Page 88 of Control's Undoing

Xavier smiled—more like bared his teeth—at her.“That’s not what he’s most known for.”

“Mm-hmm.”

“Sweltan,” Colum said, ignoring them.“It means dying.”

That sobered the mood.

“Studies of the dying,” Xavier said softly, his heart aching for a man he’d never known but who meant so much to so many.He opened the book, showing that the inside was handwritten rather than printed.“I only skimmed a few pages, but I think this was written when he lived in Paris, which is where he died.”

“We…did it,” Annie said slowly.“Mission accomplished.”Her voice was sad, though she’d tried to force cheer into the words.

“I’ll call—” Colum started.

“Not yet.Let me read,” Xavier said, because once again, he had a feeling…

Three hours later—after he’d ignored offers of tea, coffee, and water but eaten the piece of toast Annie had shoved between his teeth and drunk the water Colum thrust at him—Xavier sat back.

“This is Wilde’s,” he confirmed.“And it’s the last piece.”

“So we’re done,” Annie said.

“The last piece.Not the final piece.”Xavier raised his brows, looking to Colum.

“Ah shite.We’re missing a middle bit?”Colum slumped back on the couch, where he sat beside Annie.

“Yes.This was written after he’d been released from prison and moved to France.I think it was written in the final months of his life, when he was destitute and dying alone in Paris.”Xavier touched the book softly.“There’s a note from Robbie at the end, saying that Oscar asked him to have it bound and sent to Florence in England after his death.”

Xavier got up to pace.

“But there’s a gap, no, a chasm, between the end of the New York section and this.Possibly the most important section, because I believe he wrote the New York section before his legal troubles in England began.He would have certainly continued to write, to lay everyone’s shame and secrets bare, while his own were being splashed across the papers.”

“We’ve found, at best, three fourths of the book,” Annie said.

“Yes.”

“Feck,” Colum muttered, but there was a smile curling his lips.

Xavier understood, because he didn’t want this to end either.

“Okay, then we’re back to our previous problem.”Annie rose, stretching and then walking over to take Xavier’s seat to start flipping through the slim book herself.“Part one had a clue—multiple clues actually, that led to part two, but there were no clues to part three.We worked the problem from the other end and got the final piece, but where do we go from here?”

“Xavier?”Colum asked.“Where do we go from here?”

“Bram,” he said without hesitation.“Oscar loved them.Florence broke his heart, and it took him longer to forgive her.But I wonder if Bram was his first male lover.While he was being persecuted and eventually prosecuted for homosexuality, would he have gone back to the first man he loved?Maybe the first man he fucked?”Xavier looked at Colum in question.

“I would,” Colum said softly.

Xavier’s heart gave two hard thumps inside his chest.

He’s already in a trinity.He’s married.

“Problem,” Annie declared, breaking the tension of the moment.“Bram Stoker’s papers and books would have been studied, auctioned, and placed in museums.Most of Florence’s things were personal and mundane, which explains why they stayed with her family—undoubtedly their descendants were more focused on Bram’s papers, so Florence’s were shuttled off to her nieces and nephews on the Balcombe side.”

Xavier deflated a little, though part of him was glad it wouldn’t be this straightforward.It meant more time with them.

“Well that would explain it, wouldn’t it?”Colum said, then shrugged.“Whoever asked about how much a new Wilde book would be worth on the dark web must have that piece, which was with Bram Stoker’s things.”

Annie grabbed her computer.“But the timing… Why now?”

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