Chapter 24

CHAPTER 24

THOMAS

I t had been a long couple of days.

Rose wasn’t answering her phone or coming to church. I had considered going over to the Astrid's home to confront her directly, but when I talked to my network of housekeeping spies, they informed me she had run away on some type of holiday.

They did not know where she went. All they knew was that she was not in the state, and that she had taken her paints with her.

Fuck.

Although watching Mary Quinn slowly lose her mind as she tried to regain social status without her blackmail to force people’s hand was… entertaining.

I didn’t know who called her bluff, or how it got out, but people were whispering about that safe deposit box. After going through all the files more thoroughly, avoiding the far-too-many photos of my father, I realized she didn’t have nearly as many families under her thumb as I thought. Only the most powerful.

I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with this information yet. There were just so many possibilities.

Sitting back on the leather couch, I was taking a moment for contemplation, a tumbler of my family’s reserve whisky in one hand and a leather-bound book in the other. I was interrupted when my father yet again barged into my private quarters, uninvited.

“I am in the rectory of a Catholic church. Aren’t you worried that your mere presence is going to have you smited?” I asked, already bored with whatever this was. He slammed my door behind him.

“Is it true? Did you do it?” he demanded.

“I’m going to need you to be more specific.” I gave my father a blank look.

“There is a rumor going around that Mary Quinn was stolen from. That somebody emptied the contents of her safe deposit box where she kept the blackmail material she held on several families.”

“Oh, that.” I feigned surprise. “Yeah, I did that.”

“So you have it?” he asked again, his eyes narrowing.

“I have everything that was in her safe deposit box,” I confirmed. “I have to admit I was shocked and frankly disgusted with how many pictures of your dick in different men’s wives are in those folders. Not even just in the Manwarring folder. I have seen the blackmail she has on every single family and somehow, they connected to you. I open up a folder and bam, there’s your dick. It was horrifying. I don’t know how I’ll ever recover.”

“This isn’t a joke,” he barked.

“What’s wrong, Father?” I asked, setting my book down on the coffee table. “Worried about what I might do with the information that I found? I admit I thought I knew about most of the skeletons in our closet, but I did not know how deep some of this actually went. How did Mary Quinn get her vile claws into this information?”

“Never mind that. Are you going to protect the family?”

“Family,” I scoffed. “Do you mean the same family that betrayed me? The same family that shipped me off to Rome to become a priest without even asking if that was something that I wanted to do? The same family that never even bothered to call me, or check up on me? You never called unless I was misbehaving, and you needed to pay someone off.”

“I was trying to protect you. Mary Quinn was going to scream rape and have you dragged to prison. She was going to hold your safety over my head. Every time I didn’t do exactly what she wanted, you were going to get a beating. Did you want that to happen?” he yelled, not even stopping to take a breath. “I did what I had to do to keep you safe.”

I got to my feet. Rage that had been building in my soul for the past seven years rushed to the surface, and I didn’t want to hold it back any longer.

“You should have believed me.”

He flinched. My father, Lucian Manwarring, actually flinched.

“Of course I believed you,” he said, his voice much lower. “I always believed you. You’re my son.”

We both stopped for a moment, just staring at each other in shock. I hadn’t expected that. The Lucian I knew should have been yelling back, screaming about how I was a disappointment, the black mark on the family name.

“No,” I said. “You didn’t believe me. You pulled me out of that stable like I was a criminal and threw me on a helicopter. Without even talking to me, you sentenced me to a life suffocating under this collar.”

Father pushed past me and collapsed on the couch.

“I should have talked to you. I should have actually talked to you. There wasn’t a single moment I ever believed that you tried to rape Mary Quinn Astrid. With cases like that, facts don’t matter. Perception does. She was telling everyone who would listen and even those who wouldn’t. The warrant had already been issued for your arrest. I needed to get you out of there immediately and to make sure that you wouldn’t come back until it was settled.”

“When was it settled?” I asked.

Father looked up at me, guilt in his eyes.

“When were the charges dropped and the warrant pulled?” I asked again, knowing that I would have been arrested at the airport when I came home if they hadn’t been.

“Four years ago,” he admitted.

“And yet you kept me there. Refusing to let me come home, and ready to pay an exorbitant amount of money to keep me from being excommunicated.”

“Fuck,” he said, scrubbing his hands over his face.

“Yeah,” I said, sitting back down on the couch across from him.

“Stella says I need to work on my communication skills,” he sighed.

“I think she might understate it.”

He huffed in agreement.

Before he could say anything else, or I could tell him I had intended on shredding the Manwarring file, Luc marched in, his face red and his jaw clenched.

“What crawled up your?—”

My words were cut off when his fist slammed into my face.

“She’s my sister-in-law, asshole. That puts her under my protection.”

Oh, fuck this shit. I was not twelve anymore. He wouldn’t get away with a cheap shot.

I got to my feet, rubbing my jaw where he had hit me, and then I swung back. He dodged the punch to his jaw but didn’t see the hook coming for his ribs. He made a grunting sound, but before I could swing again, he lunged at me and both of us went crashing to the ground.

We grappled on the floor, both blocking and throwing punches.

“She isn’t yours to fuck with,” he growled.

“I claimed her. That makes her mine.” I kicked out my feet, connecting with his thighs and shoving him off of me so I could get to my feet. He ran at me again, but this time I was ready. I met him head-on.

“Boys, stop,” my father boomed, and we both ignored him.

I landed another punch to his gut, aiming just to the side and up so I caught the underside of his ribs. He doubled over in pain, and I shoved him off of me.

It was a cheap shot I had learned my first year of seminary school in a brawl. Father may have thought Rome was a better option than prison, and maybe he was right, but there were more similarities than you would think.

Before Luc could right himself and swing again, Father stepped in between us.

“What is the meaning of this?”

“You should ask him,” Luc barked out. “Ask him why Rose keeps painting pictures of him, very inappropriate pictures of him. He’s been messing with the youngest Astrid. My sister-in-law. Amelia is beside herself. We don’t do shit like this to family!”

His voice got louder and louder with every word. I almost felt bad until that last sentence.

“What the fuck would you know about what we do or don’t do for family? Where was this rage when I was sent to seminary school? Where was this anger in my defense? I’m your brother.”

“She was innocent!” he screamed.

She wasn’t, but he didn’t need to know that.

“Between the bullshit you’re pulling with her mother and whatever you’re doing to her, she had to run away by herself to the ski chalet. She couldn’t even talk to Amelia about this. They talk about everything. That poor girl is up there by herself because you?—”

I didn’t hear the rest of what he said. It wasn’t important. I knew where my angel was, and I needed to know that she was okay.

If she ran, I needed to know that it wasn’t because of me, it was because of her mother. And if it was because of me, well then maybe I needed to be giving her a little more carrot and a little less stick. I could fix that.

Either way, I needed to see her.