Forbidden Fate (Crowne Point 3)

Lottie looked me up and down, calculating, as if I were something to use, something to buy.

“Push it up inside me,” she said.

“Leave, Snitch. Now.”

The way Grayson spoke made me sprint out of the room without a second’s hesitation.

I quickly scrambled away, running before my tears fell.

Push it up inside her.

I carried a mess of bloody sheets. Numb.

In the past, a girl is less than a ghost, she’s air. Invisible. So no one thought twice about what she witnesses or does. It’s not vulgar. Because the girl isn’t someone who fucked the bridegroom hours before.

She isn’t someone whose heart bleeds for the bridegroom.

She isn’t someone whose soul is tethered irrevocably to his.

She’s no one. Nothing.

So why did his words, his proclamation, still throb inside me?

I love you, Story Hale. I will always love you.

I settled against the wall, fingering around the edge of the fruity stain, being sure to avoid it. Mesmerized by it. Mom always did say when you bleed, you’re a cut away from bleeding out.

I feel like I’m going to faint.

I walked down to the servants’ quarters in a daze, so numb I was barely cognizant of handing over the sheets to the one who would take them to Tansy and Mrs. du Lac.

I checked in on my uncle, wishing to talk to him, but he was already asleep. I hated that I’d taken this job—stayed in this hell—for him, but that very job kept robbing me of my opportunities to spend time with him.

I quietly shut the door.

When I got back to my room, I knew something was off. It felt…different. When I touched the knob, my fingers came back sooty.

“You really shouldn’t have come back.”

I turned around, finding all the servants who weren’t working, including Ellie.

Ellie held up the letter Lottie had sent Grayson. “Grayson. I’ll give you this one night to get it out of your system…”

It was one thing to have Lottie say it, another to have the inked words read aloud. It took everything inside me not to fall to the ground.

“What a find,” Ellie said when she’d finished. “But that video more so for the press.”

“You videoed it?” My heart crushed, shattered—whatever was left became bloody jam. I used to think they were my family. My only family.

“You know as well as anyone there are no secrets that can be hidden from the servants.”

“You could all lose your jobs…” But I knew they wouldn’t. The servants looked out for one another, and whatever power I might have had before was in the wind.

They laughed, because they knew it too.

“Cinderella of Crowne Hall…” she continued. “That’s what they’re calling you, you know.”

She looked over my shoulder at my closed door, and my gut twisted at what was behind it, at what they could have done now. Steeling my spine, I turned the knob and opened it.