“Let them go.” Nell held her hands out, palms open, her posture rigid as she fought to keep her composure from cracking apart. “This is between us, Gabriel. They have nothing to do with what happened between you and me.”
“They have everything to do with it.” Gabriel shoved Oliver hard against the wall, making the boy grunt as his shoulder cracked against the plaster. He yanked Lily against his chest and pulled out a rusted pistol, pressing the barrel against the girl’s temple. “You ran from me carrying a bellyful of child, Eleanor. You let me burn and then you brought my blood into this world and raised them without me. Gave them a life so sweet they do not even know my name.”
“You were supposed to be dead.” She took a cautious step forward, her eyes locked on the weapon. She knew she had him talking to give Dominic time. “Everyone believed you were dead.I buried an empty grave and I mourned you, Gabriel, even after everything you did to me.”
“Mourned me.” He laughed — a thin, cracked sound. “Mourned me so hard you opened a bakery and got yourself engaged to a viscount.”
Behind Gabriel, barely visible in the shadows beyond the boarded window, something shifted. A board easing outward. An inch of dark air where there had been none.
“What do you want?” She took another slow, measured step. Her heart was a fist pounding against her ribs, but her hands were steady. She needed her hands steady. “You said ten thousand this morning. I will get you twenty. Forty. Name it and let them go.”
“You think this is still about money?” Something shifted in his face. The greed drained away and the thing beneath it surfaced — raw and festering and older than the burns. “I sat in this cottage all day after you left, staring at this face, and I thought about you standing in that shop with flour on your hands and a ring on your finger and that look — that look like the world owed you something good. And I realised no amount of money was ever going to make that feeling stop.”
His grip on Lily tightened until the girl whimpered. His voice dropped, and the words came out slow and poisonous.
“You were supposed to suffer, Eleanor. You were supposed to be as wretched as I am. Instead you built a life and fell in love and now your children will be calling another man Papa! All the while I rotted in this hole with half a face and nothing to my name. The money was never going to fix it. Nothing fixes it. Nothing except making sure you lose everything the way I did.”
Another inch of dark air behind the board. Dominic moved like smoke.
“You hurt my mother.” The voice came from the wall. Small and shaking and white-hot with fury.
Oliver had pulled himself upright against the plaster, his bound wrists held tight against his chest, blood drying on his jaw. He was looking at Gabriel with an expression no nine-year-old should know how to wear — not fear, not confusion, but a hatred so pure and clean it could have cut glass.
“I know who you are. You are my father.” The words came out one at a time, bitten off like thread, as though he had been rehearsing them since the moment this man dragged him from the bakery. “I may never have met you before, but I know you hurt my mother. And I hate you for that.” His chin lifted, trembling but refusing to drop. “I hate you.”
Gabriel stared at the boy. For one flickering instant something almost human passed behind his eyes — not guilt, not shame, but the brief, startled recognition of being seen for exactly what he was by a child who had never met him and understood him completely.
Then it was gone. His face hardened.
“Your son has your mouth, Eleanor.” He turned back to Nell, dismissing the boy like he had always dismissed anything that did not serve him.
He raised the pistol, the heavy iron steady as he took deliberate aim at Lily’s temple. Nell’s world narrowed to a single point — the dark circle of that barrel and the wide, liquid terror in her daughter’s eyes.
“GABRIEL, NO!” The scream tore from her lungs as she lunged forward.
Behind Gabriel, Oliver moved.
He had freed his hands. The cord lay in a loose coil at his feet, and the boy launched himself at Gabriel from behind with all the strength his small body could muster. His thin arms wrapped around the man’s gun hand, yanking it away from his sister’s head with a strength born of pure, animal desperation.
“Leave her alone!” Oliver’s cry was a jagged, frantic thing, fracturing as he strained against the man’s weight.
Gabriel stumbled, thrown off balance. The pistol swung wide. Lily tore herself from his grip with a shriek, scrambling toward Nell on her hands and knees.
“Run, Lily!” Oliver clung to Gabriel’s arm, kicking at the man’s shins, biting at his twisted wrist. “Run!”
Nell caught her daughter and shoved her toward the open door. “Get out! Run toward the churchyard — do not stop!”
Lily fled into the dark, her sobs swallowed by the night.
Gabriel roared — a raw, inhuman sound — and his free hand cracked across Oliver’s face in a vicious backhand that snapped the boy’s head sideways. Oliver hit the ground hard, his cheek splitting open against the hearthstone. He lay gasping on the packed earth, his limbs tangled beneath him, too stunned to rise.
“Oliver!” The scream tore from Nell’s throat.
She never reached him.
Gabriel’s hand closed around her throat and slammed her back against the wall. The crumbling plaster gave way behind her head. He pinned her there, his fingers crushing her windpipe, cutting off her air, and the firelight painted his ruined face in shades of copper and shadow.
“You were mine.” His breath was hot and sour against her skin. “Mine to keep and mine to break. You do not get to be happy when I am this.”
