I regard her coolly for a long beat before I state, “I’m here for Elodie.” Her face pales considerably. “I’m bringing Skye with me.”
At that, she lifts her chin to stare down the bridge of her nose. “You can’t have her. She’s my little girl, and I?—”
My whisky tumbler flies across the room, smashing against the door, having narrowly missed Cressida’s head. “Don’t fucking lie to me. We both know Skye is Elodie’s daughter, and you only want her to force Elodie to stay in line, paying the price for your own selfish interests.”
I hold her glare with a cold indifference before a frown crosses my brow when I notice her eyes are theexactsame shade as the woman in the picture.
“Wait a minute…” Holding up the image, I spin it to face her.
“Who’s this woman?”
Her eyes flare furiously as she murmurs, “I’ll fucking murder that lying bastard.” Then she strides closer, reaching out to snatch the image from my hand, but I jerk it away before she can touch it and grip her wrist with my spare hand.
“Let go of me.” She tries to pull away. “I don’t care who you are?—”
“Who. Is. She?” I calmly enunciate each word while spearing her with dark eyes. “You have two seconds to answer me. One. Tw?—”
“My younger sister.” She drops her gaze for a split second before turning her eyes back to mine. “She’s dead.”
We regard one another for a long beat, and something like fear flickers through her eyes when I speak again. “Why would Warren keep this picture hidden in his desk?”
She tips her head to one side, arching an eyebrow tauntingly. “You seem to think you know everything else. Surely, you know the answer to that question too…”
I look from her to the photo, conjuring Elodie in my mind’s eye, and suddenly, the pieces seem to fit together more easily now. Why her parents never showed her love and affection. Why they didn’t believe she’d been raped. Why they gave her to Conti without a care for her wellbeing.
“She’sElodie’s mother. And Warren is her father.”
“Ding,ding,ding. We have a winner.” I let go of her wrist, and she stumbles backward with a deranged smile. “From the moment Warren met my precious baby sister, Claire, I was second best. I thought if I got pregnant, he’d be forced to marry me, and we could go back to how things werebefore… I thought he’d forget about her.”
She laughs then, and the sound is maniacal. “It didn’t work.Nothingworked. He couldn’t stay away from her, or she from him. Then she got pregnant, and weallknew who the father was even though no one said it outright.”
Warren chooses that moment to walk into the room, and she rounds on him as though I’m not even present.
“You kept her photo in your desk drawer?” Her voice is high-pitched with incredulity as Warren flicks his gaze between thetwo of us, and it’s then I notice Elodie has the exact same eyes as he does.
His shoulders sag when he nods minutely. “I loved her, Cress. God forgive me; all these years, I could barely look at our daughter because she looks so like her mother?—”
He stops when Cressida pushes past him and leaves the office in silence. The manner of Elodie’s uncaring upbringing makes perfect sense now.
I’m the one to break the silence. “Giving her to Conti is unforgivable. I’m here to make you pay for your sins, just like I’ve made Danvers pay for his.”
Rather than beg or plead as I’d assumed he would, he just steps closer to the drinks cabinet, fixes himself a whisky, and turns to me with a sad smile. “If I’d been less of a fucking coward. If I’d fought for Claire, we could have been happy…”
He trails off, his eyes turning glassy as he softly murmurs, “I’m more than ready to pay for them. Existing without love isn’t truly living.”
“You had a chance to loveher, Rivers.” His forehead crinkles when I snarl. “But you were too concerned with yourself to give a fuck about how Elodie might feel. You were too concerned with saving your own ass by handing her over to a goddamn psychopath.”
He swallows heavily as I move closer, my blood simmering in my veins with each word I spew. With each moment of witnessing just how self-fucking-centered these people truly are.
“You believed Jeremy Danvers over your own child…” My voice rises as rage roars through me. “You believed the word of a fuckingrapist—” He flinches, his reaction confirming to me that he’d known Elodie’s accusation to be true but hadn’t cared enough to do anything about it.
If I’d been conflicted as to how to handle Elodie’s parents before now, this moment right here has made my views crystal clear.
“You’re a piece of shit, Rivers. And I’m here to give you exactly what’s coming to you?—”
The office door flies open, and Cressida storms back inside, the long barrel of a hunting rifle aimed at her husband. His face barely has a millisecond to register before she pulls the trigger, her body jerking with the force of the kickback.
His glass smashes to the floor when the bullet takes off one side of his face completely, and the sound of the single shot echoes through the property as Warren’s body falls to the floor. My jaw slackens with disbelief, his wife watching unblinkingly, not wholly cognizant, as I hold up a stalling hand.
