Chapter 78 - Six Words in the Dark
The room was vast, draped in antique tapestries, lit only by the embers of a dying fire in the massive stone hearth.
Eleanor sat in the center of the Persian rug, strapped to a high-backed iron chair. Her face was bruised, her lip split, her left eye swollen shut—a mirror image of the wounds I had carried out of the Thanksgiving dining room two months earlier.
When she heard the door creak, her good eye opened, wide with sheer terror. But when she saw my face, the fear curdled into something far more toxic: profound, venomous resentment.
"You," Eleanor rasped, her voice dry as dead leaves. "You couldn't just stay hidden. You had to bring down the whole world."
I walked slowly across the room until I stood three feet from her, looking down at the woman who had watched me bleed for twenty years without lifting a single finger.
"Arthur is dead, Eleanor," I said, my voice completely devoid of emotion. "He died in an interrogation cell, begging for mercy."
Eleanor let out a cracked, breathy laugh that ended in a cough. "Arthur was an insect. A weak, pathetic coward who shook every time a car door slammed outside the house. Do you think I cared about Arthur?"
"Then why did you let him do it?" I demanded, leaning down until our faces were inches apart. "Why did you sit there, on Thanksgiving, watching him crack my head against the sideboard? Why did you look at your bleeding child and say, *'You brought this on yourself'?"*
Eleanor’s one visible eye flared with a sickening intensity. "Because you did! Every breath you took in that house brought his wrath closer to our door! Every time you spoke with that arrogant, aristocratic tone, every time you excelled at school, every time you looked at him with those damn Croft eyes—you reminded him that he was raising Julian Croft’s child! He knew he was sleeping with a dead woman’s shadow, and he beat you because he was too terrified to touch me!"
"You used me as a shield," I whispered.
"I gave you life!" she shrieked, straining against the leather straps until the buckles creaked. "You were supposed to die in that French clinic! I took you! I gave you a home, an identity, a name!"
"You gave me a monster for a father, and a spectator for a mother."
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"And look what you did with it!" Eleanor spat blood onto my boots. "You burned down Vance. You burned down the banks. And now Julian is here. Do you think he’s going to hug you, Helena? Do you think a Croft knows how to love? He’s going to carve your eyes out of your skull to unlock his treasury, and he will throw your corpse into the Rhine just like he threw your real mother’s!"
The heavy double doors behind us swung shut with a resounding thud.
