Page 67 of The Sinner's Bargain

CHAPTER NINETEEN

THORAN

The steady click of Blue’s heels followed us deeper into the shadows. They stirred the silence and muffled the whispers behind the closed doors.

She didn’t hear them.

I watched her face to be sure, but she focused only on me, on my words. My stories.

My lies.

Lies about Lacroix House and the twisted, evil man who built it.

“That’s sweet,” she whispered when I told her about Hael Lacroix building a castle for his new bride.

I don’t tell her of the graves he tore up. The coffins he raided or the bodies he burned. I don’t tell her he went mad seeing their faces in his sleep, a curse that passed down to every Lacroix thereafter.

“What happened to her?” Blue asked.

“Died,” I tell her.

Blue’s eyes study the delicate curves of my great, great, great, great grandmother’s face immortalized in oil and canvas. She watched us from eyes that always felt a little too real at night.

“She was so beautiful,” Blue said.

“She was grandfather’s whole world,” I murmured. “He couldn’t live with himself after what happened to her.”

Blue sighed, small hand pressed to her chest. “How sad.”

What I didn’t tell her was that Delphine Lacroix died at the hands of her deranged husband. That he had chased her down and crushed her throat with his bare hands. After coming to his senses, Hael threw himself into the swamp, leaving their sleeping children without both parents.

I worked through to my great, great, great grandfather Jeffrey Lacroix, Hael and Delphine’s eldest son. The only child that survived to take claim of the Lacroix fortune.

“What happened to them?” Blue asked, studying the family portrait of Jeffrey and his wife Vittoria and their son Ezra.

“Vittoria died. Jeffrey went on a few more years, but he was killed by his gun backfiring.”

Blue gasped. “Oh, that’s awful. How did she die?”

“She drowned in the lake.” With a cinder block chained around her neck.

I didn’t tell Blue.

“Oh, my goodness,” she breathed.

“Ezra married Catalina. They had two sons. The youngest died during birth with Catalina.”

Blue gasped, hands going to her mouth. “Oh no!”

I moved further along the wall. “Orson, my grandfather, married Elora and had my father and my Uncle Byron.”

Blue’s fingers wrapped around my arm, her eyes desperate looking up at me. “Please tell me they lived to old age.”

My chuckle was void of all humor. “He thought she was cheating on him. He killed her in a fit of jealous rage. Then himself.”

Blue’s shoulders sagged in disappointment, and for the first time since deciding to walk her down the history of my family, I regretted it. I hadn’t meant to upset her. I was trying to warn her why she needed to stay away from me. Why I needed to stay away from her.

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