Page 56

FIFTY-SIX

Two Weeks Later

BANE

The phone rings again and again. I ignore it.

It’s only Rotterdam, my father’s lawyer. I’ve been ignoring his calls and texts all week, just like I’ve been ignoring the letter that landed in my mailbox last week from my father. He’s the last fucking person I want to deal with right now. The man doesn’t understand the concept of going no contact.

So I continue to stonewall him. If you give an inch, he’ll take a mile. He’ll take a hundred miles. And try to drag me back into his orbit, where love is a transaction. No, thank you.

I block Rotterdam’s number. He keeps calling from different ones within the firm, and I keep blocking them as soon as they come in.

I’m trying to focus on this week’s sermon, and the constant interruptions are a fucking annoyance. My modus operandi for the past two weeks has been to bury myself in work. I’ve spent more days doing prison visits and checked back with Silas. Took communion to parish members who were too elderly and ill to make it into service and let them chat my ear off all afternoon.

Anything to fill the time so the clawing chasm of grief at her absence is numbed. Besides my self-destructive vices, that is. Which I’ve avoided every day except last Sunday after service when I gave in and drank an entire bottle of Glenlivet Twenty-five and spent the night violently vomiting and regretting my entire life.

Since then, it’s been strictly a course of filling my time with work and avoiding being alone. Except for the endless nights that I can’t escape. When I’m lucky, I manage a few hours of restless sleep, tossing and turning as my subconscious tortures me with memories of her in my arms—her happy laughter, her kinky quirks, her fingers in my hair, nails digging into my scalp?—

I slam my pen down on the desk, about to go for a punishing jog, the other activity I’ve taken up to fill any hours not consumed by work. But my phone buzzes again—another text from an unknown number. I pick it up, ready to stab the block button.

My eyes dance across the quick four-word message.

Unknown: Your father is dying.

That stops me in my tracks and has me sitting back down heavily in my chair.

Dying? Mad Blackwood?

A strange sensation bites at my ribs, something tangled and messy I can’t name. The old man was always larger than life, a force of nature in a bespoke suit. He can’t just die. He wouldn’t.

I glare down at the phone. Is this just a ploy? I wouldn’t put it past my father to demand my attention with a lie.

After a sharp exhale, I punch my finger against the number to call it.

Rotterdam immediately picks up.

“Bane! Thank God you finally picked up.”

“Is it true?” I bark. “Is the old bastard actually dying?”

“Yes,” comes the immediate response. “That’s why we’ve been trying to reach you. He wants to see you. He doesn’t have much time left.” He’s speaking rapidly as if to get the main points across quickly in case I hang up on him.

I’m still trying to process the concept of my father, a bull of a man his entire life, being sick , much less dying.

“What the fuck happened? He’s only sixty-three, and God knows he can afford the best doctors money can provide.”

“It’s a hell of a thing,” Rotterdam sighs, sounding exhausted. Considering how much my father leans on him, I can only imagine. My father is notoriously cruel to anyone he considers an underling, but Rotterdam has stayed longer than any of the others. I know it’s only for the money, not out of any love for my father.

He gives me the name of the disease, and I only register that it’s something other than cancer. I scribble it down haphazardly. “The doctor only gave him a few months to live.”

My hand clenches on the phone. A few months ?

I swallow hard, my jaw tightening. I hate the man, but hating him has given me structure and defined a large portion of my life. And now he’s just going to die? Just slip away, without giving me a proper target to throw my rage at?

My breathing gets shorter.

“Where is he? What hospital?”

I open my laptop and start pulling up airlines to get a ticket back to London.

“He’s there. In America.”

I pause, frozen. “Here?”

“They were trying some experimental treatments. He participated in a clinical trial at a research hospital in London, and now he’s in San Francisco. But between you and me, he’s desperate, and nothing is working to stop or slow the progression of the disease.”

I pause. “Is it hereditary?”

“No. Their best guess is that he got it either from something he ate or from a contaminated implement during one of the experimental cosmetic surgeries he’s gotten during one of his trips abroad during the last six months.”

I shake my head. The old man was always so goddamn vain.

Fuck. This is so much information all at once.

“I’ll get on a plane to San Francisco.”

Rotterdam sighs in relief. “That would be great. The disease affects his cognitive function. You’re all he can talk about. But he’s starting to lose it.”

I swallow hard and nod—not that Rotterdam can see it.

“Got it.”

