Total pages in book: 79
Estimated words: 75793 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 379(@200wpm)___ 303(@250wpm)___ 253(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 75793 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 379(@200wpm)___ 303(@250wpm)___ 253(@300wpm)
Horatio sits down, shoulders slumped. “You can’t tell her, Silas. Phee can never find out. Can you promise me that?”
“I can’t promise anything until I know.”
“Silas—”
“Fucking tell me!”
He leans back in his chair again, resigned now. “This… this is the reason for all of it. When I found out Claire was pregnant, I assumed the baby was mine. Of course, I did. We’d been careful. So careful. But accidents happen and I just assumed…” He shakes his head. “When Ophelia was born, well, all you could see in her was her mother. I didn’t know…”
“A lot of babies don’t look like their parents,” I hear myself say, wanting to believe it because what is coming, what I am waiting to hear? I don’t want to hear it. I want to be wrong.
“Do you see anything of me in her now?” he asks although he’s not really expecting an answer. “I should have known, I guess. Suspected. If she’d told me, maybe… It doesn’t matter now, though. Gordon found out. He must have. It explained things. Claire was always his favorite. His golden child."
“Who is he?” I ask tightly because now he’s going off on a tangent. “Who is Ophelia’s biological father?”
When I meet his eyes, I see a man who is out of options, who thought he could take a secret to his grave and protect the daughter he loves. But secrets don’t work that way. Especially dark ones.
Horatio shakes his head. “I wonder sometimes if it wasn’t Gordon who created the monster. His affections were very clear.”
“Horatio.”
He faces me dead on, eyes shadowed.
“Say it. Who is her biological father?”
“Silas—”
“Fucking say it.”
“Chandler,” he says flatly.
To think it is one thing. To guess it. To hear it, though, and to know it as fact, it’s another thing altogether.
“Chandler Carlisle-Bent hated his half-sister. He despised her, Silas. He raped her over months and months, and I never even saw it. Never saw what was right in front of my eyes.”
Christ. Fuck. I push my hands into my hair. My chair scrapes loudly against the floor as I stand. “It can’t—”
“Chandler Carlisle-Bent isn’t Ophelia’s uncle. He’s her father.”
17
SILAS
Horatio is still talking. I hear him, but it’s background noise.
“It’s how I managed to keep us hidden from the old man. It’s how I had enough money to do it.”
Chandler Carlisle-Bent isn’t Ophelia’s uncle. He’s her father.
Blood pulses through my veins, pounds against my ears. I want to unhear this. I want it to not be true.
“I blackmailed Chandler and honestly, he was happy to have her gone. He paid. For nearly two years, he paid.”
Chandler Carlisle-Bent isn’t Ophelia’s uncle. He’s her father.
“I stopped asking for money after she drowned herself. It took me that long… Jesus Christ.”
Horatio stops. I look at him, finally, and he looks about a decade older than he did when I walked in here.
“What are you going to do?” he asks me.
I shake my head, turn to the door.
“Silas. She can’t know. She can’t ever—”
I leave.
I walk out of that room in stunned, stupid silence. I knew what he’d say. I think I did, at least. It makes sense. It’s the only thing that makes sense.
“Silas?” Higgins asks when I pass him as he’s returning, but his voice is an echo, and I just keep walking until I’m out of the building and standing in the bracingly cold air. I draw in gulps of breath. My heart is racing and everything, all the words, this terrible truth, it’s all spinning round and round in my head as I try to make sense of something too terrible to make sense.
Chandler, Ophelia’s uncle, is her father.
I cross the parking lot to the SUV.
Chandler raped his half-sister. And she got pregnant.
I hit the button to unlock the door and climb in. I start the engine and when I drive, it’s on auto pilot.
What happened next makes sense, Horatio blackmailing Chandler. There’s no way he’d have been able to keep himself and Claire hidden from the old man. Not with the power and money he had at his disposal. But Chandler must have had access to that money, to some extent, and he had motivation enough to keep her gone. He needed to hide his secret, his crime, from his stepfather, so paying Horatio to stay away and keep Claire and her child away was exactly what he wanted.
I remember how he looked at Ophelia, standing in that bar as we left the hotel hours ago. With malice in his eyes, he watched her. He was in the limousine with Ethan. He’d already made some deal with Ethan. When I laid out my suspicions to Ophelia as far as Ethan’s plans for her, I believed, still do, that Ethan does not have the stomach for murder. But the look in Chandler’s eyes and the way he watched Ophelia? I think his stomach may be stronger. Strong enough.