She swallowed hard and answered carefully, “I’m sure they must have judged me at first. This wasn’t how we began, after all. We were all raised to be gentlewomen. Raised to marry as well as possible and live genteel lives. When I left, when I changed everything and dared to use my own name to do it, I’m sure Evelina and Julia must have resented me on some level.”
He appeared surprised. “So Comerfordisyour birth name. Do you mind if I ask why you didn’t take on a new one like so many courtesans do?”
She gave a half-smile. “To make my father angry. To ruin him a little. I would perhaps do it differently now.”
She frowned as she thought of her father’s letters. The angry, violent, desperate letters that just kept coming no matter how many years she and her sisters had been out of his control. Would that situation be better if she hadn’t dragged him into her mud? If when papers wrote breathless recountings of her adventures, it wasn’t his name that echoed through the scandals?
Silas let out a short breath. “Well, I certainly understandthat,” he said. “I was reminded tonight how much I’ve lived my life as a directbollocks offto the man who sired me and the family I was raised beside. Not in, though. Neverinthe family. Just slightly next to it.”
There was such bitterness in his tone that she got up and moved toward him. She took his hand between her own and held it there. “What happened, Silas?”
He shivered. “Am I so obvious?”
She nodded wordlessly and threaded her fingers through his. He let her and for a moment they both simply stared at the intertwined digits. His breath became ragged and when he looked up into her eyes that pain she’d already seen seemed even sharper. Her heart ached a little at the sight of it, even if she knew she shouldn’t allow it to do so.
“I’veneverbelonged with them, Arabella. They made sure of it. Myfathermade sure of it. I was in their house, but not their family, not truly.”
“You were a child when you joined them, yes?” She hesitated. “It seems an…odd arrangement.”
“To bring a bastard child into the family so publicly? Yes, entirely odd. He could have sent me to live with some family in the country. Someplace I’d have a chance to belong, but no. He wanted his revenge and his control because my mother had the gall to deny him.”
She let out her breath slowly. “I see. He was her protector, I know.”
“He was obsessed with her, at least so I’ve heard and read in his journals from before they broke. I used to steal into his study when he was out and read them, try to imagine some fairytale life where he loved her and we were the family I so wanted. But now, as a man, I know it wasn’t love. Not ever. It was obsession and control.”
“Yes, that happens sometimes,” Arabella said softly. “A danger of the profession. Was he her lover all the years before he took you in?”
“Off and on,” Silas explained. “He’d go months away and then show up. Give me a gift, shuttle me off so they could be alone and she would hope again. He would crush her within a few weeks and disappear back into his real life. She would crash into despair and I would try to pick up the pieces.”
“Oh, Silas, you were so young,” she whispered.
He shrugged. “You don’t get to be young when you’re raised like us.”
She flinched, for truer words had never been spoken. Children had to become adults when they were raised by adults who acted like children. Who never considered their families before themselves.
“What happened at the end?” she asked, pushing herself back to his story so she wouldn’t linger long on her own.
“One day she refused him. He had sent word he was coming and she made sure she wasn’t at home. She left me there with a letter ending it. He was livid. I thought he would destroy the house around me he was breaking things and swearing and cursing her for her audacity. And then he just stopped and stared at me. Just stared at me until I could hardly breathe. Without a word he left. She grew more broken after that. Weeks of slow collapse. I found out later he was sabotaging her. Writing her these awful letters, forcing her to be cut off at shops and with other courtesans. And once she was at her weakest, he used it as an excuse to steal me. And he did it publicly so she would hear about me, know about me. See me being raised as his son out of her reach.”
She shivered. “That was why he stared at you. He realized you were the way to hurt her the most.”
He didn’t answer for a moment. He seemed incapable of doing so. Like the words would shatter something. She knew there was more to tell, more hidden beneath all the boldness his masks. But if she pushed for it, she feared the consequences, not just for him but for her. Forthem. The them that couldn’t be, not truly.
“That must have been difficult,” she said.
“Impossible, at least until I trained myself not to care.” He shook his head and some of the heartbreak softened a fraction. “But tonight, tonighttheytried to change all that. They offered me a place there with them. To be a part of their family in a more genuine way.”
She tilted her head. “But?”
“But only if I become everything I’m not. Give up everything that matters.”
She sucked in a breath at that broken admission. At the true emotions behind it. And at the pure, powerful anger that bubbled up in her when she heard it.
She didn’t know much about the Marquess of Pentaghast and his legitimate siblings, but at this moment she could have scratched all their eyes out. Torn them into pieces without a thought because they’d made the light in Silas’s eyes dim.
And in that moment the danger of her reaction didn’t matter to her even a whit.
“If they couldn’t see your value,” she said, “If they cannot see it now, then they areallfools and they don’t deserve you. I hope you told all three of them to go straight to hell.”
