Page 40 of Blackwicket (Dark Hall #1)

The ride to Blackwicket House was mercifully silent, and I spent it trying to determine how deep the pain had rooted.

My father had always been the absent kind, and my dependence on him had eventually become nonexistent.

When I’d told him I never wanted to see him again, I’d meant it.

Yet now I was forced to face the uncomfortable fact that while Darren was alive, I’d been able to pretend someone out there cared about me, at least a little. Not in the right way, but in some way.

I was aware of Inspector Harrow next to me. When we’d last sat here, he’d pulled my magic free and swallowed a piece of it whole. It felt like a lifetime ago, a thousand years between that moment and this one. I couldn’t look at him.

I didn’t wait for him to open my door when we arrived, exiting right away, still wrapped in his suit jacket. Blackwicket House welcomed us both, the state of me sending a buzz through the foundation. For a fraction of a moment, I wasn’t completely lost. The house needed me.

“I’ll check around,” Inspector Harrow said, closing the door behind us. The lock clicked on its own, giving him pause. I awaited a reaction, but he chose to say nothing.

“No. You have questions, and I want to answer them.” I removed the jacket from my shoulders and handed it back to him .

He took it, his regard trailing from the sleeves of my blouse to my neck and cheek. All the places where blood remained, drying.

“You should clean up,” he said.

“We talk now. I don’t want this conversation hanging over my head. I’ll never sleep.”

To indicate my will, I rooted myself to the spot, my insides trembling with resurfacing emotion.

“Very well.” Inspector Harrow donned his jacket, abandoning his attempts at feigning care. “Did you murder Darren Rose?”

“I didn’t,” I replied, in the same stiff tone I’d used the first time he’d asked me if I’d killed Brock Moftan. Only now, I wasn’t lying.

“But you fought with him before he died.” It wasn’t a question. He was already aware of what others had heard.

“Yes.”

“About?”

“Are you honestly here to bring the Brom to justice, Inspector?” I threw off the balance by asking my own question, a prerequisite to my answer. If I were going to divulge everything, I wanted some assurance it wouldn’t be brushed aside.

“Justice.” He repeated the word with some curiosity, as though he’d never felt the shape of it in his mouth, “There’s no justice for what the Brom are doing. What they’ve done. There’s only retribution, and yes, that’s what keeps me in this godforsaken town.”

Retribution was enough of a promise to encourage my decision to give to the monster that would bring down William, the Brom, even if it meant feeding it my hand, perhaps much more besides.

“William Nightglass paid a visit to me this afternoon.” Inspector Harrow became perfectly still. “He came under the pretense of saying goodbye to Fiona but stayed to threaten me and promise me the world.”

I briefly detailed the fraught exchange, excluding his leering to save myself the shame.

“William paid my father to entice me to Nightglass,” I said, when I’d finished the whole terrible, foolish tale. “That’s why we were arguing. He said he’d done it for my well-being. Apparently, I was never good at hiding from anyone but myself.”

The Inspector was silent, studying the parquet tiles as he absorbed the information, filing it away in whatever perfect system he kept in his mind for tracking the wrongdoings of the Brom.

When his gaze found mine, as cold as it had ever been during interrogations past, he asked, “Was Darren really your father?”

My breath collapsed from my lungs. I couldn’t take offense. I knew why he was asking.

“He was.”

“You sound more sure than most people would be.”

“Fiona and I aren’t Dark Hall children, if that’s what you want to know, Inspector.” This was the moment I chose which secrets weren’t worth the cost of keeping. “My mother was the last Dark Hall child the Blackwickets procured.”

“Are you certain?” he asked pointedly.

I resisted the memory of Thomas’s face, weeping with the red smoke of curses as he died.

“Yes.”

Thomas hadn’t belonged to our family. He’d been a Nightglass. “My mother wanted to break tradition, and couldn’t stand the idea of stealing children, but she believed it was important to carry on the family legacy, so she chose Darren.”

“You make it seem like a transaction. ”

“It might as well have been. I can’t imagine what she saw in him other than an opportunity.”

“You assume she wasn’t in love with him.”

“It doesn’t matter,” I answered, bitter.

The same anger that took me to Darren’s hotel room door clawed through the shock of his loss and reminded me of the pain he’d brought to my life before finally leaving it.

“Maybe she was. She was always so glad when he showed, and her heart broke each time he left. The truth is, he couldn’t handle being here. ”

“This is a difficult house.”

