The Hidden Goddess Who Made Him Beg novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Two A.M. in the Rain

Del's grandmother tells her the Bulfinches will come to her now, and the cold man who humiliated her turns up soaked on the doorstep.

"Del!"

Lucian's voice cracked across the lobby, and every head in it turned.

I kept walking, through the glass doors and out under the hotel awning.

The October rain had started, thin and cold.

He caught my wrist before I reached the car.

I looked down at his hand, then up at his face.

"Let go," I said.

He did.

"Orme," he said. "Your name is Orme."

"My name has been Orme for twenty-eight years."

"You told me it was Marsh. You sat in my office for two years."

"And you never asked me one question that wasn't about your calendar."

People had followed us out.

Ten, twelve of them, in black ties and silk, and phones were rising in a row.

Imogen pushed through them, her wrap forgotten, her face white with fury.

"What is this, Lucian? Who is she?"

Nobody answered her.

Behind her, Leopold Bulfinch came down the steps slowly.

He was sixty-seven and he moved like a man who had never once hurried.

The glass had cut his hand, and he did not seem to notice the blood.

"Hester Orme's granddaughter," he said, and his eyes were on my face.

"You have Anselm's mouth."

I had waited twenty years for him to say my father's name to me.

It felt colder than I had imagined.

"Good night, Mr. Bulfinch," I said.

I stepped into the car, and Tobias closed the door behind me with a soft click.

He took his place at the wheel and checked the mirror.

"Well," he said. "That went either very well or very badly."

"Drive."

He pulled out into Newbury Street.

In the side mirror I watched Lucian standing in the rain, his hands open at his sides, getting smaller.

I did not cry.

I had decided on the elevator that I would not.

"How many phones?" I asked.

"Fourteen," said Tobias. "I counted. One of them was filming your face."

"Good."

"You're shaking."

"I'm cold."

He turned the heat up without comment.

The house on Chestnut Street had been dark for most of my life.

Now every window in it was lit.

Hester Orme sat in the front parlor in her high-backed chair with her cane across her knees.

She was seventy-nine, and she had pearls on at midnight.

"You tore the cheque," she said, before I had my coat off.

"Who told you?"

"Tobias, from the car. He has a phone in his coat that does not appear to be switched off."

"I was proud," Tobias said from the doorway.

"I was early," I said. "The plan was to leave after the vote."

"The man chose the date for you." My grandmother tapped her cane once on the carpet. "Sit, Delphine."

I sat.

"They know your name now. By morning every drawing room in this city will know it. The Bulfinches will come to you, one by one, with their hands out."

"Leopold already did. He said I had my father's mouth."

Something moved behind her eyes and was gone.

"Did he."

"What was that?"

"Nothing." She folded her hands. "The Beacon Trust holds thirty-four percent of Bulfinch Group, and at nine o'clock tomorrow I will tell their lawyers so. The board has a vote on Leopold's chair in three weeks. You will be in the room."

Thirty-four percent.

Twenty years of her quiet buying, and I had never known the number until this month.

"I'm not going to hide anymore," I said.

"No," said Hester. "You are going to be seen."

It was past two when I finally went upstairs to the room I had slept in as a child.

I lay in my old bed with the rain on the window.

My phone had forty-one missed calls from a number I knew by heart.

At ten past two the doorbell rang, long and hard, and went on ringing.

Tobias's voice rose from the hall.

"Miss Delphine? There's a man on the step. He's soaked through and he won't leave."

I went to the top of the stairs.

Through the glass of the front door, in the porch light, Lucian Bulfinch stood with his head bowed and the rain running off his hair.

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