Total pages in book: 101
Estimated words: 94782 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 474(@200wpm)___ 379(@250wpm)___ 316(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 94782 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 474(@200wpm)___ 379(@250wpm)___ 316(@300wpm)
“Should you be out of bed?” Calder remarks as Aunt Runa pushes her into the hall.
“I’m fine,” she answers stubbornly, her eyes moving to me. “Thorsen, I know the past couple of days have been difficult, but the time has come. This is what you were born for.”
“What I was born for?” I laugh humorlessly. “The whole country despises me.”
“They just don’t know you,” she insists. “You’ve hidden yourself well, but now is the time to let them see you for who you are, and they will love you as we all love you.”
I know what she’s doing. She doesn’t have to tell me why she’s pushing this. She thinks this turn of events will force me in a different direction and give me a purpose.
“Give it a chance,” she pleads. “That’s all I ask.”
Hayes speeds along the process by throwing another match on the bonfire.
“Your Highness, we don’t have much time. I’m afraid it’s very likely Narcissa will speak out to the media. We need to stay ahead of it. It’s your job now to control the narrative.”
“How long do we have?” I sigh, wishing that plague of a woman and her family would just disappear.
He checks his watch. “As of right now, a little under forty minutes.”
Once we secured the official press release, Hayes ushered me off to a meeting with the council that extended into the late hours of the night. After everything that’s happened, I refuse to let Narcissa humiliate my mother as her final parting shot. That nagging thought is what drives me down the hall to my father’s office.
Now that I have the keys, I can access his files. When I sit down at the desk and unlock his drawers, it doesn’t take me long to find what I’m looking for. Alongside the dossiers of the many people in our lives, there’s a folder for Narcissa and her daughters.
I flip the files onto the desk and open them, scanning through the mundane details of their lives. School records, dates of birth, job histories, relations. It’s at this particular juncture that something catches my eye, and I’m half-convinced I must be delusional from exhaustion because this can’t be right. But no matter how many times I blink, the name in the file doesn’t change. Listed under Narcissa’s relatives is a stepdaughter she never mentioned by the name of Ella Bellerose Laurent.
My head spins, and I feel like I’m going to be ill as that information settles into my consciousness. I can’t accept it. There’s no way Ella could ever be related to her. I don’t want to believe it. But the more time I spend flipping through the pages, the more obvious it becomes that it’s horrifyingly true. There are pictures of her inside this folder. A family photograph from when her father was still alive, along with a solitary identification photo. The blue eyes staring back at me are unmistakable. That same woman is inside my home. In my bed. And even worse, she’s in my head.
I can’t deny the link between them, and my paranoia is festering like cancer inside me. She never told me who her family was. She never mentioned Lavinia or Narcissa by name, and now, there’s only one conclusion I can draw. Has she been playing me too? Was it all an elaborate scheme between them? They came to the ball to hunt a prince, and I was the only one foolish enough to take the bait. She spoon-fed me a story that was far too convenient in its desperation. Nobody is that selfless. Nobody would make the agreement she made with me unless there was something in it for her.
I feel you.
When I close my eyes, I can still see her whispering those words under the moonlight. They felt so genuine. But now it feels like a betrayal of the worst kind.
Heat licks at my throat, and the moisture on my lips evaporates, scorching my mouth with a bitterness I can’t swallow. She tricked me. She lied to me. I was right not to trust her. But she bested me with a performance more cunning than all the others. And now she’s going to pay.
29
Ella
Something crashes, jolting me from my sleep. When I bolt upright, my first thought is that it’s a storm. And it turns out I’m right. It’s a storm I know intimately, and his name is Thorsen.
Glass shatters against the floor as his footsteps reverberate off the walls like gunshots. The artwork in the hall doesn’t sound like it survived, and every instinct inside me is screaming at me to run. I’m halfway off the bed when the door crashes open, and the god of thunder himself steps through it.
“Thorsen?” A cold chill moves up my spine. “What’s wrong?”
He comes for me, dark and scary, his eyes ablaze as his fingers wrap around my throat. “Who are you?”