Page 44 of To Heist and to Hold

Yet Ethan had not been able to let it go. No matter what Gavin might have done, he had still been Ethan’s brother, and Ethan had never lost his love for him even through the years of hurt.

He stopped at the door and closed his eyes, taking a steadying breath before, turning the key in the lock, he opened it wide.

He had not been back here since his brother’s death three years before, unable to set foot within these walls that Gavin had called home.

Yet he had made certain to pay not only the rent but also for the meticulous upkeep of the place.

Every week someone came and dusted and swept and made certain the rooms were aired.

At first it had seemed a better solution than covering the furniture in shrouds.

It would have felt like burying his brother all over again.

He saw now, however, what a mistake that had been.

Everything was just as Gavin had left it, from the chair pulled out from the table to the book lying haphazardly on the sofa cushion to the quill on the desk, dried ink still coating the nib.

He went there now, picked up that quill, gripped it tight in his hand, as if he could still feel the warmth of his brother’s touch through it.

Leaving this room as a kind of shrine might have lessened Ethan’s grief at the time—or, at least, not added to it.

But it had also prevented him from truly laying his brother to rest in his heart.

Standing here like this, surrounded by things that still held Gavin’s energy within them, he felt that at any moment his brother would step into the room with his crooked smile and hearty laugh.

Just thinking of that now made his heart seize.

He dropped the pen to the desk and rubbed at his chest, willing the ache to go away.

But it did not, instead spreading until it filled every inch of him.

Gavin would not be coming back, he told himself brutally.

It was something he should have come to terms with by now.

Ignoring everything that had to do with his brother, however, rejecting his pain, had only made things harder in the present.

His head swam, his vision clouding and his throat closing.

He swayed, reaching out to steady himself, leaning heavily on the desk as he did so.

Emotions bombarded him, those damned feelings he had buried since learning of Gavin’s betrayal and death soon after, when his world, that world he had so carefully built, had come crashing down about his head.

It had been a mistake to come here, a mistake to face this most agonizing part of his life.

And all because Heloise had opened his heart up, that traitorous organ that should have remained closed but was now left exposed.

He had to get out of here, had to find a way to close himself off again before he was completely destroyed by it.

But as he turned to go, ready to stumble his way from this place and never, ever return, the front door swung wide, and Gavin himself stood in the entrance.

He stared in disbelief, his mind unable to wrap itself around what he was seeing as he was transported three years into the past. Until Gavin moved, stepping over the threshold, and Ethan’s fevered mind finally recognized the difference in movement, the slight dissimilarity in features, the bulkier build.

And then the figure spoke, the deeper tone shocking Ethan back to the present.

“Ethan, what the hell are you doing here?”

“Isaac,” he breathed. His body gave out and he lurched sideways, his hip crashing into the desk.

Isaac was at his side in an instant, arm about him as he steadied him. “Are you well? What happened?”

Ethan was tempted to lean into his brother, to garner some strength from his last remaining family, this man who had been the scared, wide-eyed boy he’d raised after their father’s abandonment and their mother’s death.

His senses, however, were coming back to him, that familiar armor that had protected him for so long. So what if there were dents and kinks in it, if one well-placed arrow could find its way past his defenses? Right now, in this moment, it gave him the protection he needed.

“I’m well,” he replied gruffly, pulling away from Isaac, taking a step to put some distance between them. His brother stood frozen, arms extended in the air like a marionette’s before he let them drop heavily to his sides.

“I did not expect to see you here,” he said, voice quiet. “You have not been back since… well, since.”

“No, I have not.” Ethan narrowed his eyes, a sudden realization dawning. “But what are you doing here?”

Isaac shrugged. “I come from time to time, to figure things out.” His lips twisted. “Though maybe it hasn’t been as healthy for me as I believed it to be.”

“None of this is healthy,” Ethan muttered, looking about the place, heart heavy. He let loose a harsh breath. “It’s time to let it go.”

Isaac gave him a sharp glance. “You will get rid of the apartment?”

“It’s the best solution, don’t you think?”

