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“Can I ask you something?” Her voice broke the silence, lacking her usual confidence.
I already knew what she wanted to ask about. “Yes.”
She turned quiet for a while, as if she didn’t want to ask the question anymore. “Do you know why he did it?”
“Money.”
That wasn’t sufficient for her, so she asked for more. “What do you mean?”
“My father was a count. I come from a noble line.”
She stilled before propping herself up on one elbow to look down at me, like she couldn’t believe what I’d confessed. Her eyes shifted back and forth as she looked into mine, having even more questions now. “That’s why you have the chateau, why the butler calls Fender his Highness… You’re a count.”
“Fender is. I’m not.”
Her eyebrows rose.
“He’s the eldest sibling, so the title goes to him. But it was just a title at one point because my father pissed away all our money. Rather than confess his crimes and live with the shame, he decided to kill all of us.”
“Jesus…”
“Over money.” It still sounded ridiculous, after all this time. “When Fender and I ran from the house that night, we had to start over from nothing. We didn’t go to the police because we knew they would just hand us back to him…and he’d finish the job. We survived on the streets and worked for money any way we could get it. It was the beginning of our criminal careers. This camp was born from that nearly a decade ago. When I told Fender we were being inhumane, his response was always, ‘the world is inhumane,’ and carried on.” I looked at her as she leaned over me, her long hair on my chest.
“What happened to him?” She looked down into my face, her hand on my chest as she tried to comfort me.
It was a long time ago, and I didn’t need to be comforted.
“We killed him.”
She had no reaction, as if she expected me to say that.
“When we had enough power, we hunted him down—and shot him in the back of the head.” Fender was the one who’d pulled the trigger, but I wouldn’t have hesitated to do the same. “He went into hiding because he was too much of a coward to finish himself off…like the rest of us. We eventually reclaimed our noble titles and funded our family name with all the money we’d earned doing what we do. Fender didn’t want the chateau, so he gave it to me.”
Her fingers gently rubbed into my chest as she kept her gaze on me. Then she dropped it, watching her fingers move across my chest, her eyes carrying the grief that had been on my shoulders for many years. “I’m so sorry…about all of it.”
When people said something like that in response to your trauma, it was usually just a common phrase that needed to be stated so they wouldn’t seem rude. But I knew she meant it.
“I can’t even imagine…”
When we’d found my father and finished the job, it hadn’t given me any satisfaction. He was weak and scared, begging for his life like a blubbering idiot. He’d drugged everyone in the house so he could kill them in their sleep. He didn’t even look them in the eye like a man. He was so fucking despicable. It was unbelievable that someone so pathetic had claimed the lives of people I loved. He took my family away…my life away. What kind of men would Fender and I be today if none of that had happened? “Don’t ask me again to kill my brother because I won’t. And I hope now you understand why I won’t.”
Nineteen
Fender
I’d never told anyone my family secret before.
Aristocrats and socialites knew because the history of our noble line was of great interest to them. Our family was brought into shame after losing all our assets, but Fender and I returned them and reclaimed what was rightfully ours. But I never told the women I was seeing, and I imagined Fender didn’t either.
I told Raven because I had to.
She would never understand my situation otherwise.
As a young man without the muscle definition he possessed today, he carried me from my bed and strained his body to get me out—and could have lost his life in the process. But he saved me from a senseless death.
I’d always feel indebted to him.
But there was also this unspeakable connection between us, two survivors who were permanently angry, permanently sorrowful. No one else in the world would understand us except the other. I didn’t agree with a lot of things he did, and he took almost everything too far, but he was the one person immune to my acts of vengeance.
Once we got our hands on some money, he hit the weights and bulked up into the beast he was today. His physique was a part of his defense, to know that he’d always be strong enough to carry me—even though that would never happen again. He was built like an ox, with muscles so thick that if someone stabbed him, the blade would never reach his organs.