I get the rest of the details and hang up. Then sit there long after the phone call, even though I know I need to be making arrangements. At least I’ve been practicing grief lately, though I don’t know if grief is exactly what I’ll be feeling after my father passes.

Maybe it will feel more like relief.

Maybe I’ll feel sad.

Maybe I’ll feel nothing at all.

I can’t name the emotions I’m feeling right now. There’s just a lead weight in my chest and a clench in my belly, wishing Moira was here, wishing I could hold her and bury my head against her stomach—her fingers in my hair, her whisper in my ear, telling me that everything was going to be okay.

By nightfall, I’m landing in SFO and catching an Uber to the hospital. I’m exhausted after two weeks of barely getting any sleep. My body is running on fumes. This feels like a dream. Or a nightmare.

I’m still not sure this isn’t all just a hoax—another manipulation to get me where he wants me.

He’s done worse. Far worse. To his employees. To his wives. To his children. I’ve seen firsthand the wreckage he leaves behind. He grinds people to dust beneath his polished shoes. If it were any other situation than him dying, I’d be far more wary. His gaze has landed on me once more, and when Mad Blackwood sets his sights on someone, it never ends well.

It’s chillier than I expected. A damp, coastal cold that seeps through my clothes and my skin and settles in my bones. I shove my hands into the pockets of my jacket as I walk through the endless, gleaming-white hallways of the premier hospital wing where my father, no doubt, spared no expense to be housed.

Money can buy a lot of things. But it can’t buy time.

Or redemption.

“Bane!” Rotterdam sits in a chair outside the room, his laptop perched precariously on his knees. He looks up at my approach, and a wave of relief washes over his exhausted face. He slaps the laptop closed and tucks it under his arm as he stands to shake my hand.

“You don’t know how glad I am to see you.”

I eye him warily, giving only a grunt. “Is he awake?” I look toward the door.

Because of the time difference between Texas and California, it’s only seven at night, but I have no idea what I’m about to walk into.

Rotterdam nods. “He told me to send you in as soon as you got here. When I checked on him a half hour ago, he was very eager to see you.”

I nod. No point in avoiding the inevitable.

I knock on the door once and then push inside.

I freeze.

Holy shit.

Rotterdam wasn’t lying.

My father looks… already half-dead. His skin is parchment-thin, stretched too tight over sharp bones, veins dark and bulging beneath the surface like cracks in marble. His once-imposing frame has collapsed in on itself, his body devoured by this disease until all that remains is a ghost of the man who once ruled with an iron fist.

I’ve seen death before. Up close. I’ve prayed over men whose bodies were already cooling and given last rites to people who had nothing left but regret and time slipping through their fingers.

But nothing prepared me for this.

Nothing prepared me for seeing the monster diminished.

“Well? What are you doing just standing out there glaring at me from the doorway?” he barks, his voice low and rough, but the weakness is there. The frayed edges of it. The decay.

I realize I’m being rude, gaping at him like this. I force myself to step across the room, closer to his bed.

I’m supposed to be playing the role of dutiful son. But it’s a role I’ve never played before.

A good son—someone who has taken an oath to serve others—should bow their head and offer grace, even to a vile man in his last hours.

I’ve spoken to criminals with life sentences, offering them counsel and a listening ear.

But my father?

Why, God?

Why one test after another of my faith?

First, you took Moira. And now you ask me to forgive this man?

My fists clench at my sides. I swallow hard, still unable to look him in the eyes, my gaze landing somewhere in the landscape of his sunken chest.

He’s dying .

The words echo in my head, but they don’t feel real.

This is Mad Blackwood. The man who made himself king. The man who controlled every room he walked into and every person in his orbit. A man who bent the world to his will because he could.

And now he is frail. Mortal. Small .

For years, he was the shadow looming over me, and now…

Now he’s just another dying man.

I tell myself I should feel relief. I tell myself that this is justice.

But I don’t know what I feel.

I don’t know what I’m supposed to feel.

His tired eyes finally look my way again, the only acknowledgment that I’ve entered the room.

“Your mother was the only one of all those bitches who wasn’t grubbing after my money,” he says, voice rasping like dry leaves against the pavement. “That’s why I married her. That makes you the only one of my children who’s not a bastard. Which means”—he hacks out a rough cough—“you’re my only true heir.”

I close my eyes.

Of course.

Of course, even now, he can’t stop playing God.

