Eleanor shook her head. “No.”
James waited. “A sip of water?”
She hesitated, then took the glass when he offered it. Her hands shook slightly. She hated that he noticed.
He set the glass down and pulled a chair closer, sitting beside her with his knees angled toward the bed, as if positioning himself to guard both Eleanor and Arabella at once.
“I owe you the truth,” James said.
Eleanor’s breath caught.
She had wanted answers for so long. She had demanded them. Teased for them. Fought for them.
Now that they were offered, she felt suddenly afraid of what they might cost.
James’s eyes remained on Arabella as he spoke, his voice low and controlled. “The night my parents died, I saw it.”
Eleanor’s heart clenched. “You saw it?”
He nodded once. “I was a boy. I had been sent upstairs. I did not stay upstairs.”
Eleanor swallowed hard. “James.”
His jaw tightened. “I heard voices. A man I did not recognize. My mother’s voice, frightened. My father trying to keep calm.”
He paused, and Eleanor could tell he was forcing himself to continue.
“I crept down the back stairs,” he said. “I thought I would find an argument. Something ordinary.”
Eleanor’s hands curled around the arm of her chair. “And you did not.”
“No,” James replied. “I saw my father fall first. I saw my mother run to him. I saw her turn, trying to shield him, as if her body could stop what was already happening.”
His throat moved as he swallowed. “The man looked at me.”
Eleanor’s breath stopped.
James’s eyes flickered toward her. “He saw me. He did not kill me.”
“Why,” Eleanor whispered.
James’s mouth tightened. “Because he wanted me to remember. Because he wanted to control me. Because he wanted me to grow into this title under his shadow.”
Eleanor stared at him. “Oh God.”
James nodded once, grim. “I have been looking for him ever since.”
Eleanor’s voice was barely audible. “All these years?”
“All these years,” James confirmed.
Eleanor thought of the rules. The distance. The icy restraint that had often felt like contempt.
It had not been contempt.
It had been survival.
James continued, voice steady despite the tremor beneath it. “When I finally began to see patterns, I realized the man was not a stranger to society. He moved in it. He used it. Thetonprotects its own.”
