Page 63

Fifty-Three

Anna seizes up at the sight of him. In the past year, not a day has gone by in which she didn’t think about everything Kenneth Wentworth took from her.

He’s haunted her nightmares—and her waking hours, too.

Now, standing right in front of her, is the man who instigated everything.

Nothing any of the others had done would have happened without him, the puppeteer pulling all the strings.

He’s the reason her brother is dead, along with thirty-six others, including Seamus’s brother and Reggie’s father.

He’s the person most responsible for framing her own father.

He’s the man whose horrific actions drove her mother to suicide.

Anna’s both fantasized about and feared this moment, wondering how she’d react.

Would she scream? Would she weep? Or would she simply kill him in a way that inflicted the most pain?

Right now, Anna feels capable of all three.

The sensation is overwhelming, all-encompassing, and, ultimately, crippling.

In the end, all she can do is stare into the eyes of Kenneth Wentworth so he can see how much he’s destroyed her life.

He stares back, as if expecting her to flinch.

She doesn’t.

“You know who I am,” she says.

It’s not a question.

“I do, Miss Matheson,” Wentworth replies with disconcerting calmness. “I also know why you’re here.”

Anna takes in his clothes, a surreal combination of white shirt and necktie worn beneath gray engineer’s overalls.

Despite driving a train all night, he retains a distinguished look accomplished only with lots of money.

His silver hair is neatly combed, his face enviably tan.

White teeth sparkle behind his Cary Grant smile.

“Where’s Burt Chapman?” Anna asks. “He’s supposed to be the engineer.”

“I fired him back in Philadelphia,” Wentworth says, his smile remaining even as his voice hardens.

“Did you really think I wouldn’t be aware of what’s going on with my own train?

Or that when someone pays my employees to skip work I wouldn’t be told about it?

Most of all, when I get invited to ride a train I own, did you not think I’d find out who sent it? ”

Anna had considered all of that when planning the trip with Seamus. She’d decided it was worth the risk.

“Why didn’t you stop the train earlier?” she says. “In fact, why did it leave at all?”

“Because it’s been a long time since I took the Phoenix out for a spin. It’s a hobby of mine, you know. I enjoy it very much. Also, I was curious to see where the journey took us. Care to enlighten me?”

Anna gets his meaning. He wants to know who’s dead. She’s not about to tell him.

“You thought I was going to kill them,” she says.

“I assumed you were entertaining the idea, yes.”

“Because you wanted me to kill them.”

Wentworth keeps smiling. “It certainly would have made things easier for me.”

“They’re about to get harder,” Anna says.

“Because there’s proof of what you’ve done.

It shows who did what and how all of it was your idea.

Don’t ask me how I got it, because I won’t ever tell you.

What I will say is that it’s now in the hands of the FBI.

They’re waiting for us in Chicago. And if this train is even five minutes late, I’m certain they’ll start looking for it. If they haven’t already.”

Anna thought it would feel good to say all that to Kenneth Wentworth. But what should be a moment of victory is undercut by rage, grief, exhaustion, and the knowledge that not everyone who wronged her will experience true justice.

Or maybe she doesn’t feel triumphant because Wentworth doesn’t look defeated. His smile never wavers, even as it flickers into outright bemusement.

“I always wondered what my son saw in you,” he says. “All those years ago, when he mistakenly thought he was in love with you. You take after your father in that regard. Utterly unimpressive.”

Anna touches the pin on her dress. Wentworth was wrong about her father. Just like he’s wrong about her.

“I know that’s why you did it,” she says. “I know it’s because you hated my father.”

“I didn’t hate him,” Wentworth says. “I just wanted what was rightfully mine.”

“You mean my mother.”

Anna touches the pin again, thinking of the real Margaret Matheson. The resplendent woman with the irrepressible sparkle that lit up every room.

“I know you were in love with her,” Anna says. “I don’t think you ever stopped loving her. Not even after she left you for my father.”

Wentworth’s smiling facade melts away, revealing something sadder and meaner underneath. “She didn’t leave. He took her.”

“He loved her,” Anna says, thinking about the way her father had looked at her mother. That beam of adoration. “And she loved him in return. Far more than she ever loved you. That’s why she chose him over you.”

“No, he stole her,” Wentworth seethes. “He stole the life I was supposed to have with her. The family I was supposed to have with her. The son that should have been mine.”

“Dante? He’s been yours the whole time.”

“I meant my other son,” Wentworth says.

Anna goes still with shock. She thinks about her parents’ whirlwind courtship, speedy marriage, early bundle of joy that should have caused a scandal.

It didn’t because Anna’s father was respected and her mother was beautiful and they were so happy together that it didn’t matter to people when their first child was born.

The only person who cared was that child’s real father.

“Tommy,” she says, unable to keep herself from searching Wentworth’s face for hints of her brother. They’re everywhere. The smile. The eyes. The easygoing grace.

Dante shares many of those traits, which is why Anna thought it was her brother she saw roaming the Phoenix. But it wasn’t Tommy she kept seeing.

It was his half brother.

“I guess you didn’t know everything after all,” Wentworth says.

Anna stares at him, shaking. From shock or anger, she has no idea. “How long did you know?”

