“You’re kidding me, right?”

“Please.”

He took out the gun and rested it on the headstone. “Where is Suzanne?”

Surprise crossed Calista’s face.

“Don’t you know? Truly?”

“Where is she?”

“She’s right here. She always has been.”

He followed her eyes to the grave beside him with the simple white cross. There was no inscription. In Somerset, Hendricks had told him that Suzanne must be dead. He could still see Hendricks shaking his head at him. Hope is a cancer. Either you never learn the truth, or you do and go through that windshield at ninety because hope told you it was safe to make the drive without a seat belt.

He went through that windshield now, inertia flinging him cruelly away.

Oh, Bear, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.

Gibson reached for the gun.

“In childbirth,” Calista said. “She waited too long to contact me. She was already deep into labor when we arrived. It was complicated—a breach delivery. She’d lost so much blood. Evelyn did everything in her power, but the damage was profound. There was nothing at all we could do for her.”

“So you brought her here and buried her? I thought this was only for the ‘family Dauplaise.’ ”

“I made an exception. She was my goddaughter. I wasn’t about to abandon her body in the woods like an animal. My poor girl.”

“Your poor girl?” Gibson said. The gun was by his side now, the trigger cool against his finger. “Stop it. It’s pitiful. This charade that you’re avenging her somehow. My father came to you, didn’t he?”

“He did.”

“Told you his suspicions about Lombard. About Suzanne. You could have stopped it then. But you didn’t. Instead you sent that man to kill my father. You let it go on and on. You killed Suzanne.”

Calista shook her head. “Duke couldn’t be reasoned with. He didn’t understand how much was at stake. Benjamin could have been brought to his senses. If your father had only listened, none of this would have been necessary.”

“Shut up,” he said and raised the gun. “Not one more word.”

Calista had spent years twisting her evil into a logic that excused itself. What words could he speak to it? She had made right what was unforgivably wrong, and there would never be an argument against it that she would allow. But he would kill her if she said one word more.

“Why send us after her kidnapper? Why bother? Did you need revenge that badly?”

Calista looked up at him. “Do you really want an answer?”

“Yes.”