I suppress the frustrated growl that’s been building inside of me. “She didn’t love him. She was leaving. She would have been out of our lives. It would have been just the two of us. Why did he have to provoke her?” Confusion, anger, and hurt swirl inside of me as I try to make sense of it all. My tears begin to well, but I blink them back.
“Pride. Pain. Humiliation,” Sebastian answers. “Take your pick.”
Each word punctures a hole inside of me.
He could have lived.
“She didn’t have to kill him.”
“My brother’s last words that sealed his fate were about me. He asked Clarissa Rose if she truly believed I’d still love her if I knew you were mine, but she’d kept it from me.”
I study him, suspicion twisting in my gut. “The bullets she put in him before she ran say she didn’t think you’d take it well. Is that why you killed her? Did she confess?”
“I knew what she’d done that night, mija.”
“What?”
“She called me. Told me Carlos threatened to expose it was me who set the fire, as well as my work in the shadows. She told me that, despite everything, she wanted to protect me. That’s how deep her love ran for me. But she didn’t want that life.” He shakes his head. Sebastian exhales through his nose. “If I’d known you were mine, I wouldn’t have sent you anywhere.”
“You sent your own niece to grow up with an abusive man,” I bite out. “But if you knew I wasyours, it would have been different? You have a funny definition of family, Emerson.” A chill slides down my spine, my bones hollow out. “When did you actually find out?” I ask. “About me.”
“The Secret Roses Hotel,” he says. “I was away on business, but when I returned to Huxley Bay, the hotel had just opened.”
My brows pinch at his words. If he only knew of Clarissa Rose’s arrival after the hotel opened, then he’s not the one that brought her to Huxley Bay.
“Clarissa Rose and I reconnected for the first and last time.”
My mouth feels full of cotton as he stares at me.
We both know what he did.
One single shot to the heart.
“When I saw Clarissa Rose again for the first time in years,” he murmurs, “she was afraid, she thought I’d come to hurt her. Somehow, it was if she knew those moments would be her last, and so, she told me the truth,” Sebastian explains as he looks away.
“About me?” I ask.
“She lied about Carlos. He told her about the fire and the work I did, but he never threatened to expose me. Clarissa Rose only said that to me to hide her secret—you. The secret she thought Carlos would tell me, the one that would end her life. She killed my brother to silence him and told me a lie that I would believe so that I’d protect her.”
I close my eyes and let the words sink in.
“Carlos was just hurt that after everything he’d done for her, she was still leaving him. Showing his hurt cost him his life.”
So, I was right. The Octopus did kill my mother.
“I loved Clarissa Rose,” he says. “But keeping you from me was an unforgivable betrayal she needed to face the consequences for.”
My blood runs cold. “You shot her and dumped her body in an alley.” I fight away the images of her at the morgue.
“She got off easy.”
“What do you want from me, Sebastian?”
He gives me a deliberate smirk. The kind you’d find in nightmares.
“Emerson blood runs through your veins, mija. I want you with me, with your family, working beside your brother.”
The world tilts violently.
