Gideon didn’t look at her. Not once.
He stood there like something hollow.
The police had taken his last excuse with them.
Vivian was gone.
Arden sat on the floor, staring at the doors. She was past crying.
Ten minutes ago she’d been royalty. Now she was the daughter of a criminal with nothing to her name.
For someone like Arden, that was worse than dying.
Gideon turned.
His eyes found my face.
And for the first time, he saw what had been staring at him all night. My mother’s face, looking back through mine.
“Celia… where is she?”
His voice barely held together.
He reached for me like a drowning man.
“Is she still at the mines?”
“I’ll go get her.”
“The Hawthornes have the best doctors in the country. I don’t care what state she’s in. I’ll marry her.”
Something desperate and nauseating flickered in his eyes.
He thought he could fix twenty years of failure with one promise.
I looked at him and felt nothing.
Whatever pity I might have had for this man had died a long time ago.
“Go get her?”
I looked down at the bracelet on my wrist.
“How exactly are you planning to bring her back, Mr. Hawthorne?”
“Or would a shovel be more useful?”
Gideon stopped breathing.
“A shovel?”
“Yes.”
I held his gaze and buried each word like a nail.
“The mines in the Suncoast Territories go deep.”
“When they brought her in, nobody treated her burns.”
“The wounds went septic. Maggots got in.”
“The overseers thought she was too slow. They beat her with leather straps. Every day.”
“She held on for two years. After she had me, she traded everything she’d saved for one ticket and hid me in the cargo hold of a ship to Seabrook.”
“Then she died. In a drainage trench at the bottom of the mine.”
“No grave. No stone. Nothing.”
Gideon’s eyes went wide and empty.
His mouth moved. Nothing came out.
“When she died, she had already given me the missing person notice you’d put out in Aldercrest.”
“She believed, until her last breath, that you were coming.”
“She never knew that Vivian had turned that notice into a kill order. The flyer she entrusted to me was the same one Vivian sent to the mines to finish her off.”
A violent, dry heave hit the back of Gideon’s throat.
He choked, gasping for air like his lungs had collapsed.
He went down. Both knees on the marble, hands clawing at his chest. The sound that came out of him wasn’t a word. It was something animal.
He would live with this. Every morning. Every night. The woman he loved, dead in a ditch, all because he let go of her hand. That would never leave him.
And it was only the beginning.
I was done here.
I turned and walked out.
Evan fell in behind me.
The night air hit my face. Salt and sea.
It washed the rot of that room right off me.
“Boss.”
Evan held the car door open.
“Back to the estate tonight?”
I looked up at the moon.
Full and bright.
The same moon my mother used to draw for me in the dirt at the mines.
“No.”
I ducked into the car.
My fingers found the bracelet on my wrist.
Cool against my skin. Just like she said it would be.
“Book two tickets to Aldercrest.”
“I’m paying the Langfords a visit.”
“Everything they owe my mother, I’m collecting. With interest.”
One debt at a time.
This wasn’t going to end until one of us had nothing left.