Page 156 of Unholy Obsession

I freeze.

Holy shit.

Rotterdam wasn’t lying.

My father looks… already half-dead. His skin is parchment-thin, stretched too tight over sharp bones, veins dark and bulging beneath the surface like cracks in marble. His once-imposing frame has collapsed in on itself, his body devoured by this disease until all that remains is a ghost of the man who once ruled with an iron fist.

I’ve seen death before. Up close. I’ve prayed over men whose bodies were already cooling and given last rites to people who had nothing left but regret and time slipping through their fingers.

But nothing prepared me for this.

Nothing prepared me for seeing the monster diminished.

“Well? What are you doing just standing out there glaring at me from the doorway?” he barks, his voice low and rough, but the weakness is there. The frayed edges of it. The decay.

I realize I’m being rude, gaping at him like this. I force myself to step across the room, closer to his bed.

I’m supposed to be playing the role of dutiful son. But it’s a role I’ve never played before.

A good son—someone who has taken an oath to serve others—should bow their head and offer grace, even to a vile man in his last hours.

I’ve spoken to criminals with life sentences, offering them counsel and a listening ear.

But my father?

Why, God?

Why one test after another of my faith?

First, you took Moira. And now you ask me to forgive this man?

My fists clench at my sides. I swallow hard, still unable to look him in the eyes, my gaze landing somewhere in the landscape of his sunken chest.

He’s dying.

The words echo in my head, but they don’t feel real.

This is Mad Blackwood. The man who made himself king. The man who controlled every room he walked into and every person in his orbit. A man who bent the world to his will because he could.

And now he is frail. Mortal.Small.

For years, he was the shadow looming over me, and now…

Now he’s just another dying man.

I tell myself I should feel relief. I tell myself that this is justice.

But I don’t know what I feel.

I don’t know what I’msupposedto feel.

His tired eyes finally look my way again, the only acknowledgment that I’ve entered the room.

“Your mother was the only one of all those bitches who wasn’t grubbing after my money,” he says, voice rasping like dry leaves against the pavement. “That’s why I married her. That makes you the only one of my children who’s not a bastard. Which means”—he hacks out a rough cough—“you’re my only true heir.”

I close my eyes.

Of course.

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