Free Web NovelChapter 263: I need to know
Julian watched the calculation happen, the slight adjustment, the reset. He had expected Amara. The whole performance he had walked in here carrying was built for Amara, the chaos, the noise, the grand arrival. And instead, he had gotten Julian. Calm, unhurried Julian with a baby against his chest and an expression that gave away absolutely nothing.
Sebastain didn’t know what to do with that. Good.
"Sebastian," Julian said pleasantly. "I suppose you came to see your daughter."
He crossed the hall and held the baby out with the ease of a man handing over something that belonged to someone else. The nanny materialised at just the right moment, taking the baby smoothly so Sebastian could hold her.
"The nurse will stay with you," Julian said. "Anything you need, just ask them."
Seb held the baby with the slightly stiff arms of a man who was thinking about something else. Julian noted it. Filed it.
"Where is Mummy?" Seren’s voice cut through the hall, bright and direct, the way children’s voices always are no awareness of the currents moving underneath the adult conversation, no ability to be anything other than exactly what she felt.
Julian looked down at her.
Something in him settled slightly at the sight of her. Small and tired and doing her best, the way she always seemed to be doing her best. He crouched down so he was closer to her level.
"Your mummy isn’t feeling well today, sweetheart," he said. His voice was different from hers. Softer. Unhurried in a different way. "She’s been in bed all day, and she just drifted off to sleep." He looked at her seriously, like her opinion on the matter was important. "We don’t want to wake her, do we?"
Seren considered this with the gravity of someone being trusted with a decision. Then she shook her head. "Let Mummy rest," she said firmly.
"Exactly," Julian said. He straightened up.
Seb had moved toward the nanny and was looking at the baby again. He held her briefly, just a few seconds, something moving through his face that Julian couldn’t fully read from where he stood, and then handed her back. His eyes went to the room around him. To the staircase. To the hallway that led deeper into the house.
Looking for Amara. Julian watched him look.
Seren had drifted to the nanny’s side, her face lit up at the proximity of the baby, talking to her in the quiet, earnest way children talk to babies, explaining things, making introductions, completely absorbed in the business of being a big sister.
Her tiredness hadn’t gone, but it had stepped back a little in the presence of something that made her happy. It was Seb who broke the small piece of it.
"Okay, Seren." He turned from wherever his thoughts had been. "We just got back. We’ll come see Mummy another time. It’s getting late."
Seren’s face fell.
Not dramatically, she was too composed for that, too used to disappointment arriving quietly in adult decisions she wasn’t consulted on. Just a small, private sinking. She looked at the baby one more time.
"I’ll come back to see you," she told the baby very seriously. "I promise."
Then she took her father’s hand. Julian walked them to the door.
Seb stepped outside first. Seren went with the housekeeper, who walked her to the car, leaving Julian and Seb in the space just outside the front door, the particular no man’s land of a threshold, not quite inside, not quite in the open.
Julian pulled the door behind him, and when Seb drove away, he followed him.
He was close enough. He had moved the way he had learned to move years ago not the kind of skill you picked up in a boardroom, the kind you picked up when you grew up in a family where listening at the right moment was the difference between being ahead and being buried.
Seb stops and steps out of the car to meet someone. Julian was close to the wall, in the shadow of the hedgerow that lined the east side of the driveway, where the light from the entrance didn’t quite reach.
He heard every word.
He heard Kalian’s voice first, that particular measured tone his uncle had always used, the one that sounded like reason and wasn’t. The condolences about Seb’s mother. Smooth. Effortless. Kalian had always been effortless.
Then Seb.
Where is Amara’s baby?
Julian’s jaw tightened.
He stayed still.
Why do you ask? I don’t know about any damn baby.
A lie. Clean and immediate. But Julian wasn’t listening to Kalian for the lie, he was listening for what came around it. The shape of it. The edges.
Seb pushed. Kalian pushed back. And then came the whole thing, unhurried and almost proud, the way his uncle spoke when he believed no one was listening who mattered.
I lured Yvette here. Her three babies made it impossible for Julian to track his own baby. I need him distracted.
Julian closed his eyes for exactly one second.
Three babies. Yvette’s three girls deployed like pieces on a board. His daughter was somewhere underneath all of it, buried deliberately, a needle in a haystack his uncle had spent time building. Not chaotic. Not opportunistic. Planned. Patient.
I should have been the king who sat on the Vale throne long ago. Not my stupid, weak brother. Not his stupid son Josh. Not Julian.
There it was.
The thing that had always been there, underneath every smile at every family dinner, underneath every generous word and every hand on the shoulder. The thing Julian had suspected for years and had never had confirmed so plainly, so casually, so without shame.
His uncle had been waiting his whole life for this.
Then Seb again, smaller now, almost desperate underneath the bravado. I just want to make sure Amara’s baby is safe. I’ll need her back when Amara and I are finally...
You think that’s possible. Kalian’s voice carried something that wasn’t quite amusement. Too cold for amusement. You’ve lost everything. You are not the Sebastian Creed that commanded half of Verenza. Go home.
A scuffle. Movement. The sound of Seb being physically redirected by someone, one of Kalian’s men, quiet and efficient.
Seb’s voice, strained now: I need to know. freewebnøvel.coɱ
And then nothing. The sound of a car door. Feet on gravel. The particular silence that follows a conversation that has ended, whether everyone in it agreed or not.
Julian stayed where he was.
