Lisette dropped to her knees next to Severine. Severine handed Lisette her good arm and Lisette hauled her to her feet. Her brother was well and truly caught. She hissed instructions to Mr. Oliver on her Grandmère’s location and gave him the master key. Mr. Oliver nodded and rushed away just as Severine knelt next to her brother and placed her pistol against her brother’s head.
“Anubis,” she said, ignoring the blood in her shoulder, her broken wrist, “die freisetzung.”
Her dog let go of her brother’s neck and she told him to protect once again.
“Severine,” her uncle started, but she snapped at him.
“Quiet! Tell me who is controlling you, Andre.”
He laughed.
“Tell me!”
“No,” he said stubbornly, turning and pressing his head into the gun. “Pull the trigger, Sevie.”
She shook her head.
“Send me to hell, Sevie. Release me.”
“Tell me,” she begged. “Tell me why.”
“It’s like you said.” Her brother laughed, sounding drunk. “I went from man to child. To captain of my own fate to puppet. From prince of New Orleans to slave.” An actual tear slipped down Andre’s face, and he gasped suddenly, “Grandmère!”
Severine didn’t believe that supposed repentance for a second. “Tell me who it is, Andre, and we won’t press charges. We’ll all lie. It was an accident. Mr. Brand will pay out your inheritance and you can leave New Orleans. You can live a life elsewhere. Make something new that isn’t poisoned by being mixed up with the DuNoirs.”
He stared at her. “I don’t believe you, Sevie.”
For once she saw true emotion that belied his words. The self-interest had filled his gaze and there was a shred of hope at the mention of the money. “Tell me what you know.”
He shook his head ruefully. “Drunken partying during Mardi Gras. I—I got in over my head. I did something that could ruin me, and I’ve been a puppet ever since.”
“Why?” she demanded.
“Someone doesn’t want you playing in your father’s estate. Brand was to keep it running. You, however, you can change anything. You might find things out. You could ruin someone if those nuns infected you with the morals your father didn’t possess.” The bitter hard laugh made Severine wince for them both. Greed and jealousy were the true motives, she thought as she stared at his dissipated face with the soft chin she’d never bothered to notice before.
Severine’s gaze narrowed. “What did you do?”
Andre pressed his lips together mutely.
“That bad?” Severine’s voice was disgusted and she was having to fight for focus with the growing pain as she calmed down. Her whole arm, her wrist, her shoulder, her side from where she’d landed falling off the horse, her whole body really. She was a mess and it would take a while to recover.
“Andre, let us help you,” she said low.
Uncle Alphonse grunted and then Mr. Brand dropped to his knees next to her. “Severine, you need a doctor.”
“The road is blocked,” she told him. She looked back at her brother. “Won’t you help me?”
He laughed and shook his head. “If you won’t murder me, Sevie, the puppet master will.”
She knew that stubborn look and because of it, she let Mr. Brand lift her into his arms. “Lock him in the cellars,” he ordered and then carried Severine away from the scene.
As he carried her, chased by her dogs, back to the house, she told him, “I’ve always wished you were my brother instead.”
He pressed a brotherly kiss on her forehead. “Myself as well, little Severine.”
She let her eyes close because another memory was hitting her fiercely. “It was you who took me away from their bodies.”
Mr. Brand grunted.
“I didn’t cry,” she told him.
“You were in shock, little love,” he said gently.
He called her little love then too, she remembered. “I never cried.”
He didn’t have an answer for that, but the doors of the house were being thrown open, and she was settled soon after on a sofa in the parlor. Severine shuddered as she glanced around the room, once again sensing her mother’s presence. What had happened, all those years ago, and why had someone tried to use Andre?
Chapter Twenty
“Is he still not speaking?” Severine asked. She was standing near the window, looking down at the garden.
“He’s still not speaking,” Mr. Brand replied carefully. “He refuses to speak at all other than to ask when he’ll be taken away.”
She nodded and turned. Her shoulder ached and her wrist was wrapped carefully in a splint, but she was fortunate that one of the stable hands had spent the war as a medic. He had forgiven her letting the horses loose when he saw her injuries.
Her pain was pounding, but it was time. She’d almost gone to her grave and she’d realized she couldn’t do that until she had faced the past one more time.
Severine left Mr. Brand silently. She walked towards her bedroom. Rather than turning up the stairs to the tower room, however, she opened a side door. There was a small staircase that led from the master wing to the outside. It curved around the side of the house, and Severine floated down those steps once again.
At the base of the steps was a walled private garden. It had been intended for the lady of the house and it had not been used by Flora. She had seen it, claimed it, and then never gone back to it. Severine, however, had loved the little walled garden. She’d loved the way the birds made protected little nests where their fledglings could grow safer and stronger and the little flowers that grew between the rose bushes. She loved the small fountain at the center of the garden.
She hadn’t gone to sleep that night her parents had died. It had been late for her, but she had been a child, and they were having
