Brazen and the Beast (The Bareknuckle Bastards #2)(62)

A dozen answers, none of them enough. Grace, begging them not to hurt him as a girl and then, as a woman, threatening them if they did. The threat of prison for killing a peer. The threat to Devil and Whit. To Grace. To the Rookery.

Whit watched his half brother for a long moment, taking in the hollows of his cheeks, the dark circles under his frenzied eyes. “It would be a gift,” he said. “If I took it from you. The life. The memories. The guilt.” Ewan’s gaze grew haunted. And then, from nowhere, Whit added, “Do you remember the night in the snow?” The other man flinched. “It began with that massive dinner—yeah? Meat pies and game and potatoes and beets drizzled with honey and cheese and brown bread.”

Ewan looked away. “That was the first clue. Nothing good ever came of comfort at Burghsey House.”

After the meal, the three boys had been marched outside with nothing more than their regular clothing—no coats or hats, scarves or gloves. It was January and bitter cold. It had been snowing for days, and the three of them had shivered together, as their father had meted out their punishment for sins unknown.

No. The sin had been clear. They’d banded together. Allied against him. And the Duke of Marwick feared it.

You aren’t here to be brothers, he’d spat, his gaze full of unwavering fury. You’re here to be Marwick.

It wasn’t new. He’d tried to break them apart a dozen times before. A hundred. Enough that they’d tried to run on more than one occasion, until they’d discovered that being caught was inevitable, and their father’s punishments grew worse with each infraction. After that, they’d stopped running, but they’d remained together, knowing they were stronger together.

After he’d railed about loyalty to title above all else—above even God—he’d left them trembling in the cold with clear instructions. There was a bed inside for one of them. But only one. The first to betray the others would get it. And the others—they spent the night in the snow. No shelter. No fire. If death came, so be it.

Whit watched his once-ally’s face. “When he left us in the cold, you turned to me, and do you remember what you said?”

Of course he remembered. Ewan might have stayed, but he was broken by the place just like they had been. And now he was duke, wearing their father’s face and his title and his shameful legacy. “We shouldn’t be here.”

With the duke. At the estate. They shouldn’t have followed their father’s pretty promises—health and wealth and a future without care. Without worry. With privilege and power and everything that came with aristocratic benevolence.

In the wake of the pronouncement, the boys had sprung into action, knowing from experience that they lived or died that night, together. They went for anything they could find that was dry in the snow—anything that might be warmth.

Whit could still remember the cold. The fear. The darkness as they’d huddled together. The keen knowledge that he was going to die, and his brothers with him. The desperate, futile attempts to stay alive. A child’s aching need for his mother.

“But it wasn’t true, was it, Duke? I shouldn’t have been there. Neither should Devil. But you—you did right there, yeah? Because you’re a storybook character. The boy born in the muck of Covent Garden, who landed himself a dukedom. The fucking hero of the play.”

Ewan revealed no shame in the wake of the words, and that alone was enough to keep Whit going. “But that’s a lie, too. You were never a hero. And you never will be. Not with your thieved name and your shit dukedom, built on the backs of your brothers.” He paused, drove the point home. “And the girl you claim to have loved. Who saved us all that night.”

They would have died. If not for Grace.

Grace, who had found them in the cold and rescued them, risking her own skin. And that night, a band of three had become four. “Which you seem not to remember.”

“I remember,” Ewan said, the words ragged and broken. “I remember every fucking breath she took in my presence.”

“Even the one she took to scream when you tried to kill her?” What was left of Ewan’s composure shattered, and Whit let loathing edge into his voice, along with the Garden. “Nah. Killin’ is too good for you, bruv. No matter how much you deserve it. You don’t get your fight.”

Fury returned to Ewan’s face, fury and something strangely like betrayal. “I can’t kill you,” Ewan said, the words coming in a frenzy. “I can’t come for you.” Why? Whit didn’t say it. He didn’t have to. “You two—you’re what’s left of her.”

Grace. The dead girl who wasn’t dead.

Whit met that wild gaze—so like his own. “She was never for you.”

The words weren’t meant as a blow, but they froze Ewan in his tracks. And then they set him on fire. “I can’t kill you,” he repeated, full of wild rage. “But I can end you.”

Whit turned away, knowing a man lost to reason when he saw one.

And then, “You’d best watch your lady, Saviour.”

Whit froze at the words, at the way they dropped like stone into the darkness between them, as though spoken by another man entirely. No longer full of explosive anger; but instead all cold menace, more unsettling than the rant that had come earlier.

More threatening.

Whit turned, heart in his throat and knife in his hand, resisting the urge to send it flying—deep into the chest of the man he’d once thought his brother. Instead, he pinned Ewan with an icy stare and said, “What did you say?”