Disavow

by Halle, Karina

  I just don’t know how to approach it. I shouldn’t be afraid of my father. I want to stand up to him and be defiant in my feelings for her. I want him to know that I will choose her over him every time.

  I know I need to play my cards right, though. Because this isn’t just your normal father-son relationship.

  I remember what he said earlier this year when I made it clear that I wasn’t going to hurt Seraphine or collect her for his own revenge. He told me he has every means to turn around and pin Ludovic’s death on me, even though there isn’t a shred of evidence, even though I had nothing to do with it.

  The truth is, I didn’t even know what he was going to do that night at the masquerade ball. I was under the impression that Father just wanted to sabotage things, make Ludovic sick and unstable so that he could take over the company, so that I would rise in the ranks with Olivier’s shares gone. He had told me he had a plan to take his brother out of the picture “for now,” and the thought of him murdering him didn’t even cross my mind.

  But then Ludovic dropped dead in front of my eyes, while my father was grinning at him like a fucking skull, and then I knew. I knew immediately what my father had done. Whether it was poison or other means, who knows. The autopsy was no doubt paid off. I just knew that my father had murdered his own brother in cold blood, and I had no choice but to stand by and look and pretend that this didn’t really happen. Pretend that Seraphine’s wild accusations were part of an overactive imagination. I had to pretend that when I was helping my father, I was doing it for the good of myself, the good of the company.

  So much pretending. It’s like the mask I wore that night Ludovic died had never come off. It hadn’t come off until I let Gabrielle into my life, and she removed it with her beauty and vulnerability and strength. And she liked the man she saw underneath, a man I don’t know.

  A man I want to know. A man who is still looking for something to stand for.

  There is a change coming now, the same change that I felt before. It’s unstoppable. And when it happens, I will never be the same. This family will never be the same. The Dumont brand will never be the same.

  In the end, that might just be a good thing.

  It’s a cloudy day, so the halls are dark as I make my way into the kitchen. As I head toward it, I think I hear a noise from the study.

  I go over and peer around the corner, seeing Gabrielle standing by the books, running her hands over them as if in a trance.

  I stand there in the doorway, watching her for a few moments. Usually she’s so aware of her surroundings, it surprises me that she hasn’t seen me yet.

  Then I realize there are tears running down her face.

  Immediately, I spring across the study toward her, having to step back just in time before it looks too intimate.

  “What happened?” I whisper.

  She’s holding the book with the bullet hole in it. “Did your gun do this?”

  I blink at her, shake my head absently. “No, it was Blaise’s gun. Or Seraphine’s. Mine was in the desk.”

  “This desk?” she asks and opens the drawer. The gun is gone.

  “I had it there just in case. It’s upstairs now, you know this. Why are you crying?”

  I glance over at the hall and the staircase, but I see no one. I reach for her, cupping her beautiful, ethereal face in my hands and wiping away her tears.

  “It’s nothing,” she says softly, her eyes downcast.

  “I’ve never seen you cry,” I tell her, and it’s true. It’s breaking my heart. “It has to be something. Please tell me.”

  She swallows loudly. “It’s my mother.”

  “Is she okay?”

  She shakes her head, still avoiding my gaze. “No. And she’ll never be. But there’s nothing I can do. I have no choice.”

  “No choice for what?” I ask her. When she doesn’t answer me, when another tear drops to the floor, I put my hands on her shoulders and shake her slightly. “No choice for what?”

  “I need to fix this, Pascal,” she whispers, finally looking up at me through wet lashes.

  “Fix what?”

  She clamps her mouth together for a moment, staring at me with such hopefulness that I feel my heart crack, just a little, and then she reaches up and kisses me.

  I kiss her back, tasting her tears, wanting to take away whatever pain she’s feeling. I want to be that one for her, the one to make her nightmares end. I know she has them—we’ve slept together enough times that I’ve seen her thrashing all night, crying out, and when she’s not having a nightmare, she’s sitting up in bed, staring at the wall in the dark for what seems like hours.

  She talks about wanting to fix things, and I get it, I really fucking do, because all I want is to be able to fix her.

  “I have to go,” she says when she pulls away.

  “Where are you going?” I ask, grabbing hold of her hand.

  “I need to try again with my mother,” she says.

  “Will you ever tell me what this is about?”

  “I’d like to,” she says, giving my hand a squeeze while another tear falls from her eyes. A noncommittal answer but I let it go for now.

  Then she stands on her tiptoes, reaching up again to kiss me on the mouth.

  “I love you, Pascal,” she says quietly. “Always believe that.” Then she quickly drops away and hurries out of the room.

  I stand there, stunned.

  Her words feel like a slap in the face, but there’s no pain in them, only pleasure, only this searing, warming convergence around my heart.

  She loves me.

  For some stupid, ill-advised reason, she loves me.

  I’ve always thought of myself as a man too wicked to love and too wicked to be loved, and yet she loves me.

  I don’t even know how to deal with that. I don’t even know how I feel. All I know is that I do feel; I feel more than I ever have before in my whole entire life.

