The Governess Affair (Brothers Sinister #0.5)

“Speaking of cowards,” he said.

“I’m no coward.” Robert rolled up his sleeves and stepped forward. “Call me a coward again—I dare you. Don’t you know who I am?”

Everyone else stepped back, giving the two of them a wide berth. Robert circled the other boy, holding his fists up. And that was when he noticed something curious. Marshall’s eyes were blue—an icy blue.

A familiar icy blue. Robert saw eyes like that in the mirror every day.

“I know who you are,” Marshall said with disdain. “You’re my brother.”

Robert had always thought it a ridiculous thing to say in stories—that someone’s world turned upside down. But there was no other way to describe what happened. The other boy’s words hit with the force of a cannonball, crashing through everything he’d known.

“You can’t be my brother.”

But he recalled too clearly the crash of china, his mother’s shouts. Philanderer! Whoreson!

Philanderer. Marshall had Robert’s eyes. He had his father’s eyes.

Marshall sniffed and wiped at his nose. “Don’t your parents tell you anything?”

“No!” He wasn’t sure if it was an answer or a denial. And the other boy said that with such a matter-of-fact air—as if his parents were a single unit, who might sit a boy down and have a conversation with him.

Robert’s head was whirling. “How can you be my brother if your father is Hugo Marshall?”

The other boy spat once again and didn’t answer.

He didn’t have to. Robert had only the faintest notion of what philandering entailed—gambling and drinking and getting wenches with child. He’d never given much thought to the possibility that wenches who were gotten with child ended up having them.

The other boy simply shrugged all this away.

Five hundred days playing alone in the paddock, and he had a brother? It was not just his mother and father who were broken to bits. He was, too. Robert thought of soap turned to mud, of fights, of Marshall’s eye—which would be black by morning.

He thought of the three boys who had been fighting him when Robert arrived. They’d done that ungentlemanly thing because Robert had encouraged it.

Even if this boy wasn’t his brother, Robert was the villain in this piece. And if what Marshall said was true…

Robert was the knave, the cur, the right bloody bastard. Nothing would ever end happily ever after again. Not unless—

Some decisions were not difficult at all. “Hit me,” he said urgently, low enough that the other boys couldn’t hear. “Hit me hard. Knock me down.”

Marshall didn’t even hesitate. He stepped forward and smashed his fist against Robert’s nose. Robert didn’t need to pretend to fall; his legs crumpled of their own accord. When he picked himself off the ground, his nose was running red. He swiped the blood away and pushed himself to his feet.

“Did you really not know?” Marshall asked him.

He’d hit with his left hand.

“Can you hit harder with your right?” Robert asked.

Marshall’s chin went up. “I can hit hard enough with both.”

“Because I’m left-handed, too. You’ve just knocked me down, and I’ve acknowledged it. They shouldn’t bother you anymore. Not after that.” He was babbling. He gingerly extended his hand—his left hand. “Pax?”

The other boy stared at him for a moment. Then, finally, he extended his own left hand. “Pax,” he agreed. “But you break the peace, and I’ll break you.”

“Well,” Sebastian said, coming up from behind them. “This is going to be interesting.”