Page 52 of Rejected
“It’s nice and cryptic,” Jo folded the perfumed paper and put it away. She bit into her apple with a most satisfying crunch. “Says nothing, really. Except that she has betrayed me.”
The last they had heard from her, around Christmas, Amy was perfectly happy in Paris, and had no plans on returning for the London season. Aunt March had grown increasingly frail, and they preferred not to travel.
“She haswhat?” Sainted John was affronted.
“Pray do not get excited, my lord,” Jo told him affectionately. He loved it when she called him ‘her lord’ like that. Meg thought it childish. Even now, she was trying so hard not to roll her eyes, she looked most comical. “Amy is given to the dramatic. I am sure she will reveal all in due course.”
But she didn’t.
After that short note, there was only silence.
Until her brother, Viscount Vidal, came back on leave for a fortnight in the middle of January.
…
He was thin as a rail, his skin slightly darker, and his hair was shaved close to his head, like a soldier’s.
He said he was a general; he looked as if he had been through hell.
“I have been a despicable brother to you, my dear,” he said, with a slight tone of his London-days affectation. But his was now a soldier’s voice, and he could not go back to lounging about. His intonation was low, sharp and quick.
“Not despicable,” Jo said. “Just non-existent.”Absent.
He raised an eyebrow. “Like our father, d’ you mean?” he asked, watching her. A sudden vulnerability flashed in his eyes, and Jo caught in them a glimpse of open expression she had rarely, if ever, been allowed to see.
“Not like father,” she said.
“Right,” Justin smirked, closing up as quickly as he had opened up. “I am far too debauched to be like him.”
“You are not beyond hope, Justin.”
“I am afraid all the rumors about me are true, Jo,” he said quietly. “I am just as depraved as society believes me to be.”
“I do not believe you to be depraved,” she replied quickly.
“Oh, but I am.”
He sounded so jaded, Jo’s heart bled for him.
She was silent, and she hoped he couldn’t tell how devastated his careless words made her, but, oddly, he appeared to be watching her. That was the strange thing about her brother: everything about him seemed to be carefully curated so that he would appear unaffected of anything or anyone. Cold, hard, indifferent. Uncaring. But he did care.
He did care about some things, and maybe her opinion was one of them.
She winced. His face went back to showing no emotion, trying hard to look as if he did not care that he had become the thing he had hated most. But Jo knew better—she could tell how disgusted he was with himself, and that gave her hope.
“You have barely been anything at all to me for years,” she said and to her surprise, she saw something like sharp pain flash across his face.
His features, at one time so much like her own, belonged now to the face of a stranger. Hardened by war and arrogance. Justin hung his head.
“I guess Father was right, wasn’t he? I am good for nothing, after all.” He smiled and it was ugly.
“I did not say that, Justin,” Jo interrupted him before he could say more. “Please, don’t think that I—”
“I know very well that I am beyond redemption. Hated by my peers, by society, and by my own family.” Apparently, he would not be stopped.
“I do not hate you, by Jove!” she exclaimed.
The viscount chuckled softly. “Don’t be vulgar, sister.”
