His grip tightened on me.
My heart squeezed…maybe it meant he didn’t want to let me go.
But in the end, he slowly lowered me off his back.
I stared past the cold sand to the slowly darkening sky.
When I spoke next, my throat was like cotton. “I always wondered what it was like to be on Grayson Crowne’s private beach.”
He blinked, looking around. “I shouldn’t have brought you here.”
I tried to hide the sadness in my eyes, the way my face fell.
A second later he said, “It’s too cold.”
He slid out of his jacket, draping it over my shoulders.
“I’m already wearing a jacket,” I pointed out, voice barely a whisper.
It was only his jacket, so why did it feel so wrong, clandestine, dirty? The things those girls had shouted at us. I went to stop him, but his hand shot out, covering mine. My eyes met his, searching.
“Don’t fight me on this, Snitch. You’ll lose.” He tugged the jacket tighter, eyes pinched, then stepped away.
“You walked me miles home,” I said. Grayson looked out at the frosty ocean. “You could’ve just put me in a car.”
He shrugged. “I haven’t worked out today.”
“Is that really why?”
His head whipped away from the ocean, eyes colliding with mine so fast I swallowed my breath.
“You’re the mother of my child, Snitch. I’m not putting you in some car.” He looked so insulted I couldn’t speak.
Whoa.
Hearing him say it out loud drenched my body in goose bumps. Mother of his child.
“I don’t know if I can do this,” I blurted. “I don’t know if I can be a good mom.”
His hand came out as though he was going to push my hair from my face, but it froze, and then he lifted the locket from my neck.
“That’s impossible…You care too much.”
“Are you scared?” I wondered.
Hope flowered. Was he as uncertain as me? Did he feel it too? That jagged, crippling shard of fear.
The thing that made me bleed.
“Am I scared, Snitch?” He blinked, looked at me like I’d just asked him if I had two heads. Insecurity bled into me. Of course Grayson Crowne wasn’t scared.
“Every goddamn minute. I only have my dad and my grandfather as examples…and I don’t want to be anything like them.”
I was about to tell him, No, you won’t; you could never be, but he continued before I could.
“You’re the only person I ever cared about protecting, and I did a shit job of that.”
“You did a great job,” I whispered. Without him…where would I be?
In response he licked his thumb, then dragged it across my bottom lip. My heart stopped and restarted, shocked. All Grayson did was look at his thumb, at the blood he’d wiped away, and shake his head with a self-deprecating smile.
“That outfit doesn’t look like something West picked out.”
I tried to hide my smile. He’d noticed.
“I picked it out…Well?” I asked. I ran my hands down the silky material fitted around my hips. It was almost like my old clothes, but better material, and a little bit sexier.
His eyes flared, his jaw tightened, and a half second stretched into a millennia. My fingers froze on my hips, gut throbbing with the look. His eyes locked with mine.
“You did good, Snitch.” His voice was like the crashing wintry waves: shredded and raw.
Then Grayson fell to one knee.
He took my ankle in his hand, pushing at the swollen skin. “Does it hurt?”
On one knee, looking up at me, it was almost as if Grayson was proposing. My brittle heart cracked for the future I would never get.
Did it hurt?
“Just a little,” I whispered.
His eyes ached, too, but he lowered my ankle. He didn’t immediately stand up, just stayed on his knee.
“Grayson?” I asked quietly.
He thumbed the bone at my ankle. “You know, Crownes never get to propose. Not really. We’re told who we marry, and then a public proposal is planned with plenty of paparazzi. Or we stage one and leak it to the press. ”
He slid a hand up my leg, underneath my dress, pausing at the curve beneath the knee. I swallowed air as heat climbed up my leg from that one spot and eviscerated my gut.
“You asked me once about my wedding, but I never asked you.” His eyes burned. “What kind of proposal would you want, Story?”
Any.
Any kind of proposal, if it’s coming from you.
I tried to pull away, but his thumb and forefinger were a possessive bruising grip, keeping me stuck in the sand, stuck in his gaze.
“Stop.” I swallowed. How could I have so little air when the beach was breathing it?
The wind whipped the sand around us.
“I don’t want you leaving Crowne Hall…” he said, thumbing the bone.
I sucked in a breath, lungs paralyzed. I know I shouldn’t want to stay with him, shouldn’t want anything to do with him. But…
“What?” I finally managed.
His eyes found mine, burning. “It’s too fucking dangerous. Don’t leave without a guard. Don’t go out at night.”
Just like that, whatever spell he’d put on my heart shattered.
“That sounds like a curfew, Grayson,” I whispered. “Are you trying to give me a curfew?”
I didn’t let him respond. I shoved him away, putting space between us. Grayson stood with easy grace, following me.
“You can’t lock me in here.”
“The hell I can’t—”
“You’re supposed to let me go.”
“You think I don’t fucking know that?” he yelled. “It’s all I’ve been trying to do since you crashed into my goddamn life.”
I mashed my lips as the ocean breeze grew angry, magnifying our silence.
“Friends don’t get their friends’ husbands kicked out of their wings. Friends don’t give curfews, friends don’t send friends poetry—”
“So you did get my last text,” he cut me off.
