“Stay,” Charlotte said, and I froze. “My girl is supposed to finish what you started.”
Lottie spread her legs, and I saw sticky white drip down her thighs.
I froze.
“Lottie.” There was iron in Grayson’s words. Between them passed a look I couldn’t read, but it made shivers run up my spine.
Lottie looked me up and down, calculating, as if I were something to use, something to buy.
“Push it up inside me,” she said.
“Leave, Snitch. Now.”
The way Grayson spoke made me sprint out of the room without a second’s hesitation.
I quickly scrambled away, running before my tears fell.
Push it up inside her.
I carried a mess of bloody sheets. Numb.
In the past, a girl is less than a ghost, she’s air. Invisible. So no one thought twice about what she witnesses or does. It’s not vulgar. Because the girl isn’t someone who fucked the bridegroom hours before.
She isn’t someone whose heart bleeds for the bridegroom.
She isn’t someone whose soul is tethered irrevocably to his.
She’s no one. Nothing.
So why did his words, his proclamation, still throb inside me?
I love you, Story Hale. I will always love you.
I settled against the wall, fingering around the edge of the fruity stain, being sure to avoid it. Mesmerized by it. Mom always did say when you bleed, you’re a cut away from bleeding out.
I feel like I’m going to faint.
I walked down to the servants’ quarters in a daze, so numb I was barely cognizant of handing over the sheets to the one who would take them to Tansy and Mrs. du Lac.
I checked in on my uncle, wishing to talk to him, but he was already asleep. I hated that I’d taken this job—stayed in this hell—for him, but that very job kept robbing me of my opportunities to spend time with him.
I quietly shut the door.
When I got back to my room, I knew something was off. It felt…different. When I touched the knob, my fingers came back sooty.
“You really shouldn’t have come back.”
I turned around, finding all the servants who weren’t working, including Ellie.
Ellie held up the letter Lottie had sent Grayson. “Grayson. I’ll give you this one night to get it out of your system…”
It was one thing to have Lottie say it, another to have the inked words read aloud. It took everything inside me not to fall to the ground.
“What a find,” Ellie said when she’d finished. “But that video more so for the press.”
“You videoed it?” My heart crushed, shattered—whatever was left became bloody jam. I used to think they were my family. My only family.
“You know as well as anyone there are no secrets that can be hidden from the servants.”
“You could all lose your jobs…” But I knew they wouldn’t. The servants looked out for one another, and whatever power I might have had before was in the wind.
They laughed, because they knew it too.
“Cinderella of Crowne Hall…” she continued. “That’s what they’re calling you, you know.”
She looked over my shoulder at my closed door, and my gut twisted at what was behind it, at what they could have done now. Steeling my spine, I turned the knob and opened it.
Ash.
Ash from the fireplaces, the stoves…in my bed.
“Cinderella should sleep in the ashes, don’t you think?”
They laughed, leaving me with my dirty bed.
GRAY
“What the fuck was that?” I opened and closed my fists, struggling with my anger.
“She’s my girl, Grayson, at your request—no, at your insistence. She is supposed to do way more than that and you know it.” Lottie took an angry breath she tried to hide, and it blew out her cheeks like a chipmunk’s.
Then a faraway look overtook her eyes, like fog swallowing the horizon of Crowne Beach.
“I’ve been dreaming of my wedding night with you ever since our first kiss…”
Just like that, my anger evaporated into sludge.
I went to her, went to my wife. Taking her soft, manicured hands in my own. She still wouldn’t look at me, eyes downcast.
I tilted her chin with my knuckle, her brown eyes on mine. In this moment, I finally saw Lottie. Rage, hate, bitter betrayal. Charlotte du Lac was not someone who showed emotions, because she wasn’t allowed to feel them. I could relate to her on that level. It took a thief to burrow inside my heart and steal all the emotions I hid before I could feel them myself.
“Lottie.”
“Don’t.” She swallowed and took a step back, that familiar distance swallowing her eyes again. “I don’t want to talk about what we just did. If we have to do it again, we have to do it. We just don’t ever talk about it. If we need to use her, then we need to use her.”
Worse than being surprised by her words was expecting them. It was exactly what someone in our life would say. Before Snitch, before all of it, I wouldn’t have so much as blinked at them.
Now?
“No. No, Lottie. Never again.”
I dragged her into a hug, but she wormed her way out of it. The waves crashed and she rubbed her bare arm, ridding it of goose bumps.
“You can’t bring her to Asheville, Lottie.”
I tried to drive Story out, and that obviously didn’t work. Story was made of metal. She was stone. She was going to stay until Woodsy died, and I couldn’t fucking drag her around. The old man was gonna die soon, and she deserved to be there with him.
Lottie blinked, mouth parted. “You want me to go without my girl?”
“It’s our honeymoon; let’s just have it be us.”
She was silent for a moment. “Fine. I’ll go without my girl.”
I barely had a moment to exhale my relief before Lottie spoke again.
“Do you know that our prenup says you get everything if I commit adultery? It doesn’t say anything about you.”
“I promised you I would be faithful. I’m not fucking lying,” I all but growled.
She found my eyes. “You make me a lot of promises, Grayson…none of them are binding.”
My brows twisted. “The prenup was already settled over a year ago.”
“We could always get a postnup.”
Silence.
That was…insane.
To make this marriage and merger work, Grandfather placed majority shares of Crowne Industries in my name. Lottie received the same treatment. It was all for show. We were puppets. Puppets never think to cut the strings. That’s suicide.
But maybe it was a good idea.
My last leash wasn’t strong enough to keep me away from Story. Maybe it was time for iron bars. Fucking steel. Or maybe it was a recipe for disaster.
At my silence, Lottie mumbled, “That’s what I thought.”
“Lottie…I’m not saying no. Can we table it? Talk about it when things aren’t so…” Fucked.
“Before the wedding, my mom came to me to give me some wisdom…Do you want to know what her advice was?”
The lost, resigned look in her eyes told me it wasn’t some mother-daughter girl advice about how to please a man or some shit. It told me I didn’t want to know whatever Lynette du Lac had told Lottie. But when Lottie didn’t speak for a full minute, I gestured for her to continue.