Your mother is a difficult woman to forget,” he had said, in a vicious sort of tone, designed to wound, confuse.

He had thrown a photo album at Lucas’s feet, sneered at the nose he’d bloodied with his own big fist and left Lucas to page through photographs of his uncle Richard’s wedding—to a woman who had Lucas’s own unusual green eyes. If what he had seen was true, it meant William had slept with his own sister-in-law. Lucas had been sick right there on the study floor.

The subject of Lucas’s mother had never been raised again.

“Yes,” Lucas said now. “I never discovered who she was. Not really.” He could not believe how much William’s behavior could still get under his skin, even all these years later. When it could not matter to anyone, not even to him. When the man had been dead for nearly twenty years. “Not for certain.”

“My father disappeared before I was born,” Grace said matter-of-factly, wrapping her arms around her knees. “There are any number of John Benisons in the world, and none of them were interested in claiming me. I don’t even have his name.” She looked at him, her dark eyes intent on his. “There is no shame in being an accident, Lucas. There are only parents who are not up to the challenge.”

“William was not up to any kind of parental challenge,” Lucas said. “He was not what I would call a parent at all, aside from his biological contribution.”

He looked at her then, taking in the way she gazed at him, his own near-overpowering urge to touch her, to hold her, to pull her close to him again and make him feel that fleeting sensation he’d felt in the bed, that he’d never felt before. He was afraid to name it.

“I told you before that there are ghosts here, Grace,” he said quietly, but in that moment he did not know if he meant in Wolfestone or in himself.

She smiled slightly, seemingly unperturbed by his warning.

“Will they rattle their chains and scare the guests away with all their moaning?” she asked.

“They are more likely to dress in designer labels and behave as if they are normal human beings,” Lucas replied dryly. “When they are not. Not one of them.”

She searched his face for a moment, then twisted around to look out the window, as if she, too, could pierce the darkness with her gaze and see the dilapidated manor house in the distance.

“Is that why it was abandoned?” she asked, and he knew she meant the house, not him. “Too many ghosts?” She frowned slightly, as if trying to make sense of it. “Was it easier somehow to let it crumble into the ground?”

“If it were mine,” Lucas said with a quiet ferocity, “I would demolish it and salt the earth on which it stood.”

Her brows arched then, and another near-smile played over her generous mouth, drawing him like a moth to a flame. He could not bring himself to look away.

“That seems unduly dramatic,” she said. “Surely you could simply choose not to visit. Or donate the place to English Heritage. It is only a house.” When he did not speak, she shrugged. “And surely not all of your siblings share your opinion of the place?”

“We are not close,” he said. He laughed slightly, a hollow sound. “Or perhaps it is more truthful to say they are not close with me. And why should they be?”

“Because you are their brother,” Grace said quietly, as if she believed in him. As if she knew him. And he could not let her, could he? He could not let her think he was something other—something better, something less worthless—than he was. Not even if it felt as if she’d wrapped him in sunshine. This was meant to be an exercise in exorcism, not in intimacy.

He sat down next to her on the plush, bright couch, confused by the urge to be near her even when he planned only to disabuse her of any positive notions she might have of him. Then, even more confusing, he reached over and took one of her pale, slender hands in his. He did not understand himself, when he thought he had looked into every dark corner he possessed, and more than once, leaving no surprises. He had never been more of a stranger to himself than he was tonight.