I rolled my lips to the side. “As if Grayson Crowne has never left anyone on read?”
He smiled a little, like a teenager caught with a girl in his room.
I missed that.
Fuck, I missed his smile.
That’s the problem.
I stepped back. “No more poetry. No more of this. We’re supposed to be friends.”
He grabbed my elbow. “I’m your friend, Snitch? That’s it? That’s all this is?”
It’s what it has to be. He’s married to Lottie. He wants to be married to Lottie. Every action has proven that from the very fucking beginning.
I looked away.
“What if we could be more?” he asked.
As if fate heard us conspiring against it, Lottie called through the frosty winter breeze for her husband.
“Grayson? Is that you?”
Behind Grayson, Lottie gripped the gates of his private balcony, leaning ever so slightly over it to try to see us in the dusky twilight. The inky spires and turrets of Crowne Hall jutted into the frosty twilight.
“Don’t write to me, Grayson. Don’t protect me. Just…don’t. You don’t get to hold on when you refuse to fight for me, when you never fought for us.”
He grabbed my wrist as I tried to walk by him, eyes blazing like there was something he wanted desperately to say.
But he let me go.
GRAY
* * *
“It really was you on the news,” Lottie said the minute I got inside our wing. “You carried her. You saved her. You rescued her. You’re her savior. You should have just taken a mistress. I could have handled that.”
“Should I have abandoned her there? Like you did?”
Lottie’s lips parted at my words. After a moment she said softly, “I don’t understand why you hate me so much. We were friends before we fell in love. The only answer I can
come up with is…because I’m not her.”
I ground my jaw, going to my desk to grab a sucker.
“It was a du Lac publication, Lottie,” I said, rooting around my drawer for a sucker. “This situation never would have happened if that article wasn’t published.”
“You think I did this?” she asked my back.
“I know your father has someone on the inside. If not you, then who? Who has the most to gain?”
“You do. You think I did this.”
I turned around. The wind blew like a soft scream against the windowpane. She stared at me with open brown eyes. I wanted to believe her, wanted to believe the woman sleeping in my bed wasn’t capable of this, but every bad thing happening to the woman I loved was either traced back to a du Lac or my grandfather.
Or both.
Lottie laughed when I didn’t deny it.
My eyes narrowed. “Are you drunk?”
She laughed harder. “Drunk? Am I drunk? You’re so fucking blind, Grayson Crowne. Blind to anyone but her. I get it. You need…something. A reason. To hate me. Will it make it easier when you fuck her then? It’s all crazy, psycho bitch Lottie’s fault.”
She stood up, looking absolutely miserable.
“Do you know what they say about me online? I’m a cunt. I’m…” She took a deep, rocky inhale. “I’m a frigid whore. Wicked. All because I had the audacity to marry you. Why is this my fault? Why should I have to lose my family and friends? You should. You’re the reason we’re like this. I didn’t do anything. I didn’t change. I still love you.”
She stared at me.
“How long have you been plotting this, Lottie?”
She didn’t speak for a minute.
“Did you try to divorce me?”
I blinked. “What?”
“My mother warned me, but I didn’t want to believe it.”
I worked my bottom lip between thumb and forefinger as remnants of the man I wanted to be clung to me with claws. The man I thought I should be. Every minute I watched Snitch with West, it became clearer.
To be a good man, I’d have to be bad to someone.
Living in the gray was dragging all of us down.
“Yeah,” I rasped. “It’s true.”
Lottie stumbled backward. “You know we can’t divorce, Grayson. There are too many jobs, too many lives, just too much riding on this marriage.”
It was a moment before I responded, and even then all I could say was, “I know.”
“You would have given up everything for her. Your inheritance. Your company. Your home. Your family. Everything. Why?”
“I love her.”
She bit her lip. “I think I hate you.”
I nodded.
It was the least I deserved.
“You’ve broken every promise you made to me, so I’ll make one instead. I won’t let you divorce me. If this is what we are…fine. You’ll at least treat me with the same respect my fucking mother got. You won’t choose her in public.”
“I wanted to be nice,” I said, voice lifeless. “I wanted to be good. You were my wife, and I didn’t want to be…”—my fucking father—“a dick. I want us to be civil, because we’re trapped in this hell together, but I don’t want you to get confused. She comes first. She comes first, second, third. You could try for a thousand fucking years, and you wouldn’t even break top ten.”
“It must be nice being so in love that every horrible thing you do is just romantic.” She chucked a box at me that I barely caught. “When you go to your mistress tonight, give her this. I thought after today she might need it.”
I tried to hide the suspicion in my voice.
“What is it?”
She laughed, but it was bitter. “Do you think it’s poison or something? Please, give me more credit. Of course, I’d have a servant do that, wouldn’t I?”
She left the room and I fell to the bed. I opened the soft satin box, pulling out a pastel-green plush animal.
Fuck.
I bought them when I felt unloved, unappreciated, unwanted.
