Page 155 of Vicious Knight

Levgen set Dad up. It was him all along.

Him.

Thorne holds up the picture and the contract for us all to see and Mom looks like she might fade away to nothing.

Defeat has stolen the strength from Levgen’s expression and he looks cornered.

Cornered and trapped in shock that Thorne could have found out his dark, dirty secrets.

“The only reason I haven’t killed you yet is because I’m not going to do that in front of your wife and daughter.” The calm mask cloaking Thorne’s tone speaks of his danger. “With my father out of the way, you took his place in the auxiliary leadership. He’d referred you before, so they were all too accepting of you when he died. But that is just the top of the shit. All of that was done for one single reason.”

“What reason?” Mom asks, but she’s glaring at Levgen.

“To marry you,” Thorne replies.

Mom and I both look at Thorne now.

“What do you mean?” Mom’s voice is so weak I can barely hear it.

“He killed his first wife. She didn’t die of an illness. She was poisoned. He poisoned her and made it look like she died of natural causes.” Thorne continues staring at Levgen with that murderous expression in his eyes. “Why don’t you tell the family you stole from your best friend what you did to get them.”

My legs turn to water, and I feel like I might wither away. I look at Levgen, my brain struggling to comprehend what Thorne is saying. And yet something sinister whispers to me that I knew things were off. Not exactly about the way he helped us, but about him.

I was too young to really understand, but it was strange how he married Mom with ease and then they were a couple. I remember her looking awkward around him for years, but he was never like that. He fell into the role of the husband from day one.

“I saw you first,” Levgen says to Mom in a tight voice. “I met you before him.”

The him he’s referring to is my father.

“But you introduced us.” Mom’s voice trembles.

“I did, but I didn’t know you were going to fall for him. I couldn’t marry you because I was promised to Susana. I married her anyway but I always planned to kill her. When she died, my next step was to get you back from my thieving best friend.” When he blinks it’s like that mask of the savior slips off his face and I see him for who he really is. “First, I had to get in with the senior Knights so I would be allowed to marry you. My family inheritance rules are strict and I would always be bound to have an arranged marriage with anyone who was of age in Susana’s family. Unless I was a senior Knight. Nicholai Ivanov was in the process of helping me accomplish that goal when his wife and daughter discovered what I did to my clients. That’s why I had them killed, but I left a loose end.”

“Me.” Thorne gives him a mirthless grin.

“I wasn’t worried about a child but it turns out I should have been. For years I plotted to get rid of Gustave. The opportunity came about at the palace two years after I was rid of Nicholai’s family. I set him up to take the fall for the murders but I left another loose end.” Now he looks at me.

“You put me in danger,” I choke out.

“You weren’t supposed to be there. Your mother was called in to work at the hospital and your father had to take care of you.”

“I can’t believe this is really true.” Mom swallows, shaking her head. “You did this?”

“I’m sorry my love.” Levgen stares back at her. “I’ve always been in love with you and all I wanted was to be with you. You should have always been my wife, and Ivy should have been my daughter.”

“So you took me away from Gustave? You put me and my daughter in the worst kind of danger.”

“I set things up so the only thing you could do was turn to me. I thought staging your deaths would have taken care of everything. It did. Until now.”

“Nobody ever suspected you of anything, but you were the puppet master,” Thorne grates out. His free hand is balled into a tight fist at his side. “You hired mercenaries who pride themselves on working under the radar to do your dirty work. But you slipped up.”

“Ivy was the wild card.” Again he looks at me. “You weren’t supposed to be at the palace with your father that night, so you saw things you shouldn’t have seen. I didn’t know until days ago that you’d identified the scar-faced man as a Knight, and I didn’t know you heard his death chant.”

“Those two little details put everything together the moment I told Thorne.” I stare at my stepfather, not wanting to believe that he’s really this monster, but he is. “Nothing made sense until we spoke and realized we’d seen the same man.”

“Yes.”

“Then our search for the scar-faced man got you in trouble because you’d hired him for the jobs,” Thorne fills in. “You sent me the message warning me away from finding him because he was in touch with you.”

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