Page 98 of Trapped with the Forbidden Duke
“You have some nerve to walk up to me and my wife after everything that happened,” Lucien seethed. “Approaching her is bad enough when I purposefully did not invite you to our wedding, but to come near me…” He shook his head, dismayed. “Uncle, I cannot fathom it.”
“And I am sorry for the intrusion,” Barnard offered. “But I have attempted to reach out, to make amends. I asked you to come to Katherine’s funeral so we might meet, perhaps share a drink—speak about everything.”
“Speak?” Lucien laughed. “Barnard, the problem is that youneverspoke. You remained silent and complicit. And when you realized how easily I could cast you out of my life, you crawled back with written apologies, but you never once came to Stormhold.”
“I assumed that I was not welcome.”
“You would have been,” Lucien snapped. “Once upon a time, you would have been. But not now, not when you have decided to stick with stale, distant apologies. My aunt is dead, and I can only be grateful that I do not have to endure knowing that she lives another day to possibly hurt others.”
“You do not mean that,” Barnard said, his voice filled with agony. “Lucien, she was my wife. We all but raised you as our own.”
“Youmight have tried to, but she…” Lucien spat, picturing Katherine in his mind. “She wanted me out of the way.”
“No, Lucien. No. I do not believe it was as rotten as that. Katherine loved you. Why have you never seen that?”
Lucien reared back. “How can you say that to me, knowing what she put me through? I can barely stand to be around my cousins because I despise their mother, because of the strainshehad created between the three of us. You cannot look me in the eye and defend her.”
His voice cracked with old pain that he had always done well to bury. It had remained buried—until he had kept seeing his cousins, and now his uncle, and he was not sure how much more he could endure.
“Lucien, please, you must listen?—”
“I listened plenty when I was seventeen, Barnard!” Lucien snapped. “Your remorse was not enough to stop her from putting her plan in motion. You knew long before I overheard that conversation, yet you continued to look the other way,” he scoffed, shaking his head. “She would have gone through with it, you know.”
“I do not believe she would have,” Barnard insisted. “It was not in her nature to kill.”
“Why did my father die, Uncle Barnard? How, and why?”
“It—It was something he ingested, was it not?” Barnard looked genuinely confused as he looked around, as if trying to find the answer. “Something from a meal, or a plant in a drink he had at a ball.”
“No,” Lucien whispered, pain pricking his heart. “It’s not a plant in a drink he had at a ball. He ingestedpoisonthat was administered by your late wife. Yourown brother, Barnard—she killed your brother. And when she succeeded?—”
“Please, do not,” Barnard pleaded, his voice low. “Do not speak of her that way.”
Lucien ignored him, lost in the confrontation he had never let himself have, spurred on by rage and betrayal.
“When she succeeded, she turned to his only living heir when he came of age. I suppose before I turned eighteen, she had hopedI would die in some other way. Leave the dukedom ready for her beloved golden boy, Allan. But when I did not get out of her way conveniently, she took it into her own hands. Every night, she poisoned me, Barnard—pretending to help me with grief, with stress, with the loneliness of not having a relationship with my cousins becausesheprevented it.”
He choked, a cry bubbling up his throat.
“You… you sat with me night after night, after I was sick, knowing why, knowing because of whom, and now you look me in the eye and tell me that she was not such a person.”
The pain he had ignored for so many years had festered without him addressing it, and it all spilled out, dark and oozing. His uncle had been blinded by his love for Katherine, having courted her since her debut.
But Barnard was a fool, even with his wife gone, for he could not speak the truth openly.
“I tried to apologize, Lucien,” was all he repeated.
“That woman forced me to unknowingly ingest substances that would have killed me,” Lucien hissed. “She let me become almost addicted to it—both a poison and an antidote, for it helped and hindered me at different times. A cycle she forced on my body. And yet she herself was the poison all along, and she has poisonedyou.”
“Nephew,” Barnard said quietly.
Lucien only shook his head, his lips pressed together. Everything rose up, spilling out of him in a wave he could not quite control. He was vulnerable, cut open, and he did not know how to close it all up.
“I have tried to keep my wife away from you all because she is everything good in my life, and you are all a very terrible reminder that you keep defending a woman who tried to kill me. Do you know how that feels, Uncle? I was seven years old, grieving my father, and thinking that there was hope in my new family. Cousins that could be my friends—only to be met with closed doors, a locked bedroom at times, and an aunt who told me I was not good enough to play with her children. I thought perhaps my uncle and aunt could be my guardians. Do you know how betrayed I felt to learn that I would not find safety with them? That they were not there to protect me, as they ought to?”
“Of course, we wanted to protect you,” his uncle told him.
Lucien laughed bitterly, shaking his head. “No. No, you did not.”