“If this fucking thing gets me,” his fists clench weakly, and he slams them against the mattress in an exhausted fury, “it’ll be up to you to take on the mantle—to marry and produce sons who will continue the name. I’ve had Rotterdam compile a list of women from acceptable families who’ll produce good stock to continue our legacy.”

My stomach turns.

He didn’t want to see me for some last-gasp father-son reconciliation.

Of course not.

Even now, it’s about power.

Even now, it’s about control.

Even now, I am not his son. I’m an asset. A pawn. Just a thing to be wielded as an extension of himself, even after death.

The realization settles in me like lead.

I should have known better.

But somewhere, buried deep beneath all the fury, all the scars, all the years of distance—I wanted to believe.

Just for a moment, I wanted to believe.

And that’s the worst part of all.

“Would you like to pray, Father?” I ask, voice hollow.

He sneers, his lips twisting. “Did you listen to a thing I just said? I’m giving you instructions, boy. Listen!”

I nod once. “I heard you. But you’re also in this bed, and it might be one of the last times you and I ever speak.”

His glazed gaze sharpens for just a moment. “I’ll see you married and bedded to one of the women I’ve chosen for you before I leave this damned earth.”

I shake my head slowly, exhaling. “You? How are you going to manage that from this bed?”

He tries to lift himself onto his elbows but falls back from weakness. Still, his eyes are ice cold.

“I have my means. I’m not dead yet. I’m the most powerful man in the world.”

I let out a slow breath, forcing down the rage crawling up my throat. He’s always been like this. Clutching at control like it’s the only thing keeping him alive. Maybe it is.

“You’ll have to get an annulment from that little slut you ran to Vegas with, of course,” he sneers. “But that’s mostly taken care of. I’m the most powerful man in the world,” he repeats, full of impotent rage. “Don’t you know who I am?”

My breath stills in my chest. Because my attention is still frozen on the first part of his maniacal little rant.

“What do you know about Moira?”

I stand, towering over the deranged old man with his lingering delusions of power.

And then I remember the fear and confusion in Moira’s eyes as she left me that day. The way her hands trembled when she packed her bags. The way she wouldn’t—couldn’t—look me in the eye. And the fact that this fucker already tried to pay her off once to leave me.

Realization crashes into me, painful as needles spiking into my skin all over my body. Why haven’t I kept my eyes on him? I should have known he wouldn’t stop. I just saw no reason for him to press the issue. I didn’t realize that suddenly there was a deadline.

It’s all so clear now.

She didn’t want to leave me.

She had to.

Because of him.

Something inside me breaks. A tether snapping loose, untamed rage surging up like a tidal wave. My hands are on him before I can stop myself, shaking his frail body like I can rattle the truth out of him.

“What the fuck did you do?”

His eyes shift slightly sideways, unfocused. And then he starts moaning.

“Sarah… Sarah, I didn’t mean it… You were my best bitch. Sarah, come back… Don’t leave me alone… You’re the only one who ever loved me… Sarah, listen…”

His arm reaches out to the side, grasping at nothing. At the phantom of my mother. As if she’d waste her afterlife haunting him.

My stomach twists. He isn’t here anymore. Not really. He’s back in whatever hell he crawled out of. But he can relive his past sins and cling to the ghosts of the women he broke another time.

“Hey!” I cry, shaking him again. “Don’t fade on me now, you fucker. What did you do to Moira?”

He finally looks back at me, his eyes widening in confusion.

“Who are you?” he asks.

Something dark and rotten unfurls inside me.

This is the first time in my entire life my father has ever looked at me and not seen a piece of himself. His possession. His legacy. His puppet. He sees nothing. And somehow, it’s so satisfying even as it cuts deeper than anything he’s ever done.

He starts flailing, reaching for the call button.

“Help! I’m being attacked! Who let this man in here? I should have the best security! Do you know who I am? I’m the richest man in the world! I’ll get all of you fired!”

I step back, staring at the crumbling ruin of the man who spent his entire life trying to play God.

Frightened. Frail.

I did some research on the disease on my way here. Cognitive decline—rapid, unforgiving—often happens when the disease is acquired externally, the way my father did.

But the bastard stayed lucid just long enough to destroy the only thing that ever mattered to me. Just long enough to make sure I’d suffer.

I step forward again, leaning down until I can whisper right in his ear.

“I hope you die a slow, painful death. Terrified and alone, like the little boy you made me my entire life, you sick fuck.”

His breath hitches.

His lips tremble.

And then I turn my back on him while he continues to shout pathetically, his voice already cracking apart under the weight of his own decay.