Page 111 of Boiling Point
“I’mout of line?” He stepped closer. I caught the bite of aftershave, the sour drift of whiskey. “You can’t even see the line. You never could.” He took a step back and gave me a once-over, all clinical disdain. “Or could it be that you’ve knocked her up?”
The words hit like a whipcrack, every old wound rising at once. I lunged—fast, thoughtless. The decanter rattled as my fist stopped just shy of his jaw. I could picture it—his bones cracking, blood blooming, my raw, fleeting satisfaction. None of the rules we’d grown up with—not age, etiquette, discipline—held a candle to the heat flaring in me.
“No,” I spat, my hand trembling an inch from his face. “She’s not pregnant, you absolute bastard.” My breath tore in and out, wild and raw. I swallowed hard, the taste of blood sharp in my throat. “Say one more word about her—about us—and I’ll put you through that fucking window.”
James didn’t flinch. Not even a tick in his jaw. “Go on,” he said, almost gently. “One more mess for me to clean up.”
My fist hovered, suspended between impulse and consequence. The past unspooled—the somber pageantry atClaire’s funeral, the stinging shame of my first Oxford faculty meeting after the tabloids bled our story down every corridor. Humiliation, helplessness, rage—seething in my temples, cracking down my wrists like cold fire. I wanted to hit him. For the world to fracture beneath my knuckles.
But I didn’t. Not for him. Not for the ancestral ghosts in the walls. For myself. For Gabrielle. Because striking him would mean he’d won. It would make me the beast he always said I was.
I let my hand fall, slow and controlled, and stepped back. My chest shook with the effort to leash the rest of me.
“When are you leaving?” James asked, like it had just occurred to him, voice flat with boredom.
“Not soon enough.”
He nodded, lips twisting into a sneer masquerading as a smile. “Good. And when you do, feel free to make it permanent. I’m sure no one will mind.” A pause, just long enough for the venom to seep in. “And when I finally have my way, every door here will be shut in your face. So, go on—shoo.”
“Counting your inheritance a bit prematurely, aren’t we?”
“I wouldn’t say that. But I doubt you’ve noticed.”
“Noticed what?”
“Typical,” he scoffed. “You’ve been too busy fucking students to see a thing.”
“Noticed what?” I asked again, stepping in.
James studied me, head cocked, and gave a short, humorless laugh. “Father is upstairs in his room. You should go see him.” He paused. “If you can tear yourself away.”
He didn’t wait for a response. Just turned and walked out, leaving the door ajar.
I stayed rooted for a breath, pulse still pounding, then pushed off the sideboard.
Upstairs, the corridor was hushed, the air different—warmer, stuffy. I knocked once on Father’s door, then let myself in.
The room was dim, curtains half-drawn against the midday light, the air heavy with the faint metallic drift of oxygen and disinfectant. My father lay propped against a bank of pillows in the great four-poster bed, its carved mahogany posts dwarfing his frame. His pajamas were crisp, the dressing gown belted neatly, but the fabric hung loose, no longer fitted to the man who’d once filled them out with authority. A thin cannula looped over his ears and into his nostrils, the clear tubing snaking down to a portable oxygen concentrator. A youngish nurse in a blue uniform—unfamiliar, likely agency—hovered near the bedside, checking the IV flow and making quiet notations on a digital tablet.
I stood there for a moment, unable to summon the right greeting. I hadn’t seen him in bed since he’d shattered his ankle on a fox hunt two decades ago. Even then, he’d looked ferocious. Now he looked…small. Gray. His eyes were still sharp, but the skin around them had folded and thinned, like parchment baked too long in the sun.
I hovered in the doorway, caught between embarrassment and something colder. No one had warned me.
“What’s all this?” I managed, the words brittle as chalk.
“You’re the academic, Callum,” Father rasped. “Surely you don’t need it explained to you.”
I pulled a chair to the bedside. “A little wouldn’t hurt.”
Father took a deep breath, followed by a series of hacking coughs. “Lung cancer.” He said it without drama, like he was reporting the price of copper or an overnight devaluation of the pound. The nurse glanced up, then returned to her work, the tablet’s blue glow casting her face in spectral relief against the half-light.
“Stage?” I heard myself ask, clinical and dry. I hated everything about my voice just then.
“Four.” He held up four skeletal fingers, as if the number itself were distasteful. “It’s been a busy quarter.”
I pressed my palms to my knees. “When were you planning to tell me?”
He tilted his head, almost surprised. “When there was a point to it. What would you have done with the information, Callum? Booked an earlier flight?”