Inspector Harrow’s words were too close to excusing a man who’d been given every opportunity to choose us and never had.

“We were his daughters ,” I said, and the word was broken glass, shattered by the hurling of a stone Darren Rose had thrown again and again.

The force of my anger propelled me a step closer, and the Inspector squared his shoulders, standing his full height, prepared to respond if I chose violence.

“I loved my father until I hated him. He wasn’t a good man, and nothing he ever did, no small amount of decency, ever made up for it. But I didn’t want him dead.”

“Then who would have?”

“The easier question is, who wouldn’t have?

He swindled and hurt a lot of people.” My train of thought stuttered, skipped.

I considered Mr. Thatcher, William’s insistence that he’d had nothing to do with it, Thea’s assurance Patrick hated the Nightglass family and everyone involved with them.

“That man you nearly murdered in the alley.”

“Patrick Farvem,” he said, not denying it.

“Yes.”

“Patrick was found dead this morning on the village green. I was at the scene when I got word about the murder at the Vanderson. ”

My palms grew clammy. Patrick had been in bad shape when I’d left the lounge. “Did you…”

“Like your father, Patrick’s throat had been cut clean.

” His response was measured, but with no gentler an edge than usual.

Inspector Harrow knew the sort of world I’d lived in, knew there was no use in softening the blows.

“Rough business. And here’s the thing—your father worked for the Brom.

Thatcher and Patrick didn’t. Thatcher was a regular Nightglass resident doing his best to get by, and to my knowledge, Patrick Farvem was a thorn in Brom’s side.

None of these men had anything in common, but you, Eleanora. ”

Mr. Thatcher hadn’t let me leave Nightglass, Patrick had tried to stab me, and my father, well, his list was too long.

“You’re insinuating I’m a serial killer?”

“It’s a coherent line of reasoning. But knowing what I do, I don’t see you being so direct. It’s not your style.”

He’d circled to the thing that had brought our paths together, still lock-jawed on proving he was right, and I’d slipped through the cracks of the system. His system.

“Is it yours?” I asked, stooping to his level.

“If I’m not mistaken,” he replied, low, conspiratorial. “You’ve already witnessed mine.”

He was discussing Annulment, the way he’d been separating Patrick’s magic from his soul.

But it wasn’t that image that flickered in my mind, briefly illuminating unwanted memories.

Instead, it was Inspector Harrow’s body, the warmth of his mouth.

These thoughts were disgraceful after everything that had happened, and my anger grew in the fertile soil of shame.

I reminded myself that the Inspector’s behavior hadn’t been sincere.

He’d intended it as a smokescreen. Still, my belly warmed, and a shift in his body language brought him a bare fraction closer to me.

I wouldn’t have noticed had my magic not expanded, gathering beneath my breasts, pressing .

“Whatever’s going on, it has something to do with William Nightglass.

” I managed the moment by changing direction.

“He wants me for the Brom. That puts me in a special position to figure out what his endgame is, whether he’s behind all of this.

I’m willing to do it if you’ll tell me what you’re looking for, what you’re trying to find. ”

Inspector Harrow’s lips twitched, but the smile was more mocking than amused. “He does want you. So you’re saying you’d be happy to waltz into his arms and use your charms to get me answers?”

“I’m saying,” I replied sharply, “I’m involved in this as much as anyone, and I want to help you if you’d stop being so egotistical.”

“No offense meant, Ms. Blackwicket, but I don’t trust you.” He tilted his head, falsely apologetic. “I’m sure you understand.”

His dismissal of my help, when it had cost me to offer it, was the ultimate affront.

“Don’t trust me? I’m gambling my life on the longshot bet that you’re not just hanging around to shed blood and lap up feeble magic like the rest of the dogs.”

“Careful.”

“You’re the one who should be careful.”

My magic was riled, begging to be released following so much turmoil, so many moments of fear and anger.

It was trapped, churning into darkness that threatened to solidify.

Already, the edges were turning tarry. This is what my family had been forced to endure: a thousand injustices and wounds coiling and tightening like a noose.

“What are you going to do, little Curse Eater?” Inspector Harrow intoned, sensing the rise of my power, his own responding, hungry, vampiric. “What terrible mistake are you about to make? ”

After witnessing his behavior at the Vapors, I understood why his magic pulled at mine, and I wanted to use it to my advantage, to prove to him I had bite.