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With a teasing grin, he picks up his bone china cup by its dainty arm and makes a show of drinking the rest of his tea like a fucking girl.
Fuck, I’ve missed him. I don’t say that about many people, but out of every fucker I’m surrounded by, Simon is the easiest to people with. I hate him, and he knows I do, but we also know that before I felt this way about him, I loved him. I loved him as a brother. And somewhere beneath all the history between us, I still do.
“How long are you back for?”
Simon shrugs, diverting his eyes to the toast rack. “Too long,” he eventually says with a dry chuckle.
A couple of years ago, his family was struck by tragedy. Since then, he’s barely stepped foot in the country. The last two years have seen him negotiate deals between the wealthiest and most unsavoury in the world. In turn, they’ve made the earl of Rochester wealthier than he already was. Some would say he’s filthy rich, and they wouldn’t be wrong, given where a lot of the money he’s made has come from.
“Do they know you’re home?”
“This isn’t home.” His eyes scan the newspapers in front of us. “And no, no one knows I’m in the country. There’s something I need to see to, and once it’s done, I’m heading back to New York.”
His phone rings, and he stands to take the call outside the room, cutting our conversation short. Someday, he might actually confront the shitshow he left behind and that he’s trying to ignore by staying away.
“My mother will be upset that her golden boy hasn’t visited,” I call after him as Percival, the Wolfsden Society secretary, walks through the double doors of the Hush Lounge.
It’s early morning and quiet. The girls normally parading themselves are out of sight, just as the men that normally use them are home with their wives. The den of depravity is a front for the Wolfsden Society, a ghost society made up of twelve dukes, earls, and lords and headed by the king. We’re knights of the crown, doing what needs to be done to protect and honour it from those that would see it disgraced and forgotten.
“What do you have for me?” I ask Percival, stirring a teaspoon of sugar into my coffee.
He’s stopped just inside the doors, and he’s staring at me as though wondering how to approach an unruly beast. I can’t blame him. There have been times when we have butted heads, especially when my father was passing his duty to me. At times, it seemed like he was trying to test my patience more so than my resilience and loyalty.
Simon pauses in his tracks, watching as Percival comes to stand in front of me, dragging in breath after breath. His eyes meet mine, and instantly, the heaviness of the recurring nightmare I awoke from earlier assaults me. The weight drops to the pit of my stomach like lead ripping through the air.
I’m on autopilot as I push to my feet, ready to act, even though my feet are glued to the Persian rug beneath them. I know what’s coming as Percival shakes himself off from his trepidation and draws in yet another deep breath. The air freezes as my chest strangles my lungs, squeezing the exerted thrum of my heart into a deafening hammer that makes it impossible to hear the words he speaks when his mouth opens and his lips move.
No words are needed because I feel death chill my veins now as it did the morning I walked into my grandfather’s bedroom to find him permanently asleep with his tea beside him. Darkness blusters inside me as his lips continue to move, but no words cut through the thundering in my ears. The storm is spinning in as it does in my dreams, threatening to rip me apart from east to west, but in reality, it’s snapping my head from my neck and cutting my knees from beneath me. North and south pulling apart, quaking and shattering the world. A catastrophic seismic break.
“Henry?” Simon slaps my shoulder. The pity in his touch pulls me out of my head as he breathes out a long sigh. “Fuck, mate…I—”
“When?” The question rolls from my tongue, suffocated by the lump in my throat. “How?”
My eyes are burning with an anger that scorches and grates down the back of my throat as I swallow the urge to thwart the man standing in front of me. Again and again, while I listen to Percival answer my question.
“We don’t know when exactly. Your mother found him in the car this morning as she was leaving for the airport.”
“What do you mean ‘she found him’?” Simon asks while I’m trying to work past the fog, a storm of questions hurtling at me from every side.
If it really was my mother who found my father, he would’ve been within the palace gates. He would’ve been home. Secure.
“His car was parked outside their apartment.”
Our stares meet, pity and sorrow glaze over his eyes while mine are blurred with unsurmountable rage and grief.
The Severn Bridge is down.
The Duke of Gloucester is gone.
My father is dead.
The last time I cried, I was seven years old. It was the day I discovered my hate for tea.
“His driver?” I ask, ignoring the lurch of my stomach when I glance down at the teapot on the table.
“We’re trying to locate him, but—” Percival pauses when I step forward, his eyes dropping to my fisted hands. They’re aching for destruction. The violence within me is screaming, rattling at the cage holding it back, saving the world from my chaos.
“But?” I take another step. “But what, Percival?”
