The Mercer Curse (The Jewelry Box #0.5)

His grey eyes met mine, swimming in troubles and begging for salvation. “I-I have nowhere else to go. My mother….she, eh—” He cleared his throat. “She’d been ill for most of my life. Recurring breast cancer with periods of remission. It finally claimed her last month. I gave up my attempts at trying to be normal—working a dead-end job and pretending to fit in—and dedicated myself to being her caregiver for the past four months. She, eh, told me things…toward the end. She told me who my father was.”

Ah, so it was a deathbed confession.

Something that’d eaten her alive and now she’d passed that demon onto her only son.

Stupid woman.

Why couldn’t she have let that filth die with her?

She’d only condemned her son to a worser fate.

“Is that why you tried to kill yourself?” I asked clinically, feeling no emotion to the thought of him alive or in a grave.

“No. I mean…it was the slippery slope that led to it but no. You have to understand, I loved my mother. She was my only family but…she never seemed to love me in return. I’ve grown up forever trying to apologise for something I didn’t understand. I always felt like I’d done something wrong and, until she told me the truth about my father and not the scripted lie that some asshole got her pregnant then ran off, I always felt like she blamed me for something.”

“Blamed you how?”

He shrugged. “For living in a country that wasn’t hers? For keeping her away from her parents and whatever extended family she had?” Sighing heavily, Henri added, “Whenever I’d ask why I didn’t have grandparents to visit or cousins to play with she’d change the subject and say it was just us.” Raking his hands through his short hair, he caught my eyes. “Just us was lonely. But now it’s just me? It’s fucking excruciating.”

I would never admit that I knew exactly how crippling loneliness could be.

Clearing my throat, I asked briskly, “Do you have any idea where the rest of her family are? Go grace them with a visit instead of me.”

He dropped his grey stare. “There wasn’t a shred of information or paperwork in my mother’s estate to hint where she’s from. Not a single name. Not a whiff of an address. I have a feeling she might have been French Canadian, so perhaps I have relations there. She raised me bilingual—French and English. She also taught me Spanish but never told me why, or how she knew it.”

Clasping his hands together, he added quietly, “And…if I’m honest, I don’t think—even if I could find a name or an address—that I’d approach any of her kin, not after she hid me away for so long. She kept me hidden for a reason. She didn’t want me. I reminded her of something she’d rather not recall. It makes sense now I know the truth, but I think the shame and pain of my existence is something she happily died with, protecting her true family from ever knowing what happened to her and how I came to be.”

I frowned, drawn in despite myself. “So you’re saying you were brought up by a woman who didn’t love you. That you put your life on hold to nurse her and when she died, you tried to commit suicide?”

He flashed me a tight smile. “Sounds pathetic when you say it like that. It makes me sound like some poor little boy who can’t survive without his mother.” Sighing heavily, he pinched the bridge of his nose. “The thing is…with her gone, I don’t seem to have the strength to suppress the parts of myself that I’ve always fought. They’re getting worse. The needs are getting worse. I’m getting worse. It’s as if being utterly alone has allowed the darkness to consume me.”

Ah, shit.

That wasn’t good news.

I could see where this was going.

Where I’d gone.

Why I’d forbidden myself from touching a woman unless it was a paid professional, until Tess tripped into my heart. Why I’d murdered my father in cold blood and spent my entire life repenting for what he’d done.

I couldn’t cure myself.

Couldn’t turn off the blackness inside me.

I could merely live within the cage Tess kept me content in, ever so fucking grateful that she could withstand my violence, my sickness, my curse.

“You killed a girl?” I kept my voice deliberately calm. “You gave into that darkness?”

His answer would determine on him walking out of here alive or dying right there in the wingback.

He caught my gaze, flinching at whatever he saw in me. “No, I didn’t go that far. But…I did hurt her. I was the idiot who got drunk and took a one-night stand back to my family home. The same home where I’d nursed my sick mother for the last four months. The home where I’d grown up in, always feeling unwanted. The home where my equally drunk partner asked me to ‘play rough.’”

He cleared his throat and ran a shaking hand over his mouth. “I-I went too far. I didn’t have any power against the needs inside me and…I spilled her blood on my childhood bedroom floor.”

My hands balled. My gut churned. My mouth watered to end him.

“And you’re here for me to bail you out? To get you off a criminal charge?”