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He pushed open his father’s office door, not bothering to knock.

“What’s the mean—” The all-too-familiar holler collected silence.

“Good day,” Rafe said dryly. He sketched a comical bow. When had he taken up such sarcasm? He sounded like Sophie. The thought poured warmly through him. This was his final business before he went to her. Before he embarked on a new life altogether.

Thomas stared at him, mouth half open.

“Rendered you speechless, have I?” Rafe advanced into the room. “Stand.”

“Wh—”

“You heard me. Stand. If I can stand before you like this, you can damn well repay the courtesy.”

Thomas’s face took on color. No doubt they cut a fine contrast—one ashen and starved, one ruddy and bursting from his coat. “Y-you’re here.”

He ought to feel gladdened. One stint of imprisonment, one failed execution, and he had left his abuser with a stutter. But there was nothing happy or ceremonious about this occasion. It felt like a different breed of heartbreak, albeit a necessary one.

“Yes. I’m here. I regret to inform you that Russ failed to exterminate me.”

“I—I haven’t the faintest—”

Rafe was around the desk in an instant, the flat of his forearm driving into Thomas’s throat and slamming him against the wall.

“Don’t lie to me.” His voice trembled without weakness. “I cannot take it. I cannot. Not when you know—when you bloody well commanded—that I be strung up and killed!”

Thomas’s throat convulsed under the force of Rafe’s arm, but he only stared.

“And I damn near was killed. He fired, not six paces from my heart. His aim would’ve been true. I could be dead, do you hear me?” He slammed Thomas into the wall again, harder. “Dead!”

He was looking for something, hoping, for even a glimmer of humanity. He didn’t know he’d been seeking it until this moment, when he did not find it. The pressure of his restraint eased a measure.

“That fear in your eyes,” he said. “It’s not for me. It’s for your fucking self.”

Thomas’s gaze swept his son’s, left to right. What did he see? Boy? Man? Son?

Predator?

“Well, I tell you now,” Rafe said, “you can bloody well keep it. Let it be your guide any time you think of coming near my wife, my son, or my mother.” He leant his weight forward in one final squeeze. “If you so much as think a threat”—he tilted his chin—“well, you know. Needs must. If I don’t stop you with my own hand, I’ll set the magistrate to looking for Russ’s body on your property. I’ll tell every last person in this godforsaken city you’re a liar and a murderer. I’ll ruin you. I’ll ruin you any way I must.”

At this closeness, Rafe saw every grey-white whisker of Thomas’s mustache, the sagging sinew of skin beneath his eyes and bracketing his mouth. He looked old. Fragile. Fatherly, even if only in the outward, fleshly sense.

How terrific. How perfectly, insensibly human, that he could look at him as Father just now. That the core of him craved something his mind knew Thomas could never give: affection, reassurance, praise, love. It was a type of loss all its own.

Rafe pushed away from him. He walked toward the door, smoothing shaky hands down the front of his filthy waistcoat.

“How?”

The voice stalled Rafe. He lowered his head, turned slightly left. He would not look into the man’s eyes again. “How did I make it out alive?”

“Yes.”

He could tell the tale Thomas wanted. There was irony in it, after all. The fact that only a man as devoid of soul as Russ, willing to kidnap and kill for payment, would lose his life over such a trite mistake.

Russ had brought his own pistol along for the journey—the plain, loaded one that Chenoweth had taken and Rafe had fired. But the greedy butler had traded it for its fancier counterpart stowed in the coach: Thomas’s pistol, the blessedly unloaded one. But Rafe … Rafe chose—yes, chose—to answer his way. To answer the greater question in it all.

“I survived because I deserved to. And I didn’t do it alone.”

thirty-three