Her eyes softened. “I guess.”
“We won’t be the couple of the century, Lottie. We’ll be the family of the century. This isn’t a nightmare. We’ll make it a dream. I promise.”
“I want to believe you…” she repeated on a whisper.
“So do. Let me make it up to you.” I tugged on her hand. “I’m serious when I say you’re my wife.”
“But you still love her. Will you ever stop?”
I couldn’t imagine that day ever coming. I’d told Snitch the same earlier. I would love her. I would always love her. Snitch had sewed herself into the very essence of me.
But for Lottie’s sake, for our marriage’s sake, I lied. “I just need time.”
“They expect us to have sex,” she said miserably. “They want bloody sheets. I already lost my virginity. What fucking year is it?”
I made a face. That didn’t mean shit.
I stood up, giving her my hand, and led her up the stairs to my bedroom.
Our.
I undid the bandage on my knuckles, scraping blood onto the sheets. Maybe it was a twisted poetry, bleeding from skin I broke against her brother’s face, because of the girl still between us.
“There. Done.”
She smiled weakly.
I tilted her chin up with my thumb. “I haven’t seen that all night.” Her smile dropped, and I gripped her chin softly. “Charlotte.”
“You don’t want this, Grayson…I don’t want to force you into this.”
She looked away, but I drew her face into a soft kiss. “Tell me if it’s too much. If you want me to stop.” I peeled one thin satin strap past her shoulder, kissing the soft skin as I went. “You said you had a vision for your wedding night.”
She watched me, eyes wide, plump lips parted. I could do sweet and tender for her. I had been getting other girls off my entire life without any regard to my own feelings. Why should my wedding be any different?
Six
GRAY
* * *
“I’ll make you feel so good, Lottie,” I promised. “Your wedding night will be perfect. Tell me what you like. I’ll give it to you. I’ll give you everything.” I pressed her body into the mattress, lightly grazing her ear with my teeth until she shuddered.
“I don’t know what I like,” she admitted. “I…I haven’t had sex very much.”
I trailed my hands up the inside of her thigh.
“This?”
She nodded and sighed a breathy moan.
I grazed a thumb over her pussy but didn’t part the lips.
“This?”
A hot, needy moan.
I pressed my thumb, barely parting. Wet.
You’re already so fucking wet.
Snitch slammed into me as Lottie’s hand slid up my thigh. The two images collided in a dark dance. Snitch was always so fucking wet. So fucking needy. Lottie reached for my cock, and Snitch vanished like smoke.
I could feel myself going soft.
Fuck.
I grabbed Lottie’s wrists, holding them together with one hand and slamming her flat against the bed in one move. Her eyes popped at the new position, and I plunged a finger inside Lottie, trying to banish Snitch.
I couldn’t bring her into this.
Not on our wedding night.
Lottie’s mouth fell open on a silent gasp, back arching. Her soft hands grasped mine, so unlike Snitch, nails manicured down to the pad. Not the furious, heated scratching I loved.
Fuck. There Snitch was again, crawling up and sliding inside my thoughts.
Lottie reached for my cock again, and I pulled away before I could stop myself. An awkward second passed, my finger still inside her.
“Will it help if I pretend to be her?” she breathed against my lips. “Story.”
My dick twitched at her name. I rubbed my thumb along Lottie’s clit, hoping she didn’t notice.
“It will,” she gasped. “I can feel it.”
“Stop.” I tried to be firm, but my words came out strangled. I worked the finger inside Lottie, trying to turn back time with her moans and gasps, before corruption had sunk inky into our wedding night.
“Does she like one finger or two?” she asked.
I didn’t respond, but she grasped my hard cock. This time I didn’t pull away.
“How many, Gray?” She tightened her grip on me, pumping up and down.
“Lottie—”
“No!” Lottie cut me off, working me harder in a rhythm until I couldn’t think past the pleasure. “How many?”
“She’ll take as many as I give her,” I grated.
Lottie looked me in the eye. “So give her what she deserves.”
We were tumbling down this hill now, too fast to stop it.
“How many does she deserve?” She all but cried her words when I tweaked her clit. I buried my head in her shoulder as she worked me, letting myself get lost in the dark spell Lottie was casting. As Lottie pumped me, I returned the favor, her moans getting discolored, distorted, in Snitch.
“One or two?” Lottie’s soft question was at my ear, urging me to fuck her, fuck my wife while I pretended she was another woman.
“Three,” I growled, sliding two more inside. A sharp gasp slipped from Lottie’s lips. Concern I’d hurt her shattered the moment. I lifted my head, finding her eyes.
“Lottie?”
She grasped my cheeks. “Don’t call me that name.”
