Chapter 1

My boy came back to me in the middle of the night.

I'd relocated to Paris not too long after I'd moved on from New York and its memories, after my mother had died and my sister married and there was, finally, nothing left for me in America. I toyed with the idea of going back to San Francisco-all of us who were there in '49 dream of returning, eventually-but in the end I chose Paris because it was one of the few places in the world that still held any novelty for me. I considered Chicago, London, and Berlin, but I chose Paris in the end because I knew I could live well there.

Not that I had much living left in me, of course.

And so my boy found me there, in Paris, in the middle of a rainy spring night. The clouds had been black and heavy all day, and in America that kind of downpour would have been violent and it would have been punctuated with wild bursts of lightning and thunder. Paris is much too civilized for unpredictable noises of course, but water is wet no matter where you go. And so, after I stumbled out of bed and down the stairs and opened my door to confront the luckless soul who'd rung my bell at that ungodly hour, my reward was a drenched smoking jacket, a mouth full of water-

And a short burst from the barrell of Wade Hampton Hamilton's eight-dollar Remington 95 deringer pistol.

His gun jammed, of course, but I reacted to the sight of the barrel without thinking and I'd slammed him against the foyer wall even before I'd realized that the scrawny, very drunk man I'd nearly broken in half was actually a boy. Wade Hampton was nearly 22 years old on that May morning in 1883, but he was still-and would always be-a boy to me.

As a matter of fact, he wasn't just any boy. He was my boy, my son, and one of the few people I remembered fondly from the time I spent in Georgia during-and after- the war. Wade wasn't technically mine-he was the unwanted byproduct of my first wife's first marriage-but I'd saved his life on more than one occasion, and he'd saved my own multiple times, although not in exactly the same way. Wade hated me in the way that all men hate their step-fathers, but although our relationship had necessarily cooled after I'd left the South, and I hadn't seen him in nearly a decade, I'd never imagined that-

"Wade?" I questioned, leaning down and pulling him to his feet. I was 55 that spring and I felt every ill-spent moment of my life in my hips and knees whenever I moved too fast or tried to lift too much weight, but I gathered him up quickly and without grunting too much. After all, every second he spent on the floor was another moment he spent boiling in anger, and I knew that we couldn't have the conversation we needed to have if he stayed angry. "Wade? What are you doing here?"

"I came to-" he winced as he rose to his feet, then pushed me away. And I let him push me away even though his arms were weak and limp and his face was pale and he was slurring his words. "I came to kill you, Rhett Butler."

"Wade-"

"How do you like that, Captain Butler?" He jabbed his fingers against my chest and sneered up at me. He'd grown since I'd seen him last, but I was still probably a foot taller than he was. "You never thought you'd ever see me again, did you, Uncle Rhett?"

The Wade Hampton I'd known had always been soft-spoken and somewhat prissy, a sweet boy who'd been prone to silences and embarrassments. But the man standing in front of me was fairly leaking with a sarcasm that was much hotter and heavier than the rainwater that drenched both of us. Wade had never had much in common with his mother Scarlett O'Hara Hamilton Kennedy Butler, but at that moment he sounded just like her: moody, snappish, and cold in a way that made me want to hit him even though I'd sworn off violence after the War.

"Of course I thought I'd see you again, Wade," I said gently, kicking the gun into the darkness of the nearby drawing room and then closing the heavy green front door behind him. "I hoped I'd see you again, as a matter of fact."

"You never come to Atlanta to see us."

"Your mother-"

"It's all your fault, you know?" He questioned, his voice softening a little bit as he ran one of his tiny hands through the curly brown hair plastered across his pale, heart-shaped face. "Everything is your fault."

"Maybe it is," I nodded and switched on a leaded-glass lamp that threw purple-and-green shadows around the entryway. I'd purchased that town house in the center of Paris, just off the Rue de la paix, because it had seemed cozy and warm and much friendlier than the modern buildings I'd seen in other parts of town. But on that night the whole house seemed huge, mysterious, and cold. And I watched as Wade stared scornfully around the room, blind-drunk but not too drunk to miss the ostentatious designs or the new walnut furniture or the-

"I see you've done very well for yourself," he sneered and his eyes narrowed with hate. "Everybody else went broke in the recession and panic back in '73 and '74, but you didn't. Of course you didn't, you bastard."

