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He tuts, “All right. I’ve stayed out of this as long as I possibly could.” I’m not sure what he means by that, but he swiftly crosses the room and wraps my arm around his shoulders. “Let’s go.”
Defeated, I don’t bother fighting him. “Where are we going?”
“To do something you should have done long before now.”
He’s silent while we travel down one of the connected halls leading back to the main house. Behind us, the other two are formed from what I’ve discovered are passages that lead to the other houses, making the lounge a centralized hub for socializing between families.
I grumble under my breath, and in the dimly lit corridor, a smirk twitches the older man’s cheek. “All’s not lost, Rowan. You just need a little push to do what’s right.”
“I thought by giving Sam the manor I was doing what’s right.”
“That sniveling little shit doesn’t deserve this place.” I grin at his informality, but the butler keeps moving, determined to make a point. “You know, Thomas was a lot of things, but he wasn’t a bad man.”
My head swims as he walks us through the room with the piano, which taunts me with memories of Molly and her beautiful body. The way she tasted on my tongue as I devoured her, and those sweet moans she’d gifted me.
Then it dawns on me that my bed will be cold where she’s slept, and the house will be so eerily silent that I’ll want to claw my skin from my bones, and my heart squeezes painfully.
“Sam said Thomas banned his siblings from this place. He said my mom left because of him.”
I didn’t understand why it upset me at the time to hear those things until I realized what a disappointment it was.
I’ve risked so much for this man’s dying fucking wishes in the name of my mother, just for him to be exactly what I’d feared from the beginning.
Why else would we have never heard from him before now? Why else would my parents have kept this all a secret?
“We aren’t allowed to discuss certain matters with you,” Reginald says as I sit on the couch in the study, his voice hardly above a whisper. “Thomas was quite thorough with his requests. He wants you each to find your own way to the answers behind his decisions.”
I peer up at the frazzled older man. “So why are you helping me, then?”
“Because you’re like tea, Mr. Kendrick,” he says, a hint of a smile at the corners of his lips. “Bitter at first, but with patience, you reveal a rich complexity that I’ve grown to appreciate.”
He spins on a heel, leaving the room for what feels like an hour before returning with a glass of water and a single shot of espresso. I drink them both while ruminating over the sentiment.
Damn this old man for growing on me.
Reginald quietly starts a fire, and once lit, he reaches for the box on the mantle before offering it to me. “Read it, Rowan.” His face is grim. “You’ve put it off for long enough.”
He leaves me in the silence of the study, and for several painstaking heartbeats, I glare at the damn box.
“Fuck it.” I pry it open to find a single letter, wax-sealed with an R stamped in the center.
I take a sobering breath before carefully opening the letter and reading my grandfather’s shaky script.
Rowan,
I imagine you’re wondering exactly who I am, and why I would will my estate to you and your brothers. And while I plan to answer both of those questions in due time, there’s something more important I need to address first.
Your mother was a wonderful woman. Her whole life, she was the brightest star in my sky, and she deserved a father who was far greater than me. One who wouldn’t give up on her the way I had, and one who would have been brave enough to make things right before it was too late.
Before she lost her life.
Truthfully, there aren’t any great adventures or stories worth telling of my own. I was raised with two siblings, a brother and a sister, both of whom disowned me once the estate was passed down to me by our parents.
I’ve never known the reason behind their decision, but then, I couldn’t have known the grief and heartache that choice would have caused me, either.
You see, being the sole heir to the Radley fortune came with a lot of responsibility, but it also came with envy, jealousy, and malice lurking from the outside.
My siblings were no exception.
