Page 156 of Feed Your Fiends

“You have a son with Madame.” At his confused expression, I say, “Marisol.”

He says nothing, but his eyes say everything.

“I’m not letting you out until you tell me the entire truth, and what choice do you have now? Just me, and unlike you, I can walk out of this room and never come back.”

“You’d leave me here?”

“You choked me. Call me a whore. Your wife accused me of fucking you in the very car that killed her sister. Would I leave you? I wouldn’t even think about you once I crossed that threshold.”

“I didn’t know Marisol was pregnant,” he says finally. He shakes his head, tears rolling down his filthy chin. “I loved her, and she shattered my heart.”

When his eyes flash up to mine again, they’re filled with bitterness, misery and anger. The same anger that led him to kill her.

“She ran away, and she never told me or her parents about the baby. By then, I think she was brainwashed by them. Convinced that I could never be a good partner or father. She came back like nothing happened; even her parents didn’t know she’d given birth. She rejoined society four months later rail-thin, the perfect standard for ballet. No one questioned it.”

“It sounds like she was depressed over leaving her newborn.”

“Depressed?” he hisses. “She was already in a new relationship. She announced her engagement to Bart within two months. I couldn’t believe it. She caved to her parents’ wishes of marrying a blue-blood.”

He can’t believe it? As if he didn’t do something worse.

“And what did you do? Propose to her sister?” I ask in disgust.

“No.” He shakes his white-blonde hair, the strands crusted to his skull in blood. “Even before she ran away, I was working on my future, our future, and fortune. I became someone worthy of her love and her parents' acceptance through real estate. When I approached her again, I knew I had everything in order, finally. I asked her to leave Bart. I asked her to marry me instead, but do you know what she said? That she was happy for me, but that I was no Bart Auclair and that I never would be. After all that time. All that wealth, I still wasn’t good enough for her, but you know who I was good enough for?”

“Delphine. Let me guess, she was right there with a waiting shoulder for you?”

“Delphine was obsessed with her older sister. Her parents were too. She was just the spare.”

That’s what Gant had called himself. He’d related to Delphine. He’d understood her, but would he have understood if he knew what she’d done to Marisol?

“She wanted everything Marisol had. The title, the fame, the accolades. Me. a son. Just like her sister.”

“I thought no one knew of the son? You said you did at first, and neither did her parents.”

“But Delphi knew. She knew Marisol in and out. She couldn’t hide anything from her, much less a baby. Somehow, she found out. ”

I freeze. “Wait…so when did you find out about the baby?”

“Delphine told me the night Marisol announced her engagement to Bart.”

“She didn’t know about it beforehand. She’d been blindsided just like me.”

“And she wanted revenge just like you.”

He nods slowly. “The engagement, compounded with the secret baby, made her spiral. She felt like Mari would never stop punishing her for their parents finding out about me. But had they not found out, I wouldn’t be who I am now. I wouldn’t have become filthy rich just to keep her. Her parents were right about me, I was complacent like my brother.”

Jarett.He still doesn’t know who I am.

“It was Delphine’s idea that we date. She wanted to torture Marisol for everything: their parents favouring her even after her betrayal, Marisol never forgiving her throughout her engagement, marriage, and the birth of her son, Gant. And she could think of one way to do it. To have the son Marisol couldn’t, with me. To have the marriage, Marisol couldn’t have with me. She took the life Marisol dreamed of at some point. And she was right. It worked because once Marisol found out, she never spoke to either of us ever again. Not that Delphine cared. She knew she’d won.”

Revulsion rolls through me. “Don’t put it all on her. You’re sick, too. You wanted to torture her, too, for moving on.”

“She tortured me too! She kept my son away from me!”

“I don’t know why she did that, but her intuition about you was right. You’re a monster.”

“We both were monsters. I was revolting. She was revolting.”

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