Forbidden Fate (Crowne Point 3)

“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