Page 56 of Nineteen Eighty

She felt Edouard step to her side, but he kept his silence.

“I just woke up from a goddamn nap, Maureen, so you’ll need to be more speci—”

“Soren!” she yelled. And then again, and again. There was power in saying his name. A power born in love, and now, death. “My Soren!”

Cordelia’s jaw dropped. “Charles. You didn’t.”

“Like you fucking know anything,” he hissed at her, descending a couple more steps. His bare feet gripped the old patterned carpet, as if rooting himself in place in defense. “Maureen, let’s go in the parlor, and we can talk there.”

“I’m not going anywhere with you now, or ever again!” she cried out. “And anything we’re going to say is good enough for our spouses, wouldn’t you say, Huck? Wouldn’t you say that if someone is going to commit a crime they should be willing to own it? Not run away from it?”

A visible change came over her brother. His façade melted, replaced by annoyance. “Jesus, Maureen, I wasn’t the one having babies with my fucking lover now, was I?”

“Don’t put this on Maureen,” Edouard said, tensing at her side. She almost loved him then. She could almost forget what he, too, had done to her.

“And you?” Charles took another step down. “I should take admonishments from you, the rapist?”

“I know the wrong I’ve done your sister. Do you?”

“Wrong?” Charles repeated, cackling. “All I do, all I do is look after my family, and I’m the bad guy? Me?”

Cordelia looked up at him. “Come on, Charles. Doesn’t it get exhausting? Pretending that’s why you do it?”

“Fuck you, Cord.”

“She’s right, Charles. She might be the cunt who once kidnapped our Lizzy, but she’s right about this,” Maureen said. “She’s had your number all along, hasn’t she?”

“You want me to tell the world? I’ll scream it from the rooftops, Maureen.” Charles leaned his head back, spreading his arms. “Yes, world, I did it! Once again, I fucking took care of my family’s problems, and once again, they come not to thank me but to cry about it! To fucking whine about problems they created and I fixed! Yes, I killed Soren! I killed that fucking teacher! I killed the assholes who raped Evie! I killed the professor who took advantage of Colleen, and when that bitch married Au—"

“Stop before you say—” Cordelia warned, but there was no stopping Charles.

“Ekatherina was a fucking cancer to our brother, and I was the only one with the goddamn balls to do something about it.”

Maureen’s horror deepened, cutting a wide path around her, one that, though she didn’t realize it then, would become permanent.

Her brother wasn’t a misguided protector.

He was a monster.

“He didn’t mean that,” Cordelia said, barely above a whisper.

“Oh, he meant it,” Maureen said, backing away so quickly she stumbled. “He meant every word. He’s always meant it. He always will.”

“Go on, tell our pussy of a brother! I don’t fucking care! What’s he going to do, Maureen? What are you going to do? Nothing! Nothing, and that’s always been the fucking problem, and why you needed me!”

Charles beat his chest with the words, and at last Maureen knew coming here was a mistake, but she could unwind it.

She could unwind Charles from her life.

She could unwind it all, along with her love for a man who would never see justice for his murder.

“You’re dead to me,” she said as she fell out the front door. “You are not Alain’s godfather. You’ll never see any of us again.”

Edouard caught her on the porch and held her close to his chest as she released the last of her sobs into his unexpected, but welcome strength.

Colleen was still so shaken up from her first visitor that the second one caught her off guard.

Elizabeth’s face was heavy as she let herself in, walking past Colleen.

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