My Stepfather Sold Me at the Card Table, and the Man Who Won Me Never Looked My Way novel · Chapter 9 of 24
Chapter 9: The Study
Cormick's POV
At three in the morning I sat in the study with the old man's ledger open under the lamp, and I didn't read it.
I hadn't read it in years.
I kept it open the way another man keeps a photograph.
The study is a small square room at the front of the house, with a desk, a leather chair and one window onto the headframe.
The old boss died in the bed down the hall.
I was thirty-one, and he gave me the house, the crew and a sentence said over his last breath.
Bram is the only man who will never leave you.
He said it kindly, and I believed him.
I sat with my palms on the paper and thought about a form.
I had read it at the card table with the whole room watching.
I read the word BONDED, and then the name after it, typed clean, and the name was hers.
It was not my form.
I knew that in the first line, because I had never printed one in my life.
I knew whose it was by the second line.
By the third my hand had gone still on the paper, because I am a man who does not move when he is frightened.
Bram had dealt that hand.
Dermot Hennessy could not have lost nineteen thousand dollars in two years without a friend to stake him.
The friend had been holding the deck.
I sat with the pen warm in my fingers and thought it through in one breath.
A bonded person is the Holder's household.
That is the crew's old law from the company-house days.
Nobody touches her, questions her or moves her without the Holder's word.
Bram had printed that form for himself.
He had slid it to the head of the table only because the head of the table signs.
The rest of this chapter is part of the paid portion of the series. Chapters 1–6 of My Stepfather Sold Me at the Card Table, and the Man Who Won Me Never Looked My Way are free to read — start from the beginning, then unlock the rest with coins in the app.
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