“You’re here again,” Benedict’s sigh came as he joined Dorian in the corner. “How many have you had?”
Throwing back the rest of the drink, Dorian replied, “Hardly enough.”
“I can smell brandy on your breath from a mile away,” Benedict said. “If you dare walk out of here, I’ll be carrying you out in a wheelbarrow. Beaumont, you cannot keep doing this to yourself, you cannot keep wallowing in your grief and drinking it away.
“You’ll kill yourself doing it, and I cannot in good conscience stand by and watch it all happen.”
“There is no alternative,” Dorian muttered. “I lost her.”
“And now you’re losing yourself,” Benedict pressed. “You need to regain both.”
“How?” Dorian roared, then lowered his voice. He burned to tell her everything. To unburden himself of the deception, to beg her forgiveness, and start afresh, with no lies between them. But he feared she would not understand. “How in god’s name am I going to do that when I have given her every reason to never trust me again?
“Start with this,” Benedict put in, sliding a paper across the table to Dorian. “You jumped into the battle to save me and Harriet, so I jumped into the battle to save you too.”
Squinting at the paper, Dorian asked, “What is this?”
“On a hunch, I went to your man-of-business and frankly lied about you asking me to be your proxy. I told him we needed an audit of all your holdings and expenses. Then I cross-referenced the unknown accounts with my father’s from fifteen years ago.
“As expected, your uncle had hidden his trail fairly well. However, my father did not. That is how a friend of mine at the bank was able to dig into your uncle’s finances through the estate’s accounts,” his old friend put in. “And the money he funnels to Sterling and vice versa.”
“You didwhat?” Dorian blinked. “Is that not illegal?”
“Highly,” Benedict shrugged. “But only you and I know that. You can take that to the authorities and get cause to search his home and business. I am sure you can find a lead there.”
“I already have one,” Dorian said. “I just didn’t know how to utilize it.”
“We can go this evening if you want,” Benedict offered. “But you need to sober up first, old boy.”
Dropping the paper, Dorian called for some water and coffee, and a faint imagination of how he could possibly win Evelina back to him began to slither through his mind. But first things first—he needed to clean up the last few smears in his life.
“Have… have you seen Evelina lately?” he hesitantly asked then.
“I have,” Benedict nodded. “And she looks no better than you do, old pal. I’d advise you to grovel and beg for her forgiveness when you do go to her.”
“No,” Dorian said. “This time, I’ll need her to come to me.”
Frowning, Benedict asked, “What do you mean?”
“You’ll see,” Dorian said as the coffee was delivered. “I hope to God it works, though.”
Three hours later, Dorian, with too much perverse delight, ran the tip of a knife down the middle of the painting in Sterling’s study. It felt even better as Sterling was behind him, unable to do a thing.
He felt the man’s scalding eyes on the back of his neck as he peeled the canvas down. True to Ellie’s word, a safe was embedded in the wall behind.
“That was not necessary,” Sterling growled.
He came forward and, reaching behind the painting, clicked some hidden mechanism behind the frame. The safe swung open, giving clear access to the iron box concealed in the wall.
“The key, your lordship?” One of the constables asked.
Plucking a key from a drawer, Sterling bitterly handed it over, and Dorian opened the iron box. He pulled out papers from the bottom and rifled through them, finding a set of letters, all of them with his uncle’s spidery handwriting. One in particular was the order of the attack upon Benedict and Harriet at Vauxhall.
“Spitalfields,” Dorian said emptily. “All this time, he was hiding in plain sight?”
“Shall we arrest this one, Your Grace?” the constable asked.
“Yes,” Dorian said, fixing his attention back on Sterling. “Charge him with collusion for murder.”
