“Did you forget?” I growled. “Your shadowy confessions belong to me.”
Her brow caved, but only for a moment. “They beat me,” she said quietly, raspy. My expression must have betrayed my fury, because she added quickly, “It was nothing I couldn’t handle, Grayson.”
My jaw was clenched so tight my neck strained, but I trailed a soft touch along her shoulder, her neck, until she closed her eyes.
I tried to steady my breathing.
This was her confession, and I wasn’t going to steal it with my reaction.
“He slept in my bed…he made me. I felt so bad. I felt like I’d cheated.” Her eyes were still closed as she relayed parts of her trip to Scotland I’d since memorized. I wanted to rip the real confession out of her, pull the secrets like thorns from her chest. Why wouldn’t she tell me the truth like she had in the letters she sent me?
I trailed my touch down the side of her face. “Did you remember me? Did you use memories as armor?”
Her eyes popped open, then softened into a smile. “Yeah! I did. So it didn’t hurt as much.”
I trailed my touch along her cheek. “Good.”
She leaned into my palm. “West remembered a poem I wrote all those years ago. That…really freaked me out. When West ghosted me, I wrote my first poem. I shared it with my uncle, and he started to encourage dreams I’d always considered fantasy. I never thought he’d remember, but he quoted it to me in Scotland.”
“Tell me,” I said. “Tell me the poem.”
“Put my heart in a cage…” she whispered.
I closed my eyes and listened to her poem. Her poetry was always so fucking beautiful. Even back then, when she was just a teenager, she was so talented.
“You’re gonna be fucking huge, Snitch,”
She bit her bottom lip, looking away.
“Please, tell me about you,” she said. “Tell me everything. Fill in all of the gaps. Like, why did the servants help you but why couldn’t I use them?”
“You have…a following.” I dragged my nose up her neck.
“But—” She broke off on a swallow, and I bit her throat where the skin moved. “They all hate me.”
“Not all of them.” I lifted my head, serious. “Some follow you, but there is also an opposition. You saw what happened outside the tea room. It’s risky.”
“Why didn’t you tell me all of this? You’ve been letting it wrap around your heart. I want to rip the thorns out. Tell me, please? Why didn’t you tell me about Josephine? Why didn’t you tell me about your grandfather?”
Because I’m fucking terrified, and I feel like a coward.
“I didn’t know how,” I said, low. “What would you have done if I told you the way my grandfather kept me in my wing wasn’t just with beatings, but with threats to my mother and sister every day you were gone?”
Her lips parted. “I don’t know.” She placed a palm on my cheek, scooting closer to me, sharing my pillow. I dragged her thigh across my body and played with a stray curl that fell across her nose.
“When you left, my grandfather called my bluff.” I drifted my touch to her rounded stomach as I went deeper into the memory. I focused on it, on the fact that she was here. “At the masquerade I told him I was going to destroy the company, destroy everything, but…then you were gone, and the company remained intact. At first, everything was…normal. Then they wanted to take the picture. Announce the pregnancy. Picturing your face seeing that…” I exhaled, shook my head. “I said no.”
“What happened?” she asked.
I closed my eyes, listening to her raspy whisper.
“When I refused, my grandfather made me. The guards at the end of my wing were no longer there to keep me safe, but keep me in. They don’t let me out of my wing unless it’s to take pictures or smile on command. They watch my every move.”
“Is what West said really true?” she whispered, like the very walls could hear us. “Does your grandfather think I’m in the way?”
“I don’t know what my grandfather knows, little nun, and that’s what makes this all so fucking dangerous.”
I relayed all of what my grandfather told me, of the rivalry between the du Lacs and Crownes, of how it began with a girl who kissed the wrong boy, and how he stole a coin to try to marry her.
Her eyes grew. “That’s like our story.”
I nodded. “My grandfather spent his life collecting the coins. I don’t know what he was planning, but I’m sure it was huge. But something happened. They were stolen.”
Her brows popped. “Stolen? Who would have the balls to steal from Beryl Crowne?”
I went silent for a while. “My father. Or at least, I think so.” I shook my head. “On the day of my father’s funeral, three of the coins were placed in my pocket. Apparently it was Josephine who gave them to me.” I exhaled, shaking my head. “I didn’t know until tonight. She told me…” I trailed off. I couldn’t tell Snitch what she’d said.
“Stop doing that!” Story snapped. “Bloody. Raw. Jagged. Your secrets are mine too.”
Fuck.
Why does that fuck me up so bad?
I slid on top of her, pressing her into the mattress, her cunt only protected by a flimsy thread of cotton.
The perfect weight of you, or your perfect strength and heat. Your groan that echoes in my bones and lungs.
My response, the memories of her that wrapped around me, would have been the soft sighs she makes when I press her into the mattress, like now. Or the way she arches into me, and slides open. Her raspy more, and the way it scratches down my throat, like her nails on my back.
“Yours?” I asked.
She licked her lips, nodding. “They belong to me.” Her voice huskier. Raspier.
“Yeah, little wife.” I pressed my lips to her neck. “All yours. Only yours.”
Her arms wrapped around my neck, dragging me closer.
“Josephine told me my father died doing what we’re trying to do,” I continued. “It was always in the back of my mind that my grandfather could have killed my father. It felt more like a story than the truth, though. My grandfather wouldn’t really kill his own son. Now…”
“Now?” Story’s words wobbled.
“I can’t see anything but that reality. It makes the most sense.”
“I’m sorry,” she whispered.
I looked away. From her probing stare, digging into the rocks and crevices of my soul. “It’s just confirming what I already knew.”
“No…it’s like you had a reoccurring nightmare and woke up to find out it’s real.”
Jaw clenched, I looked back. “Josephine looked like she wanted to talk to me for weeks, but she could only do it without punishment on this night.”
“Why didn’t you talk to her?”
“I don’t talk to her.”
“Ever?”
“She wasn’t my mother. She wasn’t anything. I feel nothing.”
“Liar.”
Fuck. I loved that word slipping from Story’s lips in the shadowy light—calling me out. Only she ever called me out.