“I suppose that bullet hole does say just that,” Grayson replied. “Who shall we start with?”
Severine paused. Did she trust him that far? But it wasn’t as though her conclusion was so difficult. He must have already reached it. She wasn’t looking for clues. She was looking for evidence.
“I think I might start in here. You can lock me in if your inner white knight objects. Once luncheon ends, perhaps your Mr. Oliver would distract my brother.”
“Your brother?” It was a question, but she saw the way his gaze sharpened. She wasn’t a fool and neither was he, so he had come to the same conclusion. He just wanted her to say it. Perhaps he even felt she needed to own the conclusion as though the betrayal would break her. It wouldn’t.
“I fear he’s the obvious choice given he’ll get the bulk of the estate,” she told Mr. Grayson. “I’ve been pondering it all day, and I don’t think it’s so much a mystery of who is trying to end me but how he intends to get away with it.”
Mr. Grayson started to speak and then paused. “There is no sentimentality.”
Severine paused, wishing that there was something between herself and her brother and realized that there wasn’t. “The entire time I was gone, my brother didn’t write to me once. When I found our mother dead, I went running, screaming for help, and he didn’t answer. He heard me, but he didn't answer. Do you know who scooped me up and comforted me?”
Mr. Grayson shook his head, those green eyes fixed on her, waiting for the answer.
“Mr. Brand. He was the brother and protector Andre should have been. There’s nothing between me and Andre but the unfortunate coincidence of birth.”
Severine unlocked the side drawers to her father’s desk and noticed the ivory handled pistol in the bottom drawer with a bottle of old whiskey. Behind it was a matching pistol as though every man needed a pair of dueling pistols. She shook her head in disgust and pulled the bottle out, remembering him pouring himself a glass.
“The only mystery is whether Andre is working with another and who that might be.”
“I fear you are right, Severine. I am sorry for it.”
“I feel like I’m in an endless fog. It matters little with this cloud around me.” She shoved the whiskey towards Grayson and added, “I can see him, my father, pouring his whiskey. I can hear her, my mother, in the parlor. Every time I am in there, I can hear her. What she would have said to me. How I would have felt. I haven’t dared to face where they died.”
She tried not to think of the little private walled garden, the fountain, the full moon, and the image of her parents dead with a pool of blood underneath them. She shuddered, and thankfully he spoke, drawing her from the memory.
“That sounds…” He was too kind to finish.
Severine, however, had no such gentleness. Not even for herself. “I believe my brother would say I’m going mad, but I’m not.”
“You aren’t?” Grayson asked and she wondered if he saw madness in her.
“Not mad. At war with myself for loving them. Both of them to my surprise. For missing them and hating them and loving them and wishing for nothing more than to go back to that night and stop whoever killed them. “
“Surely there was no chance of that. You would have been another victim.” Grayson looked at her with such gentle kindness, his gaze moving between her as she was now and the portrait of her then. “You were only a child, Severine. You are barely beyond childhood even now.”
Severine nodded. Yes, she would have been murdered, but was going on alone so much worse? Perhaps it wasn’t. She knew Sister Mary Chastity would say that life was a gift. The game wasn’t over until you’re forced off the board.
“I would have been killed certainly. Now I find myself tortured by the most unexpected of feelings. I am reliving my childhood, my feelings then, my feelings now. I walk around this place, wounded by the deathblow I never received.”
“You do sound quite mad,” Grayson told her. “Are you doing it on purpose?”
“Perhaps I wish to see who will stand with me and who will turn against me.” She laughed. “Perhaps I am a little mad. Or hovering near madness. At the edge of it, if you will.”
“I won’t turn against you,” he told her. “You are not mad. There is too much clarity in your eyes. I have seen madness, and you are playing games.”
She laughed again. “It’s all rather too morbid, isn’t it? Pretending at madness. Finding the person who killed my parents. It’s like one of those penny dreadful novels of a previous age. What’s next? Varney the vampire? The dead rising? The ape man and his Jane?”
Grayson eyed her and cleared his throat.
“Is it time then?”
“Time for what?”
“For declaring what it is you want from me.”
He snorted, but he didn’t deny it. “You have connections here that I do not have. Even coming back after all this time, you can step into any drawing room, any exclusive club, anywhere. Severine DuNoir, you are a princess in and around New Orleans.”
She rolled her eyes and said nothing.
Grayson continued. “And, I am no such thing. Not here. Not even in London or Dublin. I have no connections. A few weak friendships at best. I need more than that.”
“What do you want?” Severine asked, knowing the beginning of an argument when she heard one.
“I want that entrée into society. I am clever, Oliver is clever. We have much to offer in return. I’ll help you find your parents’ killer if you can help me get that entrance.”
“Why?”
“I suppose I need to hold the reason close to my heart a little longer.”
Severine studied him carefully. “Are you one of those men of whom his
