“Is it true?” Dorian demanded. “You and Evie?”
Gabriel laughed, his cold eyes glittering with mockery. “Oh,yes, brother. I was fucking your fiancée right under your nose. That’s what you wanted to hear, was it not? Does it surprise you? You always knew I was the black sheep of the family. The wild one. Uncontrollable. Sounds like a traitor to me.” He took a swig from the bottle, then hurled it into the wall just behind Dorian’s shoulder. “Off with my head!”
“For reasons I cannotfathom,” Dorian ground out, barely keeping his own anger in check, “you’re lying to me.” He knew it as surely as he knew the taste of his own bitter rage.
“What’s done is done. Whether you believe me or not is irrelevant.”
“Believeyou? I’m not even sure what you’re saying, Gabriel. Malcolm’s innuendos clearly upset you. So if you didn’t have an affair with her, what secret are you harboring? What was so terrible a crime you felt the need to hide it from me across two continents and two hundred and fifty years?”
“An affair. Right. If only my sins were so… pedestrian.” Gabriel scoffed and turned his back, kicking a loose stone from the rubble at the hearth. “Sorry to shatter your image of me as a shameless reprobate, but no, I wasn’t keeping your fiancée’s bed warm. I was merely keeping her secret.”
“Whatsecret?” Dorian pressed, but of course he already knew. There was only one secret his brother would’ve carried in silent shame for so many years. One secret that had the power to destroy what was left of their nearly broken bond.
Still, he needed to hear Gabriel say it.
Dorian waited. Moments passed. Days, it seemed, before his brother finally turned to face him again.
And then it came, a whisper carried on a wave of sadness and remorse so vast it threatened to drown them both.
“I knew, Dorian. I knew she was a vampire.”
“Theentiretime?”
Gabriel shook his head. “She confessed to me after I’d…”
He paused again. Took a breath. Opened and closed his mouth a half-dozen times as the world continued to turn and time marched ceaselessly onward, and still Dorian was no closer to understanding his brother’s darkness. To understandinganyof this.
“For fuck’s sake, Gabriel. After you’dwhat?”
“After I’d caught… It was late one evening. I was in the study, and I heard what sounded like an argument in the sitting room. But when I went to investigate, I…” He closed his eyes and grimaced, as if the memory still had the power to make him ill. “It wasn’t an argument. Evie and Father were… entangled. Quite thoroughly.”
Dorian blinked, waiting for the punchline that never came. “Evie and… andFather?”
“I waited in the shadows until he finally retired to his chamber, and then I cornered her, demanding an explanation. Naturally I assumed the worst. Levied all manner of accusations, called her every name in the bloody book, threatened her, all in defense of my eldest brother’s so-called honor.” Another broken laugh shook loose from the deep well of resentment inside him. “And forwhat, Dorian? To stand here among the ruins before my king—myblood—and convince him I’m not a monster? So many years, so much bloodshed, so many secrets, andthisis what we’ve come to.” He pointed a cruel, accusatory finger at Dorian’s chest, swaying on his feet. “Fuck off, brother. We’reallmonsters, carved in our father’s image, just as he intended.”
Gabriel’s drunken speech quickly descended into a rampage about Augustus’ endless machinations, but Dorian could scarcely hear the words. His mind was stuck on the image of his fiancée and his father, thoroughly entangled.
His heartbeat thudded in his ears, the room spinning as the blood rushed to his head. “Evie was… She had an affair with… withFather?”
Gabriel’s gaze sharpened, cutting straight through Dorian’s heart. “Did you not know her atall?”
“Not as well as he did, it would seem.”
“He wasblackmailingher, Dorian! For months. Somehow, he’d uncovered her secret and forced her into the arrangement. He berated and demeaned her for what she was, then he took what he wanted from her, including the information that ultimately lead him to the royal vampire family. He threatened to kill you both if she breathed so much as a word to you. So instead, she breathed it to me.”
Memories slithered up from the depths, like corpses rising from the grave.
Evie, recoiling at his father’s every touch or gesture as they shared a family meal.
Evie, crying in the sitting room, not realizing Dorian had been watching her helplessly from the hall, desperately seeking the right words.
Evie. Sad, complicated Evie, alone in a world of monsters she just couldn’t escape.
Dorian held up his hands and tried to speak, if only to stop the rest of this dark tale from escaping his brother’s lips. But when he took a breath, his throat closed upon the words like a fist, and Gabriel continued, every revelation stealing a part of Dorian’s soul he knew he’d never get back.
“I promised her I’d help her find a way to tell you—to break Father’s hold over her before he could solidify whatever dastardly deal he’d made with the king.” Gabriel’s voice turned thin and watery, as if he were swimming through an ocean of his own torment. “But I failed you both, Dorian. In the end, Father goteverythinghe wanted. And here we are—the last of a dying legacy, one dark secret away from turning each other to ash.”
Dorian collapsed against the bourbon-soaked wall behind him and slid down to the floor, unable to stand beneath the weight of Gabriel’s confession.
