“It’s time to push,” he said casually, bored, as if his head wasn’t between my legs.
“No. He said he wouldn’t miss this. He promised.”
Lottie squeezed my hand.
“I’ll do it if you will,” she whispered.
Hot tears fell down the corner of my eye.
“I don’t want to,” I said. Not without him. Not here. Not when I was so unsure if this baby would ever have a father.
Not with the king of the underworld as my midwife. What would he ask for in return?
Tears fell down her cheeks. “Me either.”
But holding each other’s hands, we pushed.
“They’re doing it!” Gemma said. “Fucking finally.”
For a split second, the world was beautiful and right.
“What’s happening?” Gemma’s voice sounded warbled and off-key.
Something felt wrong.
Very wrong.
Just do one thing for me. Survive. Survive.
Grayson’s earnest plea was the last thing I remembered, and then it all faded to black.
Sixty-Two
GRAY
I have all the luck in the world, but none of it belongs to me…
I’ve lived a lucky life. A spoiled, selfish, lucky life.
I wrote that line in my journal the first time my grandfather yanked at my strings. When he broke my nose and first forced me to choose Crowne Industries over love.
With my arm swung off the side of my bed, I trailed my fingers along the cold floor.
Back and forth—my hand slammed into something hard, beneath my bed. I rustled around until I could get a grip, bringing it up.
A book?
Made of worn leather and pressed paper.
I have searched under every poem at Crowne Hall. There is no coin here, at least, not buried under any famous poem. I tell my dad there is still hope…but I think she is the key. It keeps me up at night, why did he want her to go to Scotland?
My blood went cold. Not a book, a fucking journal. West’s journal.
When the fuck did he put this here?
The cobblestone walls of Scotland are marked with Story’s poetry. When she slept, I went down to where the songbirds gather to search. When they spotted me, they started to sing. There it was, buried in the cobblestone wall, beneath the inscription: Put my heart in a cage and treat it like a songbird.
I slammed the journal shut at the sound of footsteps coming up the stairs, sliding it under my pillow. Every day, my grandfather visited me in my wing, trying to win me back to his side. Every morning, I stared out at the ocean, wishing I had some word of Story.