I got Lottie off, making her scream, cry, say words I never knew could come out of her mouth. As I came into my wife’s hand and on her thigh, I groaned Snitch’s name into my wife’s shoulder.
Our breaths were heavy. I pushed myself up on my elbows. I’d come in Lottie’s hands, but she was covered on her inner thighs and pussy.
I’d promised her a family, but I was fucking terrified of that sticky substance sinking inside her… Just as quickly as the dark, dirty primal heat that had corrupted us and had made what we’d done okay came, it dissipated. All that was left in its wake was an icy hollowness.
“Lottie—”
“Don’t,” she cut me off, pushing me off at the same time. Lottie slid to the edge of the bed, giving me her back. I could count her breaths by the way the elegant notches in her spine moved.
Fuck.
Fuck fuck. Fuck. That was so not how we should have spent our wedding night. Instead of taking Snitch out of the equation, we’d brought her into our bed.
And I couldn’t stop the dark, fucked-up thought in my head telling her to go clean up. She was my wife, and I’d promised to be loyal to her, so why did I hate the idea of her getting pregnant?
It was unlikely, right? She’d have to be, like, crazy fucking fertile.
I reached for her. “Lottie.”
She flinched at my touch. “I just…I need a minute.”
My hand was still outstretched when there came a knocking on the door. Lottie snapped her head at the sound, then at me, eyes wide. She scrambled across the bed, lunging on top of me.
My face must have betrayed my confusion.
“Can you just act like you aren’t totally repulsed by me for five seconds?” she asked, looking over her shoulder at what sounded like someone coming up the stairs.
“Lottie, I’m not…do you think that?”
“We can use her,” she whispered. “If it will help, we can use her in the bedroom.”
Use Snitch, as if she were nothing more than a toy?
It had been done in the past, when girls were seen as nothing.
I would never fucking do it.
But I couldn’t respond, because whoever had come to get the sheets had arrived. I lifted my head off the pillow to see who had come, and all the air left my body.
Story.
“I’m here for the sheets.”
Seven
STORY
* * *
Lottie naked. Gray naked. Lottie on top of Gray, flushed from exertion. Her lips flushed. The sheets stained red.
“Story,” Gr
ayson breathed as if he’d been punched.
I swallowed. “They are requesting the sheets, Miss—Mrs. Crowne.”
Slowly they got off the bed. Grayson stared holes into me. Chiseled arms. Back exerted. Muscles slick. Lips plump from kissing. Hair wild.
Bed sheets messy.
I gathered the sheets in my arms, silky and soft, and red. Red and bloody. Once again I was reminded of the beginning, when I’d come here with a mountain of my only belongings. Now I was back with a mountain of their wedding sheets.
I swallowed. “Thank you.”
I turned from Charlotte, catching Grayson’s eyes. Brittle, bruised. I said I would learn to hate Grayson Crowne, but I wasn’t sure I knew how.
“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 m
e 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.
She stopped rubbing her arm and lifted her eyes to mine. “Be whoever he needs you to be.”
STORY
* * *
I slept on the cold floor instead of my ashy bed, so when I woke, my shoulder blades ached. I had a brief, painful flashback to my first nights with Grayson. But this time there was no one sleeping above me to talk to. No one to slip a blanket on me in the night.
I woke alone and cold.
I knew I shouldn’t have, but I browsed the internet. I was supposed to be forgotten, right? Except I saw my face splashed on the front page of the internet, bent next to Westley du Lac, a dopey, wide-eyed look on my face. Like I’d been caught. And now I had a name.
Cinderella of Crowne Hall.
I exhaled, falling back to the frigid floor, phone to my chest. They didn’t know who I was, didn’t even know my name, but they acted as though they knew everything about me.
Gold digger. Whore. Mistress. User.
But others loved me.
Wanted to be me.
They’d managed to contain the papers and major news outlets online, but not everyone could be bought. With a sigh I stood up, getting dressed in the little clothing that hadn’t been destroyed.
Upstairs the servants were prepping for the day, and a tray of pastries and sandwiches was set out for us. When I entered, the conversation stopped dead. I knew if I had any friends left here, last night had obliterated them.
To them, the only reason Lottie wouldn’t kick me to the curb after what had happened was because I was fucking her husband.
I tried to ignore it, tried to ignore how everyone watched me, and went for a sandwich. The tray was yanked back. All the servants looked at me with cold eyes.
They didn’t snicker or laugh, and somehow that made it worse. These cruel acts weren’t like what I’d bore upstairs with Grayson’s rich peers. These weren’t done for amusement. The humiliation was calculated. They were trying to break me down and run me out.
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