Something Blue

Chapter 19

Gabe

Gabriel Townsend wasn't a very good man.

He was violent. He thirsted for the slickness of blood on his knuckles and hungered for the rush of power that a man only felt when he'd proved himself stronger, better, faster, meaner...

Gabe Townsend was an indecent man. He had taken a girl of unparalleled purity and dragged her soul through the mud. He had loved her. Sullied her. Tarnished her. And when she had left him he hadn't shied from the offerings around him. His mother had a rule about the girls in her employ, but she had no such rule about girls just passing through, or those who had chosen to leave and make their own way in the world. He'd had his share of fun between the sheets. He'd had it atop the sheets, as well. Against the wall and bent over the dresser...

Gabe was violent and indecent. He was at best uneducated and at worst willfully ignorant of society's strictures. He was gruff to 'ladies' and rude to 'gentlemen' and utterly dismissive of the simpering offspring that milled about their feet. He had a mouth like a sailor and the eyes of the devil. He wore his hair too short to be fashionable and too long to be neat, and he had no marketable skills to offer a legitimate employer beyond his proficiency at meting out justice with his fists.

On his finest day, Gabe was no gift to the human race. No beacon of propriety and worth.

But he was not, and had never been, an idiot.

At least... he had never considered himself an idiot.

How, then, did he explain the fact that he had never seen it? All those years, catching glimpses of them from afar, and he'd never wondered? Those days spent nursing Katherine, the irksome child hovering in his shadow, pestering him every moment of every day, wrapping the strands of his spirit tighter and tighter around her small finger, and he'd never even thought to consider?

What in the hell was wrong with him?

What kind of worthless moron just took a woman at her word when she was feeding him such obvious drivel? Her words-- half a decade old but still fresh and clean in his memory-- cut through him.

"It's not our baby, Gabe. It's mine. Mine and Jacob's."

And he had believed her. Not because it made sense but because she wouldn't lie. Not his Katie. Not to him. Not about something so goddamned important.

But there was no denying it, now that his mind had finally caught up with his eyes. Isobel was his. He felt it before he saw it, in that moment when she stood before him, making demands as if she had the power to command. God help him, but she idd. She had more power over him than anyone ever had, and now that he felt it how could he not see it? Her eyes, her hair, and the arch of her brows. The rest of her was Katherine, but his contribution was undeniable.

It had always dug a crater in his chest, knowing that an innocent child was living under the reverend's roof. Knowing, now, that it was his child? His little girl who had been smacked so hard she'd developed a bruise on her perfect cheek? His baby who was so quiet and timid, her gregarious outbursts the cautious exception to a hard-learned rule? His flesh and blood, a manifestation of his love, who had been a stranger to him for the first half decade of her life?

It shouldn't have been different, but it was.

He bent low over Reaper's neck, letting the cold wind drive needles into his face as they tore along the road toward town. No matter how fast they ran, he couldn't put enough distance between himself and the clawing urge for blood. No matter how hard his eyes teared at the icy wind, he couldn't blink away the image of those eyes-- his eyes-- peering up at him from beneath the edge of that stupid hat.