Forty-One
STORY
* * *
The first snow of the season fell later that night. I stared outside as the soft flakes blanketed the beach in a soft powder, my thumbs swiping across my stomach. Abigail’s Finsta lesson was still fresh in my mind…I could be anyone I wanted to be on the internet. I didn’t have to be Cinderella. I didn’t have to be the Stepsister Slut.
I didn’t even have to be Story.
I already know the world should listen to you. How you say it is irrelevant.
Grayson’s sweet words tumbled around my skull.
Maybe I wasn’t ready for the world to know who I was.
Maybe I never would be.
But I could make an account, and I could share my poetry. I could share everything, all the words I couldn’t say to Grayson because we no longer slept beside one another.
I made an account and typed my first letter.
Dear Atlas, you were meant to hold up the world, is that why you can’t let me go?
I’d barely finished making my first post when there was a soft knock on my door. My heart jumped into my throat, and I shoved my phone away.
My Atlas himself leaned against the frame, head down so his messy blond hair covered his eyes. He had a bottle of whiskey in one hand and a sucker in his mouth. I hated that I both loved and worried over the sight.
“I bought this to share when Woodsy died.” He held up the bottle of whiskey, which looked expensive. “Obviously…it’s inappropriate now.”
“You shouldn’t be here,” I said.
“Truce, Snitch.”
I needed to say no.
We had to stop doing this.
It made it so much harder to think about leaving. It made it impossible to look at him as a friend. It made it harder to hate him when he turned off his affection.
He shook the bottle slightly, lifting his head just enough so I could see the smallest smile play on his rose petal lips, enough to crack and crumble my defenses.
I nodded slightly.
He sat on the floor, resting against my bed. It was almost as though we were in high school and he’d snuck into my room.
But I had a husband, he had a wife, and I was pregnant with his baby.
We both stared out the window as snow fell harder and harder.
“I’ve been wondering for a while…You haven’t stopped calling me Snitch, but your voice is soft. It sounds like a term of endearment.”
He was quiet for so long I thought he wouldn’t respond, but then he took a drink of whiskey and said, “You’re my Snitch, you spill all your secrets to me. You’re the only one who does that.”
My heart stuttered and stopped.
“Or, at least, you used to.”
I didn’t know what to say, so I just stared at him, trying to get my heart to stop hammering.
“Even if you can’t open up to me…don’t be anyone else’s snitch. Just be mine. I want all your secrets.” His eyes flashed to mine, burning. “Promise me.”
I licked my lips. “I’ll give you mine if you give me yours, Grayson Crowne.”
He traced the glass bottle with his thumb, as if considering my proposal. “I have an answer for you.”
“An answer?”
“What I would be if I wasn’t CEO of Crowne Industries.”
“You do?”
He nodded slowly, carefully. “A hero for my sisters. A good man. A good father. I want to be that man. I’d like to be what you see in me.”
The way he spoke, it sounded like he knew it could never come true.
As Grayson unburied his heart, pieces of mine that I’d tucked in thorns broke free.
“I have a card from my uncle’s attorney,” I whispered. “I don’t want to go to his reading. Then it makes it real…but it will be read soon. Within a few months. He doesn’t have any property. I was going to give him money. I can’t imagine what he’d give.”
He
slowly lowered the drink from his lips, eyes on the window. “What if he has something to give you?”
“Then the bank will probably take it. That’s what happened with Mom…No, he doesn’t have anything for me. He said all he had for me was a coin. My uncle was losing his mind toward the end,” I whispered. “Talking about wishes and coins buried beneath poetry.”
He lifted his head, blue eyes locking on mine. “Coins?”
I nodded. We were silent for a moment, then Grayson reached into his pocket. Gold flashed in his palm. Coins.
“I don’t think he was losing his mind, Snitch.”
They weren’t like regular coins, they were etched with lace-like detail, and the lace patterns were all different.
I’m so fucking stupid. I should have known the minute my uncle spoke of a coin what he was referring to. I leaned off the bed, trying to get a better look.
“That looks like the coin West threw down when you gambled me.”
“I didn’t gamble you,” Grayson growled. “I’ve known everyone at that table since I was in fucking diapers, and they’re all shit at poker. Gambling addicts with the easiest tells.”
I tried to stop the way my heart grew at the confession. “What are those?”
He shoved them back into his pocket. “It’s hard to explain if you didn’t grow up like me, with archaic rituals and Victorian bullshit.”
“Try me.”
“There are only five of them. I have all but one—mine.” With his arms on his knees, the bottle in his hand, he stared out the window. “They’re a specific kind of currency in our world, tied to our bloodlines, and just about the only thing we honor. Families save them for years to force anything from marriages to mergers. That’s why it was so weird when West used one on you…but now I understand,” he growled the last words. “When you use a coin, the person has to obey or challenge.”
“That night, West asked if you wanted to challenge…”
“He was asking if I wanted to start a war.” He shot me a wry grin. “I considered it.”
There Grayson went again, making my heart beat without consent. I looked away, but despite my best efforts to tamp it down, hope sprung in my chest.
“Want to know something dumb? I’ve been saving them for so long because I have this hope I can use them to barter my way out of this world.”
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