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I balk. “You’re- married?! Since when-”
“If you’re not about to die on me,” Iris interrupts, “then we have to go. Now.”
“Iris-”
“The Speare house is burning,” Iris urges, and any questions I have for her leave my mind.
The Speare house is burning, and Clara is still inside.
CHAPTER 37
Clara
My uncle’s blood is on my face. I want to wipe it away, but I know it will only smear, and I don’t want it on my hands.
But it is on my hands, whether I can see it or not. Uncle Morgan is dead, and it’s because of me.
This was my plan from the moment I stepped out of Thomas’s room with his unloaded gun tucked into the back of my shorts. I could never sway my uncle to my side, and I could never escape him if I allowed him to live- at last, I’d accepted that.
But Paul… Paul had cared for me, had loved me like his own the moment my mother left this world. Of the two men- the one who had sabotaged me my whole life, and the one who had done everything he could for me despite the restrictions of his own principles- I knew who I had a chance of persuading.
I didn’t know how far my uncle would go until Paul stepped in to stop him, but I knew he would.
I knew it, and yet it still feels unreal that my uncle’s body is crumpled against the wall, bathed in blood… and I’m alive.
Paul steps over my uncle’s body, coming toward me. His pale eyes are empty, distant. The knife in his hand- no, his whole hand- is dripping with hot red blood.
He’s just betrayed the man he enslaved himself to for the last ten years, and for the first time… I wonder if that reality will break him.
But when Paul stops in front of me, he lets out a sigh that sounds like it’s been pent up for a decade. His shoulders go back, a weight lifting off him at last. He cleans the knife off on his blazer, then sheds the blazer entirely and uses it to scrub most of the blood off his hands. Then he holds one of those hands out to me.
“Do I even want to know what the next step of this goddamn crazy plan is?” he asks.
He sounds… totally unfazed by what just happened. Is he suppressing his conflicted emotions, or is his relief great enough that the rest is washed away?
I take his hand, and he pulls me very carefully to my feet. Before he lets me go, he studies the side of my face, prodding the bones of my face to make sure there are no fractures. His fingernails are still caked with blood, but his touch is tender. Despite this, the pain makes me flinch away from him. He grimaces.
“It looks like it’s just surface bruising,” he says. “Mm, your eye’s already turning red. Close your left eye.” I do as he says, and he holds up a peace sign. “How many fingers do you see?”
“Two?”
“Blurry at all?”
“No.”
He nods and reaches out to ruffle my hair, but must notice the blood still on his fingers, and stuffs his hand into his pocket at the last moment. “You know, you’re the last living Speare. The family is yours, if you can keep hold of it.”
I do my best not to look at my uncle’s body, but it’s impossible not to see the crimson splattered on every wall of my small cell and all over Paul’s shirt and face. His wording is deliberate. If I want to take control of a family- a small empire- that is mine by blood, I’ll have to fight for it for a long, long time. Maybe for the rest of my life. Even if I try to do things better than my uncle did before me, people will die and more blood will be spilled.
Remembering the power I felt when looking in the mirror of the boutique doesn’t feel right when I’m standing feet from a dead body. It’s easy to imagine being on top of the world when you can’t see what has to be done to get there. Even if Paul did the dirty work for me, I manipulated him into doing it, and I have a feeling that will weigh on my conscience for a long time.
Being the boss of a mafia family is a fine fantasy, and to survive and save lives, I’ve done what needed to be done. But even now, it’s not what I want. What I want is to create without fear. What I want is to love without reservation.
“The Speare family only exists because of betrayal,” I say slowly. “My uncle stabbed his best friend in the back so he could take part of the city for himself. Because of him, we had to leave our home. I lost my best friend, and my mother, and-”
My chest tightens, but I can’t help thinking about it. If I hadn’t been taken away from the Warwick family, could Thomas and I have had a chance?
It doesn’t feel possible anymore. The dynamic between us is too complicated by calculation. I want to believe that Thomas feels something for me, but how can I when everything he does is painstakingly planned?
