“That is all?”
“That is all. You know I have no love for your father. He lies like breathing—the ever-disappearing money, what happened with Bella. Why would he tell the truth about such a monumental failure?”
Benedict rolled his eyes. “How are you so certain?”
“How areyouso certain? So ready to believe his truth?”
“He is my father…”
“He’s shown you over and over who he is. When will you believe him about that?”
West was right. His father had proven time and again that he would put himself above his family and the gaming tables. But to insist for years that he’d been cheated? To ruin a girl’s life as recompense for a fictitious slight? To charge his son with such a vicious, soul-crushing task?
“But he wouldn’t do this. Wouldn’t tell me to do this if it wasn’t what is right,” Benedict protested, fighting to stay above the wave of desperation, gasping for breath as the alternative truth threatened to tow him under.
West huffed, shaking his head before tipping back the last of his ale and nodding at the barkeep’s unasked question.
“Tomorrow night, you’re going to be struck repeatedly, perhaps hundreds of times, while waiting for your opening. And neither of us has even the slightest concern you’ll break. Because he trained you for violence. He beat you?—”
“When I’d done wrong, failed in my duties?—”
“When it suited him. Those were no mere corrections, Benedict. He tortured you because it satisfied his vile soul to break you, to twist you into something more wretched than him.He tried to take every kind, generous, loving piece of you and wrench it into something monstrous. And if you go forward with this scheme, he will have succeeded.”
The denial, born of years of repeating the only truth he’d ever known, caught in Benedict’s throat, screaming and clawing to break free from his parted lips. Determined to loosen the knot in his trachea, he emptied his scotch into his gullet.
“This scheme is all I have,” he whispered, his voice cracking. “There is no other plan, no other way. Without a significant injection of funds, Blackwood will crumble, and I’ll have nothing. We’ve been planning this, Father and I, for nearly a decade. Everything, every lesson, every fight, every woman—it was all to get me here, now. This is all I am.”
“Eliza, you might have Eliza.”
Eliza.His heart adopted the word for its own. Adapting its rhythm until it formed the letters of her name. But even if he could forsake everything he was, he had nothing to offer her. He couldn’t support her. All he had was a barren, crumbling house that screamed as the wind raced over the moors and through cracks at night. Not even that, but the potential of that someday.
West studied him, gaze heavy. “Only you can decide if the price is fair. It’s your soul, after all. Your secrets die here with me. But I think if you look up, see the horizon beyond this plan, you’ll find that you have a great deal more than you ever realized. And you could have more than you ever dared to dream.”
The sincerity threatened to overwhelm Benedict. “Honestly, when did you become so eloquent? It’s unnerving.”
“I read. Try it sometime.”
“You read?”
“I contain multitudes. A study in contrasts, if you will.” Weston spread his hands apart, palms up, as he gestured toward his person in emphasis. “Now, I think I can manage one moredrink before you bankrupt me and clear the entire establishment of scotch.”
“Please,” Benedict said.
Another glass appeared before him without prompting, and he paid for it with a grateful smile.
“Of course, the drink will cost you…”
Benedict groaned, letting his forehead flop onto the bar. “What?”
“The girl.”
“What of her?”
“For years, I’ve been working on you to abandon Ambrose to his shithole. And in weeks, she has you considering it.”
Benedict grumbled into his drink.
“Seems as though she’s special.”
