Page 54

CHAPTER 54

With the speed of a fullback, Nate got to his feet. “No, Mother! I told you no! Don’t do this!”

Dante’s fingers spontaneously compressed Maarja’s.

“Fuck me a-running.” Behind them, Connor sounded shocked.

How amazing the human brain could be. Maarja faced the round black hole of a rifle pointed at her chest. She absorbed a revelation she’d never imagined. She heard gasps, then the clatter of folding chairs as everyone on the Arundel side flung themselves to the ground, and, a few moments later, everyone on the bride’s side (her side) realized the implications and followed suit.

She observed that the members of Saint Rees’s team remained on their feet, and they began to move in a prearranged pattern to remove Fedelma.

Yet in a split second, her mind ran through the possibilities and certainties.

Four sons: Dante, Nate, Connor, Jack.

Three mothers: Raine, Béatrice, Fedelma.

One father: Brat Benoit Arundel.

When Benoit decided he would wed a woman to produce an heir, he’d first chosen to take a woman who could carry a boy who could be trained to be his heir’s bodyguard. He wanted someone who could be as ruthless and determined to advance the Arundel name as he was, as he would train his heir to be. What followed was logical to him. The son to protect his heir would carry cruel Arundel genes from both parents.

He’d forced himself on his cousin Béatrice. She had been a young innocent woman. She’d collapsed, mentally unable to deal with his uncaring rape. For that, he scorned her and the son he’d conceived with her.

That was Jack. He was warped. He was dead. Scrub him off the face of the earth.

Benoit hadn’t given up. After Béatrice’s collapse and even before Jack was born, he turned to his cousin Fedelma. Or she offered herself to him. Because here she was, and Nate was born. Benoit took the boy away to train him, then used Fedelma to make Connor.

After his failure with Jack, Benoit was hedging his bets, making sons rapidly on a woman who was unbalanced, ambitious, and unhealed from the first birth.

Who cared? He didn’t.

Within months and weeks, Raine had given birth to Dante, the legitimate Arundel heir.

Then the glitch in Benoit’s scheme was exposed.

Fedelma, as ambitious and as merciless as Benoit, had no intention of allowing either of her sons to be nothing more than a bodyguard and companion for Dante. She was an Arundel. She had been given to another man, a member of the organization. She wanted the top man. She wanted Benoit, and she had aspirations.

Like Dante, like Connor, Maarja had assumed Nate’s mother to be an unknown, lost in time, disposed of or perhaps a runaway. But no. Nate’s mother was here, now, at Maarja’s wedding, and like the Arundels of the past ages, she was willing to kill. She wanted to kill.

Fedelma took a tall step out of the pit and onto the level ground. She swept the rifle around, and the members of Saint Rees’s team halted where they stood. “Dante, call them off,” she commanded. “No lackey is going to sabotage me.”

“Leave her alone.” Dante spoke to Saint Rees. “This is a family matter.”

Saint Rees gestured.

His team backed away.

“I’m glad you see it that way, boy .” Fedelma gladly pointed her rifle at Nate. She hated him, her son. She hated everyone here. Her eyes, so much like Dante’s, glowed gold with a fanatical zeal. She wanted, she intended, to end this day in blood. “Ungrateful son. Always you deny your duty to me! I should shoot you where you stand.”

Nate stood with his feet planted on the lawn, “You already knocked me out and kicked me with such joy I suffer and the doctors fear for me. Why stop at shooting?”

“When I kicked you, I disciplined you as I should have done more, and sooner. You. And him.” She flicked a hand and a glance of scorn at Connor and Owen as they moved swiftly to take Octavia and Alex off to the side, away from the line of fire. “My sons. The sons of the great Benoit Arundel. Like the Arundels of the past, your father was the god of death, fear, and cruelty. Neither of you are worthy of the blood that flows in your veins. Only Jack. Only he had the ambitions and the wiliness to take the place as the leader of this generation, and he wasn’t even the son of my loins.”

Dante spoke right to her. “You should consider that you’re the weak link.”

“I am. I know it.” She smiled, and the effect was horrible. Her broken teeth, her bloody mouth, the flakes of dirt drying on her skin. The jump through the window glass and the landing on the ground had been obviously painful and devastating, and hiding in the pit gave her the appearance of an oozing monster. “All these years of scheming, for nothing. It ends today. I die today.” For one moment her rifle swung wildly.

Screams erupted from the gathering. A scattering of people panicked and ran for the house.

Fedelma ignored them and pointed her rifle at Maarja. “But I won’t kill an Arundel. I won’t slaughter my own blood. I’ll kill her and stop this marital abomination.”

Maarja spoke right to the atrocity the Arundel heritage had created. “You can’t kill me. I carry the Arundel heir.”

The gasp from the assemblage almost lifted the orange blossoms from Maarja’s head.

Dante gripped her hand and, as if Fedelma wasn’t there and pointing a rifle at them, looked Maarja full in the face. “Truly?”

“Yes.” She brought the peed-on and washed stick out of her skirt pocket and waved it. She nodded at the same time, as if she needed all the ways to assure him. “I don’t know how it works, I’ll have to look it up, because I really did have a period. It was weird, bleeding and wild emotions.”

He took the stick from her and stared at it as if a baby was some unexpected miracle when in fact, all along he’d been insisting on its existence.

Maybe he wasn’t as certain and as powerful as he proclaimed.

She’d knocked him for a loop.

And she was nuts for being thrilled at a moment like this.

“Hey!” Fedelma yelled, wild, impatient, unable to believe the all-important Dante Arundel could ignore her in her big moment. “I’m here and ready to kill…someone!”

From the wall, a full-throated woman’s voice said, “Then kill me, Fedelma.”

Maarja recognized that voice. She turned to see…Raine Arundel tossing her veiled hat aside and, leaning on her walker, stepping away from the wall to confront the woman who had served her for so many years. And deceived her for so many years.