“I do,” Isaac replied slowly, carefully, his eyes wary as he considered Ethan. As if he feared one wrong word would act like a grenade thrown into the tentative calm that was between them. “But why after all this time?”

Why indeed. Heloise’s face swam up in his mind, the gentle compassion in her eyes that told of understanding and commiseration.

No , he told himself fiercely, she has been playing me all along.

Everything about her has been false, including those feigned emotions.

No matter how harshly he berated himself, however, he could not force himself to believe that those moments of their affair had been faked.

But Isaac was waiting for an answer. An answer Ethan was not ready to admit to his brother, much less himself. Clearing his throat, he tugged at his jacket sleeves. “I’d best be going,” he muttered. “I’ll leave you to close up, then.”

Before he reached the door, however, Isaac’s voice stopped him. “Aren’t you going to ask me what things I try to figure out when I come here?”

Ethan turned his head and regarded his brother cautiously. “I daresay it’s none of my business. You’re a grown man; you can do as you like.”

“But it is every bit your business,” Isaac replied softly.

Was it? And even if it was, did he have any right to hear it after the way he’d pushed Isaac aside these past years? He very nearly shrugged him off and left, the comfort of solitude like a beacon.

Until a small voice in his head, Heloise’s voice, urged him to wait, just a moment.

And that small moment was all it took to shift his mind entirely.

As he continued to look upon his brother’s familiar features, the echo of Gavin in them, he saw it: the tightness about his eyes; the faint trembling of his lips before he pressed them tight together; the clenching of his hands into fists that told of great stress, a stress that Isaac was attempting to hide with a mild expression and easy tone.

Ethan saw how he’d left his brother to deal with his grief alone while he’d shut himself off from the world, and how his brother had attempted to mask that grief to protect Ethan.

As he was still doing. That door Heloise had opened in his heart opened even further and he knew, no matter how loud that creature of self-preservation was within him, he could no longer turn his back on Isaac.

“Tell me,” he said, voice gruff as he turned to fully face him. “Tell me why you come here.”

Isaac’s eyes flared wide, his lips parting. Then, as if he feared Ethan would take advantage of the lull in conversation to turn and bolt from the room—he was tempted to, God knew he was—he quickly gathered himself and began.

“I keep thinking over that last day with Gavin, when we learned he was the one responsible for the cheating at the club.”

A memory washed over Ethan at those words, a vivid recollection of the moment they had discovered that Gavin was the viper in their midst, the way his stomach had dropped when they had discovered the missing funds in his brother’s desk, his world falling apart in an instant.

Isaac, in his youthful fury, had rushed to Gavin, to confront him.

And it had been as Gavin had hurried back to Dionysus that he had made a fatal misstep, had careened into the path of a speeding carriage and been thrown from his horse and died before Ethan could beg him for a reason why he had done what he had.

“Yes,” Ethan said through numb lips. “I recall it well.”

Silence filled the room, heavy and bleak, nearly suffocating him as the horror of that day seemed to manifest between them. And then Isaac spoke, his voice reed thin.

“If I had not come here in the heat of the moment, if I had been able to control my anger, Gavin would not now be dead.”

Ethan’s head snapped back in shock. “You cannot have been blaming yourself for his death all this time?” But he saw with painful clarity that Isaac had been. Dear God, his brother had been dealing with guilt on top of his grief? He had not even considered the extra burden Isaac must have carried.

He took a step forward, laid a hand on his brother’s shoulder. “You are not to blame,” he said hoarsely. “It was an accident and nothing more.”

“Perhaps,” was all Isaac said. But that one word was enough to reveal that Isaac didn’t believe it one bit.

“Be that as it may,” he continued, in an obvious effort to steer the conversation to safer waters, or at least the tumultuous waters he was familiar with, “I keep mulling over that last conversation I had with him. I was angry, and distraught, and so was he. Yet there has been something bothering me about it these three years, something that keeps me awake at night and sits like a vulture on my shoulder during my waking hours.” He paused.

“And lately I believe I’ve come to understand what that thing might be. ”