Page 48 of The Villains We Make

“I can’t promise anything until I know.”

“Silas—”

“Fucking tell me!”

He leans back in his chair again, resigned now. “This… this is the reason for all of it. When I found out Claire was pregnant, I assumed the baby was mine. Of course, I did. We’d been careful. So careful. But accidents happen and I just assumed…” He shakes his head. “When Ophelia was born, well, all you could see in her was her mother. I didn’t know…”

“A lot of babies don’t look like their parents,” I hear myself say, wanting to believe it because what is coming, what I am waiting to hear? I don’t want to hear it. I want to be wrong.

“Do you see anything of me in her now?” he asks although he’s not really expecting an answer. “I should have known, I guess. Suspected. If she’d told me, maybe… It doesn’t matter now, though. Gordon found out. He must have. It explained things. Claire was always his favorite. His golden child."

“Who is he?” I ask tightly because now he’s going off on a tangent. “Who is Ophelia’s biological father?”

When I meet his eyes, I see a man who is out of options, who thought he could take a secret to his grave and protect the daughter he loves. But secrets don’t work that way. Especially dark ones.

Horatio shakes his head. “I wonder sometimes if it wasn’t Gordon who created the monster. His affections were very clear.”

“Horatio.”

He faces me dead on, eyes shadowed.

“Say it. Who is her biological father?”

“Silas—”

“Fucking say it.”

“Chandler,” he says flatly.

To think it is one thing. To guess it. To hear it, though, and to know it as fact, it’s another thing altogether.

“Chandler Carlisle-Bent hated his half-sister. He despised her, Silas. He raped her over months and months, and I never even saw it. Never saw what was right in front of my eyes.”

Christ. Fuck. I push my hands into my hair. My chair scrapes loudly against the floor as I stand. “It can’t?—”

“Chandler Carlisle-Bent isn’t Ophelia’s uncle. He’s her father.”

17

SILAS

Horatio is still talking. I hear him, but it’s background noise.

“It’s how I managed to keep us hidden from the old man. It’s how I had enough money to do it.”

Chandler Carlisle-Bent isn’t Ophelia’s uncle. He’s her father.

Blood pulses through my veins, pounds against my ears. I want to unhear this. I want it to not be true.

“I blackmailed Chandler and honestly, he was happy to have her gone. He paid. For nearly two years, he paid.”

Chandler Carlisle-Bent isn’t Ophelia’s uncle. He’s her father.

“I stopped asking for money after she drowned herself. It took me that long… Jesus Christ.”

Horatio stops. I look at him, finally, and he looks about a decade older than he did when I walked in here.

“What are you going to do?” he asks me.

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