Chapter 254

Chapter 254

Charles was on his feet the moment Carol asked, and back again in what felt like seconds—family portrait in hand, sliding into the seat right beside Emily before she'd even had a chance to blink.

That was fast, she thought, mildly impressed.

Then his hand found hers beneath the folds of her dress, warm and unhurried, like it belonged there.

Emily bit back a smile and gave his hand two small, secret squeezes.

Across the room, Robert caught the exchange from the corner of his eye. Without a word, he quietly abandoned his solo post and settled in beside Kelly.

Now both couples flanked Carol on either side, leaving Shawn as the odd one out—marooned on the far end of the sofa like a forgotten footnote.

Carol didn't seem to notice. She opened the album across her lap and began turning pages with the unhurried ease of someone revisiting a very long story.

Each page was a family portrait. The earliest ones had faded to black and white, the edges soft with age. A handwritten year was penciled beneath each photo. Emily did the mental math—the stern-faced patriarch in the first few spreads must have been Charles's great-great-grandfather.

The Howards were once a very large family, she realized, studying the rows of faces.

Carol turned another page, and Emily's gaze snagged on a photograph she recognized.

"I've seen this one before," she said, leaning in slightly. "Charles showed it to me once. Are all these people Howard relatives?"

Carol's hand paused on the page. She glanced at the date stamped in the corner, then gave a single, measured nod.

"They are. Though not long after this was taken..." She let the sentence trail off, her voice carrying the practiced calm of someone who had long since made peace with old grief. "Some passed away. Others simply... drifted."

Shawn leaned over from his end of the sofa, took one look at the photo, and let out a short, sharp sound of contempt.

"Parasites," he muttered, settling back with a scowl etched deep into his face. "Every last one of them."

Emily's curiosity flared. Charles had only ever given her fragments,hints of old feuds and buried scandals, the kind of things old money families carried like heirlooms they were too proud to throw away. She'd been dying to know more ever since.

Her fingers practically itched to press for details.

She didn't, of course. She was a Windsor by blood, a Howard by marriage, and she had an image to maintain in this house.

Kelly, however, seemed to read her perfectly.

She reached over and pressed her hand flat against the open page, a small smile playing at the corners of her mouth.

"Mom, why don't you use this one to walk her through the family? The timing was complicated, I know—but everyone's in it. It'll be easier for Emily to put faces to names."

Carol considered this for a moment, then agreed. She sent Charles for a pen, and when he returned, she began working through the photograph like an annotator—circling certain faces, skipping others.

"These families," she said, circling a loose cluster near the center, "we still have some contact with. Not often, but we're on good terms. They're the collateral branches—most of them grandparents now, their children scattered and settled into their own lives. We don't see each other much."

Emily listened carefully, quietly cataloguing the circled faces, filing them away as safe.

"For the wedding," Carol continued, capping the pen, "we'll invite this group. Whether they come is entirely up to them."

Shawn glanced over, scanned Carol's selections, and gave a slow nod of approval. The circles made sense. These were the people who still showed up at Christmas, who still sent cards. They'd come.

Weddings mean numbers, he thought, and there was something quietly satisfying about a full room.

Carol recapped the pen and switched to her finger, sweeping it across the faces she hadn't circled—the ones left in the margins.

"These," she said simply, "are done. Completely cut off. If you ever cross paths with any of them, keep your distance. Bad character tends to run in families."

Emily's gaze sharpened, moving carefully across the uncircled faces.

"Would they ever come after us directly?"

"Hmph." Shawn's knuckle hit the coffee table with a short, decisive knock, the way a judge might strike a gavel. "They wouldn't dare."

Kelly let out a sound that was half laugh, half scorn.

"They'd better not." Her voice carried a blade beneath its elegance. "They already showed their hand once—trying to carve up the Howard assets like it was some kind of inheritance buffet. Greed, fine. That's human nature. But one of them went further than that." Her hand moved instinctively to Robert's leg—a small, protective gesture she probably didn't even realize she was making.

The room shifted almost imperceptibly.

No one said it aloud, but Emily understood.

The official story was that Robert's leg had been injured in a skiing accident in his twenties—a reckless run on an expert slope, the kind of thing young men do to impress young women. But the truth, she now suspected, was written in the quiet grief on Kelly's face and the way Shawn's jaw had tightened just slightly.

Someone tampered with his equipment.

They'd aimed for something far worse than a broken leg. The only reason Robert was still walking—however imperfectly—was a last-minute change of plans. He'd switched to an easier slope that afternoon to give Kelly a lesson.

A casual decision. A lucky one.

Emily felt something cold and steady settle into her chest—not quite rage, not quite pity. More like recognition. Old money families wore their brutality in the fine print. Every dynasty had its body count.

Her gaze drifted back to the photograph, scanning the uncircled faces one by one—

And then she stopped.

A pair of pale green eyes stared back at her from the corner of the frame.

Her pulse lurched.

No. She caught herself almost immediately. This is a Howard family album. Delbert has nothing to do with these people.

She drew a slow, quiet breath. Green eyes weren't exactly rare. She was letting the stress of the past few weeks make her paranoid, seeing Delbert's shadow in every corner.

Get it together, she told herself firmly.

She steadied herself and pointed to a small boy standing near the edge of the group—young enough that he barely reached the adults' elbows, those pale eyes wide and unguarded.

"Is he a Howard too?"

Carol's brow furrowed faintly. She studied the boy for a moment, then gave a half-nod, half-shake of her head.

"Everyone in that photograph is connected to this family, but I can't remember this child's name." She tilted the album toward Shawn. "Do you remember him?"

Shawn took the album. Something shifted in his expression the moment he looked—the simmering irritation he'd been carrying all evening drained away, replaced by something harder to name. He was quiet for a long moment.

Then he handed it back.

"That's Saskia's grandson."

Saskia.

Emily turned the name over in her mind and came up empty. She glanced at Charles, who looked equally blank.

Carol let out a long, soft "oh"—the sound of a memory slotting back into place—and set about explaining.

"That's Charles's cousin, on your grandfather's side," she began. "His grandmother, Saskia, was..." She paused, weighing her words. "Well. Saskia was Shawn's younger sister."

She turned back several pages until she found her—and there she was. A striking woman with Shawn's sharp features softened into something more luminous, standing at the center of a family portrait with the easy confidence of someone who had never been anything but adored.

She was beautiful, the kind of beautiful that made rooms rearrange themselves around her.

Beside her stood her husband—shorter than she was by a noticeable margin, with light green eyes and a grin so open and unguarded it looked almost naive. His position in every photograph told the story clearly enough: he had married into this family, not the other way around.

"The family didn't want to lose her," Carol explained, her tone matter-of-fact. "So they brought her husband in instead. He took the Howard name."

Emily nodded slowly, studying the early photos—the husband's bright, slightly dazzled smile in the first few portraits, the way it grew more restrained with each passing year. Polished down to something guarded. Then cold.

And then, a few pages later, both Saskia and her husband were simply gone.

Only two young adults remained in their place—carrying on the family line, and those unmistakable pale green eyes.

Their children, Emily guessed.

She looked at the gap where Saskia had been and felt something quiet and unsettling settle at the back of her mind.

Saskia had been Shawn's only sister. Cherished enough that her family had bent tradition to keep her close. A woman like that—raised in this house, loved like that—

Would she really have turned against her own brother?