Flutters rose up and down my back at his words.
“Do you like that, the idea of taking him inside you when you’re filled with my come? When I go back to my wife, I’ll be all clean.”
I tensed at the idea and his laugh followed like fireflies in the night. He worked his hand harder over my skirt, forcing me to get off on my worst fucking nightmare.
Always torturing me.
“You don’t like that, little nun?” he teased. “Say the word, little nun.”
His hot breath and his teeth on my neck were a sinful temptation.
I was heady with it. Eroding this razor-thin line between us further. One step away from it dissolving.
So he couldn’t see me.
So what?
I was fucking his come into my body.
“Say the word and I’ll get my cock covered with you, Story.”
He nipped the skin at my neck, as if finally giving in a little himself. A small mark. A bruise barely noticeable. Except it lit thousands of fires inside my body.
More.
“More,” I begged.
He groaned against my neck like he was just as swallowed in the fantasy as I was. He bit harder and I exploded.
My head fell against his chest.
He pushed the hair out of my eyes.
“My girl,” he said softly. “You are still the most beautiful, perfect creature when you come.”
“What are we doing?” I whispered. “We’re becoming everything we don’t want to be. You’re hiding me from your wife. You’re lying to her. I’m cheating on my husband. I’m having another man’s baby.”
“Another man?” he growled. “Is that what the fuck I am to you? Just some asshole who knocked you up? I’m yours the way you are mine.” He quirked his neck to the side, as if fighting the rage crawling up his spine. “What are we doing? You could never cheat on your fucking husband with me.”
He bit off the word, his grip on my waist becoming a vise.
“Get this through your head, Snitch. When you’re with him, you’re cheating on me.”
Forty-Four
STORY
* * *
I rushed out of the maze, Grayson at my back. I ignored him calling for me, ignored him all the way back into Crowne Hall.
“Story, wait!”
The Crownes had moved from breakfast to a light cocktail brunch in the library. I’m sure they were wondering where we were. Both of us…missing.
“Story!” He grabbed my arm.
“Let me go. They’ll be wondering where we are.”
“I don’t give a shit.”
I yanked at my arm. “We can’t do that again.”
“Stop fucking saying that.”
“I have your—your—”
He grabbed my waist with both hands. “My come.”
“There you are, Angel.”
I shoved Grayson off. West came to us, and I could feel Grayson’s eyes on me. My skin was hot and itchy, and my chest bruised from my pounding heart. I wrapped my arm around West’s, letting him lead me away from Grayson, into the library.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
He glanced at me, brow raised, and if I didn’t know any better…I’d swear his eyes were filled with humor. “What for?”
I don’t know. Nothing. Everything. In the end, I didn’t respond.
In the library, Lottie held Grayson’s hand, but he stared holes at me. Lottie was talking about some book she’d had trouble finding, by an author she couldn’t remember.
“Story could help you with that, right, Angel?”
“Um…” I trailed off.
“I don’t see why,” Grayson said.
“She’s quite the bookworm,” West supplied. “And sisters should be close.”
West was enjoying torturing me.
I know he was.
“Oh…well, I guess,” Lottie said.
This was so wrong and fucked up and morally repugnant on all sides. To be talking like in-laws while her husband’s come was inside me. While he stared at me like he knew, like he wanted me to know he knows.
West slid his hand from my waist, down to the curve of my ass. He dipped his head down, so he could whisper against my ear.
“Where were you, Angel?” He slid his palm lower, under the curve of my ass. “What has your skin so hot?”
When you’re with him, you’re cheating on me.
My gut flipped, eyes on Grayson.
I stepped back. “I-I need a drink.”
West’s laughter followed me to the mimosa tower.
Josephine stood next to the tower, one hand on her arm, the other holding her sparkling drink. I grabbed a water.
“I’m Story,” I said, realizing we hadn’t talked. I don’t think I’d seen anyone talk to her.
“I’m Josephine.” She smiled. “You’ll have to forgive me. I would have introduced myself earlier, but I’m not allowed to speak unless spoken to.” She shrugged as if it was the simplest thing to say that.
I blinked. “What?”
“You’re the servant girl, right?” she asked. “Story?”
She hadn’t said it with derision as everyone else had, so I nodded.
“I’m sure there’s a lot you don’t know about this world. There was a lot I didn’t know.” She grew wistful, then smiled again, and moved to leave.
“Wait. What don’t I know?”
She studied me beneath her thick, black lashes, maybe wondering if she could trust me. Then she kept walking.
“Please.” I stepped in her path. “No one talks to me either…what don’t I know?”
“That’s a very long conversation.”
“Then just tell me, why can’t you speak unless spoken to?”
Josephine cast a furtive, sideline glance to her left. Tansy Crowne was watching us.
“Being a mistress isn’t cheating with some guy’s husband. It isn’t like the world you know. It’s a title. It’s a sentence. When you become a mistress, you give up the life you know. We do get one thing. The mistress always gets the holidays.”
“Why do it?” I whispered.
