He Chose the Girl Who Tried to Kill Him novel · Chapter 14 of 24

Chapter 14: The Brother's Bargain

Tobias's POV

I found my brother where I knew I would, in the glass office above the ore dock.

He had his boots on the desk and a tin cup of coffee in his hand.

I had not been invited there in eleven years either.

Nobody stopped me on the stairs.

The clerks looked up at my face and looked down again, because I have the old man's jaw and they could count.

"Tobias," Langston said, and swung his boots off the desk. "You look like death. Sit. Have you eaten?"

"You let her go."

"I did."

"At four in the morning, in her nightdress, in frost."

"I gave her a candle. She wouldn't take the boots." He set down the cup. "She had to walk to you on her own feet, Toby. If I'd carried her, she'd have thrown the letter in the lake."

I stayed standing.

Through the glass behind him a freighter was taking on coal, and the dust drifted up in the cold.

"You knew what it said," I said.

"I have known what it said for two years."

"You drove her."

"Yes."

He said it so plainly that I had no answer ready.

I had come to hear him lie.

"She sat beside me in the cab," Langston said. "She had a clean collar on and her mother's shawl."

He looked at his hands.

"She held my sleeve at the corner of Case Avenue and asked if it would hurt."

"And?"

"I said no, because I'd been told no."

"By whom?"

He looked at the ceiling.

"I won't say it to you. Say it to her, if you want. Ask Adaline whose carriage brought her to the church."

"You're protecting Severance."

"I'm protecting a loan." His mouth went crooked. "Four hundred thousand dollars, and Mother says we'd be sold up in a month."

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