Total pages in book: 120
Estimated words: 113936 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 570(@200wpm)___ 456(@250wpm)___ 380(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 113936 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 570(@200wpm)___ 456(@250wpm)___ 380(@300wpm)
“Stop the crying,” he snapped. Then he forced himself to calm down. “What the hell is going on here?”
“You got out of the prison. It’s a miracle. We can—”
He moved her hands away as she reached for him again. “Don’t touch me.”
“You’re free, though—”
“And you’re alive. But you left me to rot in there. For two hundred years?”
Cordelhia’s wide, hurt eyes did absolutely nothing for him. All he could think about was the decades upon decades of time he had spent suffering while she was prima facie proof he wasn’t a murderer.
“Who the hell was upstairs in your bedroom that night?” he demanded. “Who died?”
With an elegant hand, Cordelhia motioned to the house. “May we please not do this here. I don’t wish the gardeners to hear anything.”
The last thing he wanted to do was go in that fucking house, but he stepped inside because information was the most important goal right now.
“Would you care for a libation,” she said as she indicated the parlor’s bar cart.
Which was the same one he’d taken the sherry off of.
Refusing to go any farther than the foyer, he laughed sharply. “That’s what drugged me in the first place. So, no, I’m not drinking a damn thing—who was that body? Your scent was all over it!”
It was a while before Cordelhia answered, and when she did, her voice was so soft he could barely hear it.
“I had a twin.” She put that long, lovely hand at the base of her throat. “She was an identical twin except for the fact that her eyes were mismatched.”
Ah, but of course. That defect would have been considered irredeemable by glymera standards—and he could remember a time when, though he certainly wouldn’t have condoned such a condemnation, he’d have understood it some. Now? After having been in the prison? Been deformed himself?
That way of thinking was an affront to everything that was moral.
“She wanted to get mated. The male was a commoner. My brother and mahmen were so upset—they knew it would ruin not only her, but our entire bloodline. My sister would not see reason, however, so they sehcluded her. It didn’t matter. She snuck out of the house. It was pure insanity.”
At this, Cordelhia went down to a display of stones that had been tumbled into the shapes of eggs. As she righted one that was off a mere degree or two, he saw her properly. She was painfully thin, twitchy as a bird, lost in a grand house with so many beautiful things.
“So you planned it all along,” he said numbly. “You mated me, lived with me for a year, long enough so that things seemed on the up and up. Then when you both went into your needings at the same time, because you were twins, your brother killed her and drugged me, and the body swap was accomplished.”
“Kane, you must understand.” She floated over to him. “It was never anything personal.”
When she reached for his hand, the expression on her face, the pleading, guileless beg to see their side of the situation, was scarier than anything he’d witnessed in prison.
“Don’t touch me,” he snarled.
Her brows lifted and she placed her hand back at the base of her throat.
“Your mahmen,” he said, “she knew the plan, then.”
“Yes.”
“Hell of an acting job. And no doubt she repeated it in front of the servants of this household. So there were witnesses.”
Now it was his turn to walk around, and as he peered in through the dining room, he remembered the way things had been.
He looked over his shoulder. “How did you end up living here, though. After it was all over? If you did this to preserve the bloodline, and you’re alive and well, how does that work? I know the glymera is a cutthroat kind of place, but surely killing your own sister or daughter to survive socially is extreme even for them.”
When she looked down at the carpet, he cursed under his breath as he figured it out. “You all told people it was your sister I was mating, the exhile dhoble. And that’s why your mahmen chose me. I had no family and an elderly aunt who was dying. I was from the Old Country with no contacts here. That was why the mating ceremony was only your immediate family.” He thought of that birthday party and laughed harshly. “That’s why we never had anyone to this house, why there were never any gatherings, and of course the servants were too loyal to talk. You probably imprisoned your sister in the fucking basement for the year it took for both of you to go into your fertile period, and then when the time came, you executed the plan perfectly and swapped places.”
Cordelhia stood before him, looking helpless. “You have no idea what it’s like to be ostracized. No one to speak to you, nowhere to go—”