“It was either that or die. I had triplets to worry about. I’d already lost one child to them.”
I covered my stomach with my palm, and her eyes dropped to that. “They tried to kill you?”
“The Crownes do not abide bastards.” She took a sip of champagne. “But really, anything that would destroy their way of life. You don’t get…this…”—she waved to the enormous ballroom—“by allowing people like us to change things.”
My heart cracked. “Grayson could help. I’m sure he doesn’t want his siblings—”
“Grayson Crowne and my children are not siblings, Story. He, along with his real siblings, have never spoken a word to them.”
I blinked. That couldn’t be true. I tried to remember past Holidays, a time when I’d seen Grayson speak with the bastard Crownes.
I came up blank.
“Is it also forbidden? Is that why they’re not here?”
She shook her head. “They’ll be here soon, and they’ll be ignored like me. If you manage to have your baby—”
“I’m not—”
“You’ll get a prison in Scotland…I mean, a castle. And you’ll be forced to watch your children grow up to become the people who murdered their father.” She sighed. “At least my master loved me. He made me his mistress to save me. But he couldn’t save me from everything. From rituals dating back centuries.”
I shuddered at the memory of the wedding night. “I’m not a stranger to archaic rituals.”
Josephine paused, a distant look in her eyes. “I see myself in you, Story. Be careful. Whatever you think you know, or have seen, I can guarantee it’s only the tip of the iceberg.”
I opened my mouth to ask more questions when a hand wrapped around my waist.
“You’ve been over here for a while,” West said. “Your conversation looked riveting.”
I stared at Josephine, w
anting to keep talking to her. It was a tsunami of information, and I felt like she had all the answers to questions I didn’t know needed answering.
Josephine smiled. “Just girl stuff.”
She walked away, mingling with the crowd in silence. West’s eyes fell to me, and I placed a hand on his chest before he could speak.
“West, I’m going to get some air.”
He grinned. “In the maze?”
I opened and closed my mouth like a fish, then mumbled something incoherent and dashed off, stealing away into a linen closet.
I fell against a pile of soft sheets with a deep exhale. My head swam with everything I’d learned and done, but this closet smelled like clean cotton and was dark and I could breathe.
Then the door opened, followed a second later by its closing and then Grayson’s voice.
“Lottie, can we do this later?”
“You were gone for thirty minutes. Everyone noticed.” Lottie’s voice followed.
I froze, unsure if I should speak up.
I felt cheap and wrong, as though it were months ago, and I was back behind the linen watching one of their private moments. They stood next to the door, bodies muted in the darkness, and they didn’t see me in my pile of sheets.
“You’re a horrible husband,” she said. “You promised you would be good but…You’re worse than my father. You’re making a fool of me. It’s like I’m your mistress, not your wife. Don’t speak unless spoken to.”
Grayson dragged two hands through his hair, the pain in his eyes tearing lines down my heart.
I was watching Atlas dissolve into pieces.
I knew how much it meant to him to be good, and I was the reason he was bad. Me.
“You know what I want, Lottie,” he said. “You know.”
She curled her fist. “I’m not letting you divorce me. I don’t care that you tried. I don’t care.”
She opened the door, slamming it shut.
Grayson stared at it, scraping his hands through his hair, muscles in his back tight, neck corded.
“You tried to divorce her?”
Forty-Five
STORY
* * *
Grayson spun, eyes wide.
“Story—what—” He broke off, rubbing his jaw, looking around the small closet like someone else was going to pop out.
“You tried to divorce her? When?”
I stared at Grayson, waiting for him to say something—anything—after what I’d just heard.
Silence spread.
“Right after I learned you were pregnant,” he finally said. “My grandfather asked me what I was willing to lose. And I thought about it…. Everything but you. My fortune. My family.” He paused. “My wife.”
He let that linger.
“I…would lose her if it meant keeping you safe. So I did…only you came back married to West, and everything changed.”
I wasn’t sure if that filled me with happiness or sadness. I went with anger. I tried to push past him, and he grabbed my arm.
“Let me go.”
“I’m done letting you go.”
I tried to yank my arm, but he dragged me to him.
We were so close.
“Why didn’t you tell me the truth about being a mistress, about your family, about this, about everything?
“Why do you think I pushed you away?” he yelled. “I tried to get you out of this world. Away from us. Away from me.”
I clutched my stomach. “Am I in danger?”
He ground his jaw. “If they find out about you…yes.”
My chest bottomed out.
Fear.
Raw, breathless fear.
“Why didn’t you tell me? Why are you always lying?”
“What good would it have done, Snitch?”
“I could have—” I broke off, mashing my lips together.
What could I have done that Grayson Crowne couldn’t?
He brought my head into his hands. “This is my weight to bear. I’d rather you were safe and happy and away from me, than with me and unhappy like everyone—or worse, dead.”
“I would have hated you less,” I whispered.
His thumbs dug into my cheeks. “You should hate me more, little nun.”
