“Less than an hour ago, you informed me you wouldn’t name me heir,” I said, resisting the urge to tap my glass.
I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of knowing any part of him lived in me.
“That was before you were engaged to the Bailey girl. I think I would enjoy hearing the story of how you convinced her brotherto turn to piracy and then fucked his sister into thinking you loved her.”
The garish words created a fire that burned through me. He thought he knew something when he couldn’t begin to fathom what it meant to understand people. Mostly, I hated that he was right. All of it. Rose willingly tied herself to me because she was, at her core, good and capable of love; that she believed the same of me was a tragedy.
“It would go better for you if you refrained from speaking about her like that.” The words were razor sharp.
I expected him to taunt me for my protectiveness. To gloat about how I wasn’t any better than him, but instead he tapped his glass and took a long drink before resting his arms on the side of the chair. The sardonic smile I anticipated was replaced by a solemn frown that reminded me a lot of pity if I thought Sebastian Smith was capable of such an emotion.
“I wondered if you orchestrated it, but I can see you didn’t. You’ve judged me all these years for the way I loved your mother, but maybe now you understand. It’s in our blood, the need to possess,” he said.
My hand clenched around the glass, and for a moment, I knew it would be easy to kill him right then. He was dying and weak. Every breath he took was an insult to my mother’s memory.
“What you did to her wasn’t love. You used her and ruined her.” I said.
My father leaned forward, and as his eyes flashed, I saw the truth of him. He didn’t know the difference between love and ownership. I hated him even more than before.
“She was a whore, Edward. It’s their job to be used. I made it so she didn’t have to sell her body anymore. How many whores can say that they had a roof over their head and food in their belly without having to spread their legs? You are as ungrateful as she was,” he snapped.
“That wasn’t living!” I shouted. “You gave us just enough to survive and made sure we would never have more than that. It was cruel.”
He clicked his tongue and tapped his glass.
“I am not having this conversation again with you. I thought your feelings for the girl would make you finally understand, but I see you are just as willful and stubborn as your mother.”
That he could twist this to seem like I was the one not understanding was a testament to how gnarled the paths of his mind were. For the first time, a sickening truth landed over me, suppressing everything I was. It didn’t matter if I ruined his name, his reputation, his fortune, because his mind would never allow him to know that it was because of him it was happening. It might hurt, but he would be the victim, never at fault.
The suffering he inflicted on others was out of his hands.
At fourteen years old, I knew I’d understood everything. It was all black and white. The walls I erected around my memories of him were air-tight. Sitting across from him now, though, they crumbled like sand to the wind. He wasn’t a force to be reckoned with and brought to his knees because he was just a man. A broken and sad man at the end of his life, without anything to show for it.
I wished I could tell Billy he was right all along. He wouldn’t have gloated. Instead, he would have hugged me and told me that it was time to start living.
Standing, I set down my glass on a nearby table and turned to leave.
“Where are you going? We aren’t done here,” he stuttered the words as if they cost him.
I studied him for just a minute more. Blue eyes that echoed mine, except they were dull and lifeless, even though he breathed. God, he’d seemed so large when I was a boy. Now his shoulders slumped forward, and the vein in his neck gave awayhis anxiety. Here was a man who wanted me to see him as he saw himself, and I couldn’t. For so long, I thought taking everything from him and unmasking him was divine justice, but it turned out all I needed to do was see him for who he truly was.
“You can name me your heir or James Allan. You can even die and let the crown have it all. There is nothing I want from you. I’ve spent fourteen years imagining what it would finally feel like to destroy everything you loved, but I see now there isn’t anything left to take from you. Even if I did, you wouldn’t comprehend it. After all that, you are just a lonely man at the end of his life and nothing to show for it.”
The words were a weight off my chest, and for the first time, the teenage boy who lived in me took his first breath. The stinging skin from the beatings soothed, and the cruelty of the world became a dull ache instead of an all-encompassing pain.
Turning my back on him was everything I imagined ruining him would feel like. It didn’t even cost my life.
My vision swam with the ramifications of a single evening. Billy used to say that a man like Sebastian Smith didn’t deserve the price of my life, but I called him short-sighted. That if the price of my life was that he was forced to live in the ashes of his, it was a small price to pay. The tragedy of it all was that I couldn’t tell Billy he was right. Though even if I did, he wouldn’t have gloated. He would have nodded and said it was all right. Then he would have told me that there was a woman out there who loved me and to get to it.
The smile I felt on my lips was out of place in a place like Fairview, but it was just another reminder that I didn’t belong here.
“She probably thinks you love her, but she doesn’t know that you don’t know how. It’s my blood in your veins, boy. You think you can pass as a gentleman, but all you are is a whore’s son and a pirate. They will see right through you.”
Poison-tipped arrows meant for the heart. They ricocheted all the same, missing their mark.
“Maybe,” I said. “Maybe I’ll never be able to love her the way she deserves. Maybe I’ll fuck it all up. I’ve spent so much time living to die that I think it’s time to try something different.”
“I will make sure you never find peace. That mark on your chest is an inevitability.”
