Total pages in book: 79
Estimated words: 75793 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 379(@200wpm)___ 303(@250wpm)___ 253(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 75793 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 379(@200wpm)___ 303(@250wpm)___ 253(@300wpm)
His expression darkens. “I’ll be fine. The intention wasn’t to kill me.”
“No, I didn’t think it was. I don’t think you’ve had enough time to make an enemy in prison.”
He shakes his head. “It was a message.”
I nod, knowing this already. This is Sly’s doing. “If you don’t mind, we don’t have much time.” I set the folder on the table between us and open it. I watch him drag his gaze from my face down to that folder, and I see the blood drain from his skin.
It takes him a minute, and when he reaches out, it’s with a tentative hand as if touching the contents I set before him might burn him. They’re copies. The originals are safe. I watch what he does, as he moves the papers around, and, as I suspected, he stops when he reaches the handwritten letter from Claire. Her suicide note.
“Where did you get this?” he asks, looking up at me.
“Your house.”
He’s confused. “The house burnt down.”
I watch him because I’m wondering something. Try as I might, I cannot come up with any motivation for the Foxes to have burnt down the Hart house. I just can’t put it together.
“I got to it before the fire.” He stares up at me like he’s trying to put the pieces together just as I am. “I remembered delivering that envelope Sly had me bring over years ago. Remember how you were crouched over something in the floorboards when Ophelia opened the door, surprising you. On a hunch, I went over to see if whatever you were hiding was still there. It was.”
“These are copies.”
“Originals are safely hidden.”
“Has Ophelia seen—"
“No. It’s why I’m here in the middle of the night. And like I said, we don’t have much time.”
“You bribed the guards.”
“I did. Time to come clean. Because I’m not sure how much you know about what’s happened since my last visit, but Fox has tracked down Carlisle-Bent, and I need to know what the hell I’m dealing with.”
“Oh, God. No.” His face that had gone white earlier now takes on a gray hue. His shoulders slump and he pushes his hands into his hair. “No. Jesus, no.”
“Horatio. We do not have time for you to fall apart, so get your shit together and tell me what the fuck is going on. Because they’re going to drag me out of here in handcuffs in about five minutes.”
He looks up at me. “Why?”
“There’s security footage of me walking out of your house the night it burnt down. They think I set that fire. Ophelia thinks it. Thought it.” I think she knows it wasn’t me. Deep in her heart, she must.
“What? But…” he trails off, draws a deep breath in. “Ah, shit.”
“Talk. Now.”
“You can’t let her see this,” he tells me. “Any of it.”
“Yeah, well, both Gordon and Chandler Carlisle-Bent are in town. Sly picked up Gordon, and I’m sure he’s looking forward to meeting his granddaughter. Chandler, the uncle, I don’t know jack shit about him but given the fact that he’s estranged and cut off, I can’t imagine he means well for O. So what the fuck is going on?”
“You need to keep her away from them. Both of them.”
“Why?”
“Just do it, Silas. If you have any feelings for her at all, and I think you do, just fucking do it no matter the cost.”
“The old man is dying.”
“Keep her away from them!”
The cop at the door peeks his head in.
“It’s fine,” I say. The officer taps his watch and closes the door. “Tell me what the fuck this is all about. Tell me so that I know what I’m dealing with. I can’t keep Ophelia safe unless I know, and I do want to keep her safe.”
He digs through to pick up one of the newspaper articles, the Daughter of Oil Tycoon Kidnapped one.
“It’s not true. She wanted to be gone. She needed to be gone.” He pushes a hand through his hair. “I loved her. I’d have done anything for her, but I didn’t know. I just… She never…”
He takes a deep breath in and wipes his eyes. I sit there and watch a grown man cry. A man who didn’t show the slightest emotion when sentenced to ten years in prison is now sobbing before me.
“Horatio,” I put a hand on his arm. “We don’t have time.”
He nods. “Ophelia can’t know about her mother’s suicide. She has to think it was accidental. She can’t ever find out, understand? It will kill her.”
He looks through the paperwork, realizing something, and picks up the medical report with the blood types. He glances at me.
“I know.”
He looks stupefied for a minute.
“I know you can’t be her biological father, Horatio.”
“Oh, Jesus. Fuck. Jesus fucking Christ! It was supposed to burn. It was all supposed to fucking burn.”