“You want honesty from me, but you keep so many secrets. This whole time you had this huge fucking secret. How many others are you keeping?”
“What if I failed, Snitch?” His brows drew and he looked away, like he was embarrassed.
Seconds ticked on, the wind howling.
His grip never loosened.
“I wasn’t going to give you a hope for a future that I can’t guarantee. Put you in danger and make promises I couldn’t keep. I did that once before, and I won’t do it again.”
I tried to force the armor around my heart to stay locked tight, but each word he spoke pried it apart. West was offering me the future I’d been scraping at. Out of Crowne Point. Away for good.
“Is there hope now, Grayson?” I whispered.
His jaw was clenched so tight the muscle popped.
Then he nodded, so slowly I wondered if he didn’t want me to know.
It burned my chest.
“Your family will never accept me, Grayson. They’d rather kill me. We just keep knotting the thread further and further. There’s no hope for us, Grayson. None at all.”
“Don’t say that.”
“You fought. You fought so hard. It doesn’t matter. No matter what we do, we’ll never be together.”
Even though I knew, deep in my marrow, Grayson and I wouldn’t be together, there was still this part of me that wouldn’t stop poking at the idea. It was a dream and a hope. You can’t shake those, they exist like their own shards of glass, cutting you with the image of happiness.
But now I finally saw.
It would never happen.
Ever.
I fumbled with the locket at my neck. Ready to open and end this thing between us once and for all, when his hand came to mine.
“Stop.”
My eyelids burned. “Let go of my hands.”
“We’re almost there, Snitch.”
“We’ll always be almost there, Grayson. Don’t you see?”
“I know you don’t trust me.” He spoke like the words were smoke burning his chest. “I’m your shard of glass now.”
He thumbed a tear at my cheek that I didn’t realize had fallen.
I wished I could tell him otherwise, but he was right.
“But we’re almost there, little nun.”
GRAY
* * *
Later that night, as the sun set on the ocean, I gripped the papers in my hand until they wrinkled. I could be a hero for my family, or I could be a good man for Snitch.
But I couldn’t be both.
“Grayson?”
I lifted my head at Lottie’s soft voice. She held her left arm with her right hand, her silk pajamas wrinkled. She looked like she’d had less sleep than me.
“I…I need to talk to you about something. I’m…” She exhaled a shaky breath, hand on her stomach; then her eyes zeroed on the document in my hands. “What is that?”
I stood up, gripping the postnuptial, then handed it to her.
Lottie held the papers, staring at them for a while. “Is this what I think it is?”
I nodded.
She looked back at them, going quiet. “You’re handing me papers for a future, so why does this feel like the end?”
Because once my grandfather saw this, I’d finally have leverage to get us out.
“It’s for her.” She gripped the papers, wrinkling them. “It’s always her. They won’t let you get away with this, Grayson.”
“They won’t have a choice.”
She sat on the couch overlooking the winter ocean. “Do you know why I hate Christmas? It was the one time of year my father’s mistresses could come to Du Lac Manor. My mother had to play good hostess and act like what was happening wasn’t a knife to the soul. For
most, Christmas is the happiest time of the year. For us, it was the darkest.”
My chest twisted, and I fell beside Lottie. Christmas had always been the darkest for me for the exact same fucking reason. I’d first promised myself I’d never be my father next to the tree, as I watched my mother hide her pain.
The waves crashed on the wintry sand as I watched my wife, saw a life that had seemingly been mapped by fate since the beginning.
She turned to me, eyes bright and earnest. “You need more time. I’ll give you time. I’ll give however long you need.”
“Lottie, I love her. I’ll never stop loving her.”
“You would give me everything? Even though all of it is going to go to my brother?”
We would be out of this world—both Snitch and I. West du Lac could jack off into a pile of money like Scrooge McFuck for all I cared.
I’d finally have my girl.
I sat beside her, pulling her hand into mine. “We’ll be free, both of us. I’ll take all the responsibility. You won’t leave this marriage with a scratch. No dark holidays. None of that.”
“I’ll never be free,” she muttered.
“Lottie.” I gripped her face. “What is going on?”
There was something on her mind. I couldn’t believe she was happy in this marriage, happy with Snitch always between us.
She yanked her head out of my hands and reached for the discarded papers. She put them on the glass table in front of us, scribbling her name.
“There.” She thrust the papers into my lap. “Let me know when I should expect my divorce.”
“Lottie…”
“It won’t work,” she said. “Whatever you’re trying to do, it won’t work. Your grandfather won’t let you give everything up; my parents won’t let you leave me. We’re stuck together now. None of this will work. People like us don’t get to choose our fates, Grayson.”
Maybe she was right. Maybe all this would be for naught. But I reached for my green pen, and signed my name next to hers in green ink.
Hoping that fate would listen.
Despite what I’d just signed, I would be faithful to Lottie until my marriage dissolved. I wouldn’t start a life with Snitch with stains on our souls. I knew that was as important to her as it was to me. I would build us our perfect happily ever after.
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