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“I’m everything he made me.”
“Jac—”
“Stop wasting time,” I snap.
It causes her to sob harder when I pass her to Simon just as Percival finds us. He’s out of breath and barely able to relay that Arthur has been escorted back to Buckingham Palace. While Simon is distracted, my mother slips back inside the car.
“Get out,” I bark at her through my clenched teeth. This isn’t like her. Heartbroken and mourning or not, she knows better than to be difficult. Wasting time will only make it more difficult to figure out what happened to my father. “Don’t make it harder for yourself.”
Hopeless dismay trembles in her regal countenance.
“There’s something you need to know,” she whispers up at me, grasping my hand and tugging at me until I crouch.
The scent of cloyed blood fills my lungs, the metallic tinge chilling me to the marrow of my bones. I’m unbalanced when she pulls me closer, her arms wrapping around my shoulders so that her sobs wrack into me as I am met with my father’s corpse. I refuse to let any of it sink in. To accept the sight in front of me.
After a few steadying breaths, she murmurs into my ear, “His briefcase is gone. It’s all gone, Henry.” Deep blue eyes flash to mine as I glance down at her. “It was all in there.”
“What was in there?”
“Everything. If anyone finds out…” A stuttering breath wracks through her. “It will destroy us.”
“What’s in the briefcase, mother?”
With a shake of her head, she twists to face the windscreen, leaving my father in open view again. This time, it hits. Reality slams into me with a force of a sucker punch.
He’s drained blue. A corpse. His grey hair is flecked with red spit where he choked on his own blood. While I follow the trail of spatters, she squeezes my hand the same way I remember her doing on my first day of school. The grip of her trembling limb tightens more and more the longer I peruse my father’s limp body to the centre of the stain on his side.
“It was always going to come to this.”
Ignoring her statement, I lean across her to examine my father’s wound. A single stab between his ribs. The sixth and seventh, I guess from simply looking.
“His lung.” I pause at the almost quiver in my voice. Taking a deep breath of the heavy air, I carry on. “It was punctured.”
“It’s just one.” A manic laugh escapes her. “One wound. Just one,” she repeats over and again as I reach forward and trace the tear of his claret-stained shirt. “One-one deep cut.”
“It’s all it takes,” I retort, rubbing my thumb over my index and middle fingers. The sticky blood gloops and crumbles, almost instantly turning to dust that I rub into my palms as I pull back to crouch in front of my mother once more.
The anger that I’ve been pushing down roars in my chest, echoing above my raging pulse, drowning out the furious thoughts in my mind with only one promise. The only one I can give her while I wipe the fresh tears from her bloodshot eyes.
“Their days are numbered.”
She nods. “Here.”
Glancing down at her lap, I watch as she pulls out a flick knife from the pocket of her loose trousers and holds it out to me. It looks out of place in her dainty, manicured hand. As bloody as it is, it’s as gentle as ever when she places the knife in my hand.
“It doesn’t matter what he taught you,” she tells me, closing my hand tightly around the weapon used to murder her beloved. “There is no mercy in justice. Be your worst. Do your worst.” Sagging back into the seat, she rests her head awkwardly on my father’s shoulder. “Bleed them dry, Henry.”
With a nod, I stand and pocket the knife. There won’t be any fingerprints on it, and if there had been, she would have contaminated them enough that it doesn’t matter anymore. The only important thing is the justice that it will serve as I hunt down my father’s murderer.
A man that lives by the sword dies by the sword. And I plan on making good on the promise I made today—I will hunt. I will find. I will kill.
CHAPTER TWO
HENRY
“From dust we came, and to dust we must all return,” I repeat the last line of the eulogy I gave earlier at the church as I raise my glass to toast my father—the Duke of Gloucester, a wolf like every man sat around the table.
“But from ashes we rise,” Arthur states, touching his glass of Penderyn whisky to my Blue Label Johnny Walker. Although I prefer cognac, this is the only way to toast my father—with his drink of choice.