  It took thirty-one years to hear it.

  I wonder how much longer it will take for me to believe it.

  I don’t know how long I stand there in the study, staring at the empty space where she once was. Eventually I have to move, to process, to make sense.

  I’m going to need her to open up to me in every way possible.

  If she truly loves me, there are to be no secrets between us, not even little ones.

  I head out of the study and grab my keys. I exit the house and get into my car and drive off, fast. I need to feel the rush of air, the thrill of speed, something to make sense of what I’m grappling with.

  But as fast as I go on the narrow country roads, I can’t escape what she told me.

  She loves me.

  I can’t outrun that truth.

  She loves me.

  I don’t know how long I drive for, but suddenly I have to pull over into a farmer’s lane, thrusting the car in park and putting my head on the steering wheel, trying to breathe.

  She loves me.

  I need to let that feeling—that it’s real, that I deserve it—into my heart, even just a fraction. I need to be able to accept it, or what we have is never going to work.

  I need to figure out how I feel about her, and I need to tell her with the same conviction that she told me.

  But how do I know if I love her? How do I know what love is? All that I’ve seen of love has been the mask over the lies. Love is a pretty cover-up. Love is what a father denies his son. Love is what a mother gives, but only when you’re good enough. Love is what you tell your wife, knowing she’s playing exactly into your plan. Love is a game, and it’s up to you to stay on top, playing everyone until you’re the only winner.

  I have no idea how much time has passed out there on the side of the road until I notice storm clouds rolling in from the north and the sky growing darker. I glance at my watch and see that it’s already six p.m. I should go back for dinner soon, though I don’t have an appetite at all. Besides, it’s Sunday, which means my mother is cooking, and even
I have better skills than she does. She’s just probably going to drink vodka.

  I drive back and make it home just as rain starts to fall, a late summer thunderstorm rumbling in the distance.

  It matches my chaotic mood.

  I enter the house and go up the stairs to my office. I can hear my mother and father discussing something in the kitchen, something I don’t want any part of, so I sneak past them.

  Even though work was pissing me off earlier, I could use the distraction now. Maybe if I shove everything that just happened to the back of my mind, my subconscious can go to work on it and figure it out. Seems it can be a lot smarter than I give it credit for.

  I open my laptop and see that more emails have piled up. One of them has a Word attachment I have to open, some bullshit for the HR department (seriously, again, it’s a Sunday—since when are the French workaholics?).

  I open up the document, read it through, and then do a virtual signature, only it’s not working.

  I have zero patience with computers. I’m always one second away from either putting my fist through it (which doesn’t work when you have a laptop) or hurling it across the room (which does work very well when you have a laptop).

  Taking a deep breath to steady my patience, I decide to print out the document instead.

  Of course, the printer says there is a queue, though I don’t know how that’s possible, since I don’t remember the last time I printed something out. I’m surprised I even have paper, to be honest, though I figure maybe Gabrielle refilled it for me. She might have been printing out my schedule as well.

  I push the rest of the backed-up documents to print, and they start to go through the machine, feeding out blank pages first until it starts to print something. I barely have time to read it before it falls to the floor, but in that brief glance, I see something that makes my skin crawl.

  No.

  It can’t be.

  Holding my breath, I crouch down and pick up the corner of the paper, almost afraid to look at it, for it to tell me the truth.

  I flip it over.

  The paper has the following words printed out on it:

  There’s no place to hide. Soon the letters will end and I’ll be coming for you.

  The letter that was addressed to my father was written on my computer.

  But that’s not the end of it.

  Another letter prints out, and I grab it before it falls.

  Await my instructions or you will lose everything.

  I stare at the papers in my hand, my mind grappling with the truth. I hadn’t seen that last one before. What the fuck?

  What the fuck?

  The third paper falls from the machine, the HR document, but it seems so foreign and trivial to me in light of all this, I let it stay on the floor.

  I take the papers over to my desk and then start going through my Word files on the computer, trying to find the source of them. I don’t find it anywhere in the Word documents, but I find a few in the trash, some of them ones I haven’t seen.

  Who is doing this?

  But the question is futile, because even though I’d like to think my father is the one behind them, even though I wouldn’t know why, there’s only one other person who has access to my computer via password.

  Just then the door to my office flies open, and I have just enough time to slip the papers in my desk and close the documents on the computer.

  It’s my father, dressed in a black suit, like he’s going to a funeral even though it’s Sunday night.

  “Pascal,” he says to me with a stiff smile. “I need to have a word with you.”

  “Now really isn’t a good time,” I tell him, no smile in return. “And there really is such a thing as knocking.”

  “Manners have to take a back seat sometimes,” he says, standing on the other side of the desk and staring down at me. “This is one of those times.”

  His eyes look black, cavernous. It takes a lot to hold his eye contact these days. I know what he’s capable of, and looking into the eyes of the devil is hard when he’s your father.

