r P
r and another man, dragged my body from the ancestral hall.
ly grumbled, giving my leg a car
pits at the edge of the territory, a mas
ng taken out. The servants whispered in the kitchens, their voice
y body past her window. She was far too busy. She was hosting a sma
udience. She'd escaped the fire, she claimed, but the trauma had given her amnesia.
ugh. But no one questioned it. They hung on her eve
ne, pulling her into a desperate embrace, burying his face in her golden hair. He held her at a
is voice thick with emotion.
Fremont. "Sir," he said in a low voi
He didn't even look away from Caroline's face. He jus
eplied, his tone flat. "Froze
easy." Then his voice softened as he turned his full attention ba
of fragile innocence. "I just feel so sad," s
ympathy, cementing my image as the monst
Tucker grunted as he and his partner prepared to
, and this-this was my corpse being thr
inside me re
scrubbing her skin where I'd touched her, Kane throwing my ferns into the fire, Vaughn's fingers digging into my jaw, his voice hissing why didn't you just die. It fed on everything, and it gre
th
back int
reathin
ken through the surface of deep water. My hands flew to my chest, my arms, my face-n
hands again. Small
se were the hands of a girl who hadn't yet spent weeks grip
ed over me. I knew these ha
out the
erything was exactly as I remembered it-because I had lived this before. I had lived this exact moment months ago, on the day I was
as here. In the past. Before the fire.
I had woken up months
carriage seat so hard my knuckles cracked. This wasn't a dream. This wasn't some merciful afterlife. T
embered e
my pulse quieted to the steady, lethal rhythm of a war drum. A smile touched my lips. It was a cold, sharp thing, with no warmth and no joy in it. I lifted my hand and traced the curve of that sm
ew. Something hard. Somethin
d be no tears. No des
there wou
was too soon for that. Revenge was a dish best served cold
ded a
ory. This road... yes. Just ahead, there was a fork. The main
h, the smaller, l
he Pinecres
ne person in the family I had never met. The one
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