She sank to her knees in the wet grass and stared up at her father beyond the pistol now leveled at her head. “Please don’t do this,” she said. “You don’t have to. You can let me go. Let all of this go. I would give you the money to leave the country if you wanted it. You could take a new name and forget you ever had three daughters.”
“Three ungrateful daughters,” he said, but she could see the hesitation.
“Three very ungrateful daughters,” she corrected herself, trying not to hope that she might be getting through to him. That she might make it out alive. “You could start new. Become someone you want to be instead of what you became when we abandoned you. Please. Please let me do that.”
He stared at her a long moment and then he lifted the gun that had drooped momentarily in his fingers. She squeezed her eyes shut, ready for the blast and the darkness that would come after.
But when the blast came, there was no pain, there was no darkness. She heaved backward onto her backside out of instinct and scooted away before she realized she hadn’t been shot. Instead her father lay on the shores of the Thames, smoking gun still clutched in his hand.
And he was dead.
CHAPTER23
When Silas heard the gunshot as he raced through the thick woods, he began to hear another sound. It took him a moment to realize it was his own voice, howling in pain and horror as he pushed through the brambles and onto the shores of the Thames.
He saw Arabella there, crumpled on the ground and for a moment all he could do was scream her name into the night. But then she turned toward him and he saw, to his shock and relief, that she wasn’t harmed.
He threw himself down beside her, gathering her into his arms as she began to sob, her fingers digging into his jacket as she almost tried to claw her way into his coat.
“Shhh,” he soothed. “I’m here, I’m here.”
“He’s—he’s dead.”
It was Evelina’s voice that said it and that brought Silas back to reality. He looked to where the rest of them stared and saw there was a man lying on the shore. A gun smoked in his hand, a hole was in his forehead.
Arabella stopped sobbing and pushed at him, silently asking him to help her up. He did so and she rushed to her sisters, gathering them close as they trembled together.
“He shot himself,” she gasped out at last. “He was pointing the gun at me and then he shot himself instead. I was trying to give him a way out, I don’t know why he took this one.”
They collapsed together then, Silas watching the love that always glowed so brightly between them create a warmth that he knew would carry them through this awful truth. He looked toward his brother and found Reg watching him just as closely.
“I’m very glad she’s unharmed,” Reg said as he came to Silas and clasped his arm gently.
“At least physically,” Silas said.
“Miss Comerford,” Reg said, and then shook his head. “Arabella.”
She jolted at the use of her name and looked toward Silas’s brother. She left her sisters to hold each other and moved to him. “Y-Yes, my lord? I’m so sorry you had to be involved in this, that you were dragged into?—”
“I have no regrets in coming to your aid, only in my part in all this, which I’m sure Silas will tell you soon enough. But the guard will be coming, Arabella, and soon.”
She blinked, as if she were only just realizing that she would potentially be implicated in this death. That she might be seen as a suspect, even if she hadn’t done anything wrong.
Silas slid his arm around her. “We’ll get through it,” he whispered.
She looked up at him. “I don’t want to harm you or your family with all this.”
“You misunderstand,” Reg said. “I’m not telling you about the guard’s arrival to make you see that you’re in danger. I need to know what happened, if you can bear to tell it, so that I know how to make it go away. For you. For him, as well. And I suppose for us, too.”
“Make it go away?” she repeated.
He smiled. “You’ve been involved with many powerful men. Enough that you should know we can make most distasteful things go away with the right pressures and payoffs. And since you were clearly the victim in all this, I think the full weight of the title Pentaghast will have never been used for a better purpose than to ensure you are left unscathed. Please, tell us what happened.”
Arabella clung to Silas as she choked out the whole story of her father’s arrival, plan to make her death look like a suicide and finally his taking of his own life after she had offered him an escape.
Silas held her tightly, feeling her heart pound with fear and grief with every word. How he wished he could take some of that pain, lift its weight from her shoulders. But he knew from experience that he couldn’t. She would have to feel it. The best he could do was be there to hold her through it.
“I understand,” Reg said when she was finished. He dug into his pocket and offered her his handkerchief, which she used to wipe her eyes. There was a commotion from above them in the park. “I’ll meet them. And I’ll be sure they understand what truly happened.”