“I had my suspicions. Maggie never told me she was pregnant, but the timing always struck me as odd. Your father pretended Tommy was his son, even though anyone could see, if they looked long enough, that he bore no resemblance to plain Arthur Matheson. I certainly noticed it the one and only time I was allowed to meet my son.”

Anna knows exactly when that was. Her family’s final Christmas party. The same one where she had met Dante. While the two of them bantered, fueled by undeniable attraction, Kenneth Wentworth was speaking to his other son for the very first time.

Pain presses against Anna’s temples. A headache brought on by both surprise and rage. Kenneth Wentworth took her brother from her once. She refuses to let him do the same to his memory.

“Tommy was the son of Arthur Matheson. Maybe not biologically, but in all the ways that matter. And he was my brother. I loved him, and you took him from me.”

“I loved him, too,” Wentworth says. “But I wasn’t allowed to act like he was mine. I wasn’t even allowed to speak to him. And when my son died, I wasn’t even allowed to mourn him.”

Anna recoils. An instinct she can’t control. Nor can she stop the tears that are forming. Angry ones so hot they sting her eyes. “You caused his death! You didn’t deserve to mourn him!”

“I didn’t know he’d be on that train,” Wentworth says, his own eyes now glistening. “And he shouldn’t have been. Your father should have kept him from going. He should have kept him out of the war entirely. But he didn’t and my son died and that’s why I had to kill him.”

“He was killed in prison.”

“Yes,” Wentworth says. “At my instruction. The family of the man who did it was rewarded handsomely.”

Anna recoils further as more boiling tears emerge.

Her father never got a chance to defend himself.

It didn’t matter that no one might have believed him but her and Aunt Retta.

He still would have had the opportunity to lay out his case, prove his innocence, be set free.

If that had happened, perhaps her mother’s grief could have been contained.

At least enough to preserve her sanity, to give her the will to keep living.

If all of that had happened, Anna might still have her parents.

But Kenneth Wentworth took them, too, and now she can only keep backing away, putting as much distance between them as possible.

Anna’s certain that if the gap closes by an inch, the urge to rip him apart with her bare hands will be too strong to resist.

But after two more backward steps, Anna collides with someone standing behind her.

Reggie.

She forgot he was there, listening, a witness to Kenneth Wentworth’s confession. Making no move to harm her, he says, “Still think they all deserve to live?”

Anna can no longer answer that. She honestly doesn’t know.

“This whole time, you’ve been spouting all these noble declarations about justice and honor and not sinking to their level,” Reggie says. “But I know you, Anna Matheson. Deep down, you’re just like me. You want something more satisfying than justice. You want revenge.”

Yes, Anna wants revenge. She’s always wanted it. But more than that, she wants her old life back. Twelve years ago, the existence she’d imagined for herself was snatched from her. She was like a derailed train, thrown off the tracks, broken apart.

Killing Kenneth Wentworth, she realizes, would be a way of putting herself back together and following the course she’d always planned. It won’t be completely the same. Her family is still gone, and nothing will change that. Anna will always carry their absence with her.

“Think about what they did,” Reggie says, still behind her, his voice a hiss slithering into her ear.

“To your family. To you. Think about Seamus. And his brother. And all those other innocent men who died. I guarantee, if they were in your position right now, none of them would hesitate. Not for a second. Not even Seamus. But you’re the one who’s suffered the most. Out of everyone, you deserve this. ”

He reaches around, offering the gun. Anna accepts it with hands so numb she can barely feel it.

“You want to kill him, don’t you?” Reggie says. “You’ve wanted to kill all of them all night. And you have every right to feel that way.”

Anna takes a faltering half step toward Kenneth Wentworth, who eyes the gun now in her hands. He looks scared, and it thrills her. At last, a feeling of triumph.

“Please don’t shoot,” he says. “Please, Anna.”

She aims the gun squarely at his heaving chest. Her index finger trembles against the trigger.

“Admit what you did,” she says. “Admit that you destroyed my family.”

Wentworth’s mouth drops open, but no words come out. In that fraught silence, Anna steps closer, her aim never wavering.

“Admit it!”

“I did it,” Wentworth says.

Anna takes another step. Point-blank range.

“Did what?” she says.

“Destroyed your family.” Wentworth gulps after he says it, as if he’s trying to take the words back. But then, he pushes out more. “I destroyed so many families. And I forced others to do it, too.”

“How does that make you feel?” Reggie asks Anna.

She releases a long, drawn-out sigh. “Angry.”

“And aren’t you tired of holding in all that anger?”

“Yes,” she says. “So tired.”

She’s spent the past year of her life in a state of perpetual rage. Before that were years of sorrow preceded by grief. Raw and cutting. The kind of grief she can’t ever forget, because it won’t let her. It left scars on her soul.

“I just want it to end,” she says as tears continue to burn her eyes.

Reggie nods in both sympathy and understanding. “You know how to make that happen.”

Anna spares a thought for Seamus, the man who embarked on this journey knowing he likely wouldn’t reach the end. His final words now sound loud in her thoughts.

You know what to do. You can end this.

Anna can.

And, with one sudden pull of the trigger, she does.