SWNOVELS Chapter Chapter Sixty-Eight
“Where is Duccio?” I pressed.
“This is Daniel,” Gabrielle insisted, walking me into her drawing room. “Duccio was his father.”
I stared at the man standing by the empty fireplace with suspicion, feeling like I’d fallen into some deluded dream. Nothing felt right about the moment. The Baroness, my lycan mother, held my hand and was alive while this doppelgänger stared at me without the slightest deception in his mind.
Daniel Archer, the man said silently to me.
He was a child. No, he was a man in his early thirties, but his mind bore none of the characteristics of a lycan more than a year old. It was transparent, yet I struggled to believe it could be true. I’d stared at that face so many times: the ridge of his temples, the firm jaw, and the sharp nostrils that flared under that heavy brow even when he smiled. And then there were his eyes, azure pools I’d gotten lost in each time I stared at him, startled by how alert and penetrating they were.
“Was his father?”
“Biological father,” he said. “I never knew him but a moment before he passed.”
I looked to Gabrielle to explain, but the pain in her red eyes confirmed the impossible.
“He cannot be dead,” I insisted. “He would never end his life.”
Of that much, I was sure. I’d met no one more alive than Duccio. The only blade that had ever cut him was stealing his father’s life. The truth of what he’d done, ending the very thing he loved most, crippled his mind with guilt. But he’d never…
An acute pain broke through my thoughts. Could I be so blind about someone? Had I forgotten what he’d done to Guccia and her family or the others?
I raised my hand to press my thumb against my temple and covered my eyes. My head swam with uncertainty.
“But where is he?” I demanded with a start. “And where is Maximilien? Where is my father?
Though I resisted, Gabrielle pulled me to sit beside her on the small champagne velvet sofa. I didn’t want to sit, but I hadn’t the strength to do anything but comply.
“Mon chéri, your father passed away some fifty years ago in New York.”
My eyes sharpened, and I shook my head.
“That’s impossible,” I insisted. “I was there fifty years ago. I lived there for a century and would know if he were there.”
Even as I said the words, I doubted myself. I’d left New York in September 1859, nearly sixty-five years ago.
But he’d been alive all that time, just as Gabrielle was now seated beside me. Father had been alive all those days in Napa while I thought of him, remembering all he taught me about farming. I’d seen him smile at my work a hundred times, feeling the warmth of his imagined kisses as they comforted my torn soul.
“Duccio died only three months ago,” she continued. “He is truly gone. I saw to his remains myself. But what I don’t understand is how did you know him?”
She stared at me, her eyes suffering to comprehend the impossible, just as I stared at her.
“I’ve known him all my life,” I asserted. “He rescued me the night Chastain’s wolves cut down you and Father.”
Gabrielle offered nothing but confused disbelief in response. And then I remembered the moments from so long ago. I sent her flashes of what remained locked in my mind. Fragments of memory. How I floated in Duccio’s arms as we ascended out of the dungeons. How he held me on the schooner while I shivered from the blood lost to Bishop Toussaint’s torture. I remembered Duccio’s words describing how Chastain had executed Maximilien and Gabrielle. He’d rescued me from a similar fate. He would protect me forever, he promised. Then of the race across the peninsula when Sforza’s wolves hunted us. And then of his loving me when we arrived in Rome, of the sweet melody of a thousand kisses.
Gabrielle rose from the sofa with a start, releasing my hand to move away. She went to a window, though her eyes stared at nothing. Her mind was a sea of agitated confusion. Daniel moved to comfort her, but she shook her head—it was unnecessary.
“But what does it all mean?” I implored her.
The material world beneath my feet seemed unreal. I couldn’t anchor myself, and the nightmare of these impossibilities swirled aimlessly, threatening to make me sick.
“I don’t know all of what it means,” Gabrielle said. “And I fear we never will. But I have so much to tell you about Duccio, as I see you have to tell me.”
Gabrielle returned to the sofa. She took my hand again and kissed my cheek.
“The last of those many things I’ll tell you,” she whispered, “is that I’m the one who killed him.”