Assassin's Creed: Forsaken by Oliver Bowden

he even joined the household. Ours was not an affair the way you’re thinking with your dirty mind. We were in love, and shame on you thinking otherwise. Shame on you.” She shook her head again.
    Feeling my hand tighten on the handle of the sword, I squeezed my eyes shut. “No, no, it’s not me who should be made to feel at fault here. You can try and come high-and-mighty with me all you like, but the fact is that you had a . . . relationship of some kind, of whatever kind—it doesn’t
matter
what kind—with Digweed, and Digweed betrayed us. Without that betrayal my father would be alive. Mother would be alive, and I would not be sitting here with a knife to your throat, so don’t blame me for your current predicament, Betty. Blame him.”
    She took a deep breath and composed herself. “He had no choice,” she said at last, “Jack didn’t. Oh, that was his name, by the way: Jack. Did you know that?”
    “I’ll read it on his gravestone,” I hissed, “and knowing it makes not a blind bit of difference, because he did have a choice, Betty. Whether it was a choice between the devil and the deep blue sea, I don’t care. He had a choice.”
    “No—the man threatened Jack’s children.”
    “‘Man’? What man?”
    “I don’t know. A man who first spoke to Jack in town.”
    “Did you ever see him?”
    “No.”
    “What did Digweed say about him? Was he from the West Country?”
    “Jack said he had the accent sir, yes. Why?”
    “When the men kidnapped Jenny, she was screaming about a traitor. Violet from next door heard her, but the following day a man with a West Country accent came to speak to her—to warn her not to tell anyone what she’d heard.”
    West Country. Betty had blanched, I saw. “What?” I snapped. “What have I said?”
    “It’s Violet, sir,” she gasped. “Not long after you left for Europe—it could even have been the day after—she met her end in a street robbery.”
    “They came good on their word,” I said. I looked at her. “Tell me about the man giving Digweed his orders,” I said.
    “Nothing. Jack never said anything about him. That he meant business; that if Jack didn’t do as they told him then they would find his children and kill them. They said that if he told the master then they’d find his boys, cut them and kill them slowly, all of that. They told him what they were planning to do to the house, but on my life, Master Haytham, they told him that nobody would be hurt; that it would all happen at the dead of night.”
    Something occurred to me. “Why did they even need him?”
    She looked perplexed.
    “He wasn’t even there on the night of the attack,” I continued. “It wasn’t as if they required help getting in. They took Jenny, killed Father. Why was Digweed needed for that?”
    “I don’t know, Master Haytham,” she said. “I really don’t.”
    When I looked down at her, it was with a kind of numbness. Before, when I’d been waiting for darkness to fall, anger had been simmering, bubbling within me, the idea of Digweed’s treachery lighting a fire beneath my fury, the idea that Betty had colluded, or even known, adding fuel to it.
    I’d wanted her to be innocent. Most of all I’d wanted her dalliance to be with another member of the household. But if it was with Digweed then I wanted her to know nothing about his betrayal. I wanted her to be innocent, for if she was guilty then I had to kill her, because if she could have done something to stop the slaughter of that night and failed to act, then she had to die. That was . . . that was
justice
. It was cause and effect. Checks and balances. An eye for an eye. And that’s what I believe in. That’s my ideology. A way of negotiating a passage through life that makes sense even when life itself so rarely does. A way of imposing order upon chaos.
    But the last thing I wanted to do was kill her.
    “Where is he now?” I asked softly.
    “I don’t know, Master Haytham.” Her voice