The Necklace They Gave Me Last novel · Chapter 13 of 24

Chapter 13: The Price

Dermot did not say it was a lie.

He stood in the middle of the marble with his split lip, and he looked at the floor.

Dorian saw it, and he smiled.

"Get out of my house," I said.

"Your house." Dorian pulled his dinner jacket straight. "Enjoy the kitchen staff, sister. They'll clap for anyone who feeds them."

"The driver will take you to a hotel. Your clothes will follow you tomorrow."

He walked to the door with his chin up, and nobody stopped him.

Dorian's two guards from the Marlow Street sidewalk went out after him without being told.

I turned to the staff.

"Go back to bed, all of you," I said. "Thank you for staying. I'll find you in the morning."

They went quickly, the cook last, with one look back at Dermot.

Then it was only the two of us in the great hall, under all those lit windows.

"Tell me," I said.

"Susannah."

"You've had three years. Tell me now."

He pushed his hand through his hair.

"The week after you left, Alastair made me the company's finance chief," he said. "I was thirty. I said yes because I wanted nothing left of that house and I thought I could do the job to spite it."

"You wanted to spite me."

"I wanted to stop feeling anything. The note was in my wallet and I read it every morning."

"A note I never wrote."

"I didn't know that. I thought you had looked at me, and decided I was nothing."

His voice stayed level, and it was worse than shouting.

"Dorian brought me the audit in the second week," he said. "Four hundred pages, a firm's name on the cover, every number matching."

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