Chapter 7 - Secrets of the Past Unearthed
The silence that followed her question was heavy, filled only by the rhythmic crackle of the oak logs burning in the hearth.
Damon walked over to the side table, picked up the crystal decanter, and poured two fingers of amber scotch into a heavy crystal glass. He offered it to her.
"I don't drink scotch," Brinley said politely.
"It's twenty-five-year-old Macallan," Damon said, setting the glass on the edge of the desk anyway. "It helps when people ask questions they aren't prepared to hear the answers to."
He leaned his heavy frame against the edge of the desk, crossing his ankles, looking down at the floorboards.
"You think I stayed in this house out of choice, Brinley?" Damon asked softly. "You think I like the stone walls, the guards, the darkness?"
"My mother thought you were a monster," Brinley replied honestly, sitting down in the heavy leather armchair opposite the desk, holding Buttons in her lap. "Until the checks started coming. Then she knew you were something else. Something sadder."
Damon let out a short, bitter bark of laughter. "Sadder. Yeah. That's one word for it."
He took a long sip of his drink, his gray eyes fixing on the cracked photograph of his mother on the top shelf.
"Twenty-three years ago, before you were born, there was a war between my family and the Valenti syndicate," Damon explained, his voice low and mechanical, as if reciting a court transcript. "Your father, Tristan, wasn't just a deadbeat gambler. He was a scout for Frank Moretti."
Brinley’s body went rigid. "What?"
Damon looked at her, his expression devoid of pity—only bleak, undeniable truth. "Tristan married Audrey because she was a Valenti distant cousin. He used her to get close to the family records. When the war broke out, he sold out his own wife's relatives to save his own skin. He was the one who leaked the location of the Valenti safehouse where your aunt Elena was hiding."
Brinley felt the blood drain from her face. "My father... was a traitor?"
"He was a coward," Damon corrected her gently. "There's a difference. A traitor plans; a coward simply runs to whoever offers him five more minutes of life. When Tristan lost all his money to Moretti, Moretti gave him a choice: bring your mother and you to my estate as a distraction, or end up in the Seekonk River."
Damon leaned forward, his gray eyes locking onto hers.
"Tristan brought you here to die, Brinley," Damon revealed coldly. "He knew Moretti was planning to blow the gate two days later. He used a three-year-old child and a desperate mother as human shields so he could slip out the back way with twenty thousand dollars in cash."
Brinley’s hands tightened around Buttons. The world seemed to wobble slightly on its axis. All her life, she had believed her father was just a weak man who had disappeared into the night. She had never imagined he was a monster who had set up his own daughter to be slaughtered in a syndicate war.
"And... my father's death?" Brinley asked, her voice barely a whisper. "Did Moretti kill him?"
Damon took another slow sip of scotch. He didn't answer immediately. He looked down at his right hand—the heavy, scarred hand with the faint blue ink of an old dragon tattoo fading beneath his skin.
"No," Damon said flatly. "I did."
Brinley gasped softly, her breath catching in her throat.
"I caught him at the docks three hours after you arrived," Damon said, his voice dropping into a register of absolute, terrifying finality. "He was getting onto a fishing boat bound for Canada. He had the twenty thousand dollars in a duffel bag. I asked him about you and Audrey. Do you know what he said?"
Brinley swallowed hard, tears burning her eyes. "What?"
"He said, 'There are plenty of women in Canada. I can make another kid.'" Damon’s jaw clenched so hard the muscles jumped beneath his scarred cheek. "So I put a bullet through his head and threw him into the Seekonk River. And I used his twenty thousand dollars to open the bank account that raised you."
Brinley sat frozen in the leather chair. The crackling fire cast long, dancing shadows across the mahogany desk, illuminating the worn fur of the one-eyed teddy bear resting in her lap.
She looked at the scarred, silver-haired man sitting across from her—a man who had executed her biological father, destroyed a rival empire, paid for her education, and kept a promise to a three-year-old child for twenty years.
"Why didn't you tell my mother?" Brinley asked softly.
"Because Audrey loved the memory of the man she thought she married," Damon said, his tone softening. "She was a good woman, Brinley. She didn't deserve to know she had shared a bed with a devil. She needed to believe her child’s father was just lost, not evil."
Damon stood up straight, setting his empty glass down on the desk with a clear clink.
"Now you know the truth," Damon said, stepping back toward the window overlooking the dark bay. "You know who I am. You know where your life’s blood came from. Take your bear, take the deed to the cottage in Maine, and go live your clean life, Brinley. You owe me nothing."
May you like
Brinley looked at the black iron key resting on the desk, then at the scarred back of the man standing by the window.
She slowly stood up from the armchair.
