Chapter 1070
Alistair kept staring at the counter. “She was my partner. Before I took the throne. We worked wet work together. She has the Black Ledger—a record of every unauthorized sanction I carried out for the family. Things the government doesn’t know about. Things that would put me in a black site for the rest of my life.”
He turned to look at her. “And worse… she has the tapes. Audio recordings. Of me. Doing things.”
“What things?”
“Torture,” Alistair whispered. “Interrogations. The things I did to keep the family safe. If you heard them… you would never look at me the same way again.”
He turned to leave the kitchen, heading for the downstairs bathroom to wash the flour from his hands.
Skye followed him. She grabbed his arm. “Alistair, talk to me! We can fix this!”
He stopped. He was vibrating with tension.
“You can’t fix this! This is blood, Skye! Oceans of it!”
He pulled his arm away—a jerk reaction, a spasm of frustration and self-loathing. His elbow slammed into the bathroom door.
The crack was sharp and immediate. The top hinge screamed and snapped. The heavy solid oak door groaned, tilted, and crashed to the floor in a cloud of dust and drywall.
Skye jumped back, her hand flying to her mouth.
Alistair stood there, staring at the fallen door. He looked at his elbow, then at the wreckage. The violence of his own body horrified him.
“I…” He stammered. “I didn’t mean to…”
He looked at Skye with wide, panicked eyes. “I am not violent toward you. I swear. It was an accident.”
He looked like a child who had broken something precious, terrified of the punishment. Terrified that she would finally see him as the monster he believed himself to be.
Skye looked at the door, then at him. The fear in his eyes broke her anger.
“Well,” she said, crossing her arms. “It’s broken. But we don’t have time for this. We have a leak to plug.”
Alistair was hyperventilating, his eyes darting between the door and Skye. He dropped to his knees—not to pray, but to grab a screwdriver from the nearby utility drawer. He started attacking the hinges with frantic, manic energy.
“I can fix it,” he muttered, his hands shaking. “I have to fix it. I can’t leave it broken.”
“Alistair!” Skye knelt beside him. “Leave the door! We need to find Harper!”
“I am waiting for the trace!” Alistair snapped, his voice cracking. “Felix needs twenty minutes to triangulate her burner phone! I can’t just sit here and think about you hearing those tapes! I have to do something!”
He drove the screw into the wood with enough force to crack the frame.
This wasn’t home improvement. This was a man trying to repair his own fracturing reality.
Twenty minutes later, the door was propped up—skewed and ugly, but standing.
Alistair sat cross-legged amidst the debris, sweating. He had stripped a screw, hammered his own thumb, and was currently swearing in Russian at a hinge pin. It was a distraction, a way to channel the kinetic energy of his panic until the phone rang.
Skye watched him, her heart aching. The man who could topple governments was being defeated by his own guilt, manifested in a piece of carpentry.