Doubt turned his voice harsh and made his words run fast. His gaze was ultra penetrating as he watched her for hints or clues of guilt as he spoke, but if she already knew, then he wanted to be sure she felt at least something in his reveal—that she was moved, somehow, as she came to understand just exactly who he was, and what her family had made him.
“In the wake of the tragedy, your father became steward, and for all intents and purposes, inheritor of the slightly smaller duchy to the east, with its incredible maritime prospects, named as such, to the surprise of no one, by his very best friend.”
“My father arranged the accident...” Her words were a breathless combination of horror, rage and knowing, all braided together.
But the knowing was a new knowing, and with taking it on, it seemed, she took on an invisible anchor of responsibility, her shoulders visibly sinking, though she had been barely old enough for school when it had all occurred.
Out of the storm of his emotions, he made the wild swing from suspicion to—to what exactly, he couldn’t say, but something filled him with the urge to reach out to her, to place a hand on her shoulder and say something conciliatory, to remind her that she had been too young to have been meaningfully involved in the ancient plot.
He resisted the urge. Comforting her because her father was a monster was not on the current agenda. Wrenching his plan back on track and toward fruition was.
Though off to a less-than-smooth start, and thirty years delayed, justice would finally be served. His relief was shaky at best, the bumps and hurdles thus far only proving what he’d known since he was a disillusioned child: a person could only rely on themselves. That his plan hinged on her, a stranger and the daughter of his enemy, was a weakness, but one that could be adjusted to.
She was crucial to it all, the only one who could help him find the closure that he’d chased his whole life—closure that his mother had insisted had to come from within, not knowing that he didn’t have anything inside but a gaping hunger for the wrongs committed against them to be righted—and already his plans had taken a significant detour because of it.
He had intended to approach her privately, smoothly lay his cards on the table based on his suspicion that she was of a mind with him, charm her into thinking she might be interested in destroying her father’s legacy and leave the harbor with her none the wiser. He’d contemplated how to approach her for months, with the loft of their titles, the respective careers they were well known for in the world and the friendliness of their nations all on the line. Discretion, charm and mystery had been the key components of his planned approach.
Instead, they’d fought and set off a national alarm, and he’d unintentionally abducted her. And now he had to convince her to go along with his plan.
It was incredibly trying to work with others. He was cut from the cloth to lead or go alone—teamwork was inefficient.
But he could find no other way. Her father had been meticulous in his lineage obsession, ensuring that only another one of his blood, another d’Tierrza, could undo his work.
And so Drake had studied his would-be partner, reading every tabloid article about her and tracking down every whisper of her name from the moment his plans had settled into their final shape. He’d held his mother’s hand as she struggled with her last breaths—cancer the foe that finally took her down after murder plots and poverty had tried their best and failed.
Before that moment, he had simply turned his entire life into a catalog of triumph and success, his metaphorical rude gesture to spite the man who’d tried to stamp out him and his family. But when he’d learned that that man had died, peacefully in his sleep, the death of the innocent and the just, while his mother had struggled to draw in air, it didn’t matter that he’d made sure she’d had the best care money could provide and the all the comfort human beings had been able to invent. Drake had been consumed with impotent rage. That a good and strong woman would go, her passing a thing of pain, while her tormentor had gone easy ate at him, driving him from sleep, from home, from ease, from even the satisfaction of having earned everything back that had been taken from him and then some.
It wasn’t enough. The only thing that could possibly be enough was to take everything that man held dear.
When the shocking announcement was made that the old duke had passed up his wife to name his daughter his successor, Drake realized he’d been given his opportunity.
Whether or not the father could see it, the daughter hated his guts.
Marrying her would be Drake’s means to not just regaining his own ancestral home, but to taking Tierrza’s, as well. He would exact his revenge in the only way that a man like Dominic d’Tierrza would have understood: by taking everything he had.
Helene might be the daughter of his greatest enemy, but she was also the key to his revenge. He was going to marry her. He was going to marry her and get her pregnant, and his sons—and his name—were going to rule not just Andros, but Tierrza, as well, the famous jewel of Cyrano.
And he had strong reason and evidence to believe that she would be amenable to the idea...if he hadn’t irritated her too much by kidnapping and towering over her.
He didn’t expect, however, her to place a hand over her heart as she said, “You have my most sincere apologies. If this world were a just one, my father would reap the punishment his actions deserved, but it is not, and this is just one more of the many evils he died without accounting for. I cannot undo what he did, but I offer you my deepest apologies.” She concluded her speech with a deep bow.
He frowned.
This was not the solidarity he had been looking for.
He needed a rebellious daughter, not a battle-weary soldier.
Though, he supposed, her response was a sort of confirmation of his suspicion that bad blood existed between father and daughter.
From age eleven to sixteen, she had used every public appearance and every form of acting out possible to present a clear picture, at least to Drake, of exactly what she thought of the man.
She had exhausted the typical means of wealthy children by the age of thirteen—wrecking cars, being caught on film smoking, dating older men. It had seemed her actions were more than adolescent rebellions. But then she’d turned to more mature methods.
At thirteen, she became famous for being the youngest accepted applicant for Cyrano’s International Young People’s Volunteer Corps, a humanitarian organization comprised of Cyranese citizens aged eighteen to twenty-six, sparking a sea of rumors of corruption and buying access that were no doubt true, but didn’t prevent her from spending two years in Kazakhstan, mastering the Russian language and establishing an orphanage...into which she funneled an inordinate amount of d’Tierrza cash. The amount itself was the next scandal, far exceeding the highest recorded charitable donations in the nation of Cyrano prior to it. For a while, the joke was that daddy’s little girl had a great big heart and no sense of the value of money. Again, it was clear to Drake, though, that she’d been entirely aware of her actions, and they were intentional.
She was hitting her father strategically.
Looking at her now, though, he realized it went deeper than that.