  “I received some letters,” he says simply, and my heart stills in my chest. I watch, unable to breathe, as he reaches into his suit pocket and pulls out folded slips of paper.

  He places them on the desk and waits for me to unfold them.

  One of them is the one I discovered earlier.

  Await my instructions or you will lose everything.

  Another is the first letter that was sent.

  Then the next.

  And everything that was sent in between, everything I intercepted, everything that wasn’t addressed to anyone.

  Finally, the last one says:

  1692 Rue Saint-Jacques, Sunday 8 p.m.

  “When did you get these?” I ask, hoping my hand isn’t starting to shake.

  “Almost every single day last week.” He pauses. “Since you got back.”

  “Were they addressed to the house?”

  “No. The office.”

  Gabrielle, I think. What are you doing?

  But there is no time to dwell on it.

  The fact is that this whole time, she was lying to me, she was the one sending the letters.

  But why? Why send to me first and then my father?

  Why send them at all?

  “I don’t understand,” I say quietly, not wanting to meet his eyes.

  “I can see that you don’t,” he says, his voice dripping with disappointment. “And that should make me feel better, knowing you’re not the one behind them. But it also makes me see that you’re just too stupid to catch on.”

  I look up sharply. “Too stupid?”

  “You really have no clue, do you?”

  I shake my head, my eyes narrowing. “Enlighten me.”

  “You really don’t know who would bother sending me these letters? These immature, laughable, naive little letters?”

  I don’t want to say it. “Seraphine?” I ask.

  “Seraphine knows better than that. And this isn’t her style. And before you come up with any other idiotic answers, no, it isn’t your brother and it’s not Olivier. It’s not your mother and it’s not Jolie. Who else does that leave?”

  Oh, fuck.

  He knows.

  “Gabrielle,” I whisper, staring out the window, watching the rain hit the panes.

  “Yes, your little lover girl.”

  I glare at him, but he laughs in response, showing the palms of his hands. “Easy there. Do you think I’m dumb, son? Do you think it wasn’t obvious the way you look at each other, like lovesick teenagers? Did you think it wasn’t suspicious that you took her to Mallorca? Do you think I didn’t just catch the two of you kissing in the study?”

  I gulp.

  “The biggest disappointment,” he continues, clasping his hands at his front, “is that you didn’t even bother to hide it very well. I warned you, Pascal. I told you to stay away from her. I told you we had unfinished business, and you went against my orders anyway. I don’t take that lightly.”

  I ignore that. “Why would she send you letters? What did you do?”

  “Nothing,” he says. “I also told you she was crazy. Here’s the proof.” He gestures to the letters. “Who would do such a moronic thing, as if it wasn’t obvious it was amateur hour? Oh, she would have gotten caught eventually.”

  “Caught for what? These letters aren’t exactly extortion. They ask for nothing.”

  “You’re right. They are false threats, meant to scare, I suppose. Only speaks of her intellect at the moment. Surely you’ve noticed that she’s not right in the head? Or were you too busy getting your cock sucked for that?”

  “Yeah, I probably was,” I tell him, sick of this. “Is that a problem? Does it make you feel old and powerless because she’s sucking me off and not you?”

  Oh, that gets him good. Like I just backhanded him, followed by some spit. The way he sneers makes me realize I’ve got to be on guard.

  “You think you’re
so smart, Pascal.” He seethes quietly. “You think because you’re young and rich that you’re above it all. I suppose I only have myself to blame for that. I should have treated you like I treated Blaise, hoping you’d grow a pair of balls. But it didn’t work for him, and it probably wouldn’t have worked for you. You’re sheep, son. But you’re my sheep. My flock. And I’m going to teach your girlfriend a lesson. Show her that you have to gain the wolf to gain the wool.”

  Pure, unadulterated heat floods my veins, the anger so sharp and acute that I can scarcely contain it. “You are not to lay a finger on her.”

  He smiles, so casual, so easy, like this is just a game to him. “I’ll try not to, but you never know what you’re capable of in self-defense.”

  Something about that statement makes my subconscious scream, scream that I’m missing something important, that it could be the end of everything.

  “You know why I murdered my own brother?” he asks, and the blunt way he admits it makes whatever I was feeling before fly out the window.

  He’s never said as much to me before.

  Now it’s just out there.

  That can’t be good.

  “I killed him because he was disloyal,” he goes on when I can’t form the words to ask. “He was a traitor to his own blood. Sure, I never liked him. My parents always favored him to the point that it was cruel. They would pit us against each other all the time, kind of the same way we pitted Blaise against you. But I was always curious who would be hungrier for our love. The more my mother loved Ludovic, the more I hated her and him. If she hadn’t died early, I would have killed her myself and had no remorse. Same goes for my father.”

  He sighs and gives me a half smile. “I wouldn’t have felt a thing if I killed them, Pascal. I didn’t feel a thing for Ludovic when I slipped that cyanide into his drink. He deserved to die. Do you know why?”

  It hurts to swallow, and I’m barely able to say, “Because he was disloyal.”