"I sent you money, Wade."

"I used that for mother," he shrugged, leaned against the white wall, and then slid down until he was sitting on the floor once again. I sat down too, slowly and carefully, anxious to maintain eye-contact, anxious not to be too intimidating. "I used everything for mother. She sends her regards, of course."

"Wade-"

"You shouldn't have left us," he told me, his delivery a slow, deliberate drawl even though his words made absolutely no goddamn sense. "You shouldn't have let this happen to us."

"When you're older-"

"I'm old enough to understand, Rhett Butler," he snarled at me, and I had no retort because he was right. Wade Hampton was 22 years old, the same age I was when my father threw me out of his house and struck my name from the family bible. The same age I was when I ran away to New Orleans and first met Belle Watling and Anderson Menteur. The same age I was the first time I won a poker tournament.

The same age I was the first time I killed a man.

"I'm old enough to know it all, Rhett Butler," he stretched out his short legs and scowled at me. "I'm old enough to know all about you and Uncle Ashley and mother and Aunt Melly. Hell, I was there for most of it, anyway. And what I didn't understand or know at the time, well-county gossip has given me most of the information down through the years. Believe it or not."

"I believe it."

"I was there for the war, and Frank Kennedy's funeral and-and," he pinked slightly. "And I was there for mother's madness and all the rumors. And I was there when Bonnie died."

I wasn't supposed to let him get to me.

Any other man would have died instantly upon threatening me at my front door in the middle of the night, but I wouldn't have killed Wade Hampton. He'd come all the way to Paris in secret, under his own power, because he needed to get something off his chest, and I'd thought it was the best course of action to actually let him get it off his chest. He obviously wanted to blame me for everything that had gone wrong in his life, and I was quite happy to take the blame if it meant it would relieve whatever burdens he'd been carrying around in his heart since I'd left Atlanta all those years ago.

But this was too much.

I could take the blame, I could take the accusations, I could take the recriminations, and I could accept a murder attempt now and then. I was used to being defined as a rogue. But blaming me for Bonnie's death was too harsh.

"You killed her," Wade said, his brown eyes wide as he watched me, as he waited for me to take his bait, as he waited for me to react to his brutal statement with equally brutal physical force. He wantedme to take a swipe at him. He wanted me to snap, for some sick and twisted reason I understood without fully understanding. I'd tried these same tactics years ago with my own father, but that was after the old man had gone out of his way to destroy me.

On the other hand, I'd done nothing at all to Wade Hampton Hamilton.

I hadn't visited him much, but I had written him over the years. And I'd paid for his education and I'd made sure that he'd gotten a good start in business after he'd left the University. I'd given his mother a generous settlement in the divorce, and he'd lived a privileged life in Atlanta and he'd been received in all of the best homes thanks, in part, to my efforts. I hadn't been a model man over the years by any stretch of the imagination, but throwing Bonnie in my face was wrong.

Very wrong.

"I was there that day too, Rhett Butler," he taunted me, hatred making his smooth southern drawl sound harsh and gritty. "Although I bet you forgot to remember that I was home at the time. Yes, I heard her neck snap all the way in my room. Sounded like a goddamn 2-by-6 splitting in half."

"That's enough, Wade."

"Internal decapitation," Wade continued, drawing out each syllable quietly, until the the sounds crashed against my ears like thunder. "That's what her death certificate says. I remember the way she looked in her coffin when-"

I slapped him hard across the face before he got the rest of the words out of his mouth, hitting him with so much force he blacked out before his head bounced against the wall. The violence gave me a moment of satisfaction, but then that moment twisted into darkness as the reality of what I'd done stabbed against my chest. I would have stood up, carried him out to the street, and rolled him into a nearby gutter if he'd been any other man. But he was just a boy-he was my boy-so instead I just sat there in the cold foyer, gritted my teeth, and watched him closely, all too aware of the dangers that lurked in the hearts of misguided southerners like Wade.