Chapter 4

4: 4

4

I clutched my collar shut, the blood draining from my face.

Ezra stared at me and said nothing, the cold rolling off him in waves.

He'd seen.

Dread pooled in me.

Joanna smiled like she'd won.

"Why so nervous, sis? Have you been sneaking around behind my brother-in-law's back?"

Every eye in the room swung to me.

Ezra's face gave nothing away, but I could see the anger and displeasure in his eyes.

Heat crawled over my skin, unbearable, as if I'd been staked over an open flame.

My father rounded on Joanna at once.

"Joanie! Watch where you are. I won't have you talking nonsense!"

But I knew he wasn't defending me.

He hadn't gotten what he came for tonight, and however much he doted on Joanna, he couldn't let her wreck his own plans.

Joanna wouldn't back down. "I'm not making it up! I heard it from the Henson staff a while ago. He doesn't love her at all. They barely exchange two words a day, and they sleep in separate rooms. And yet she's got marks like this on her. I couldn't just stand by and let him be kept in the dark, wearing horns he doesn't even know about!"

Joanna wanted Ezra.

A man like Ezra, that much power, that face, who wouldn't want him?

Back when the Hensons went looking for a match, of all families they'd picked the most unremarkable one, the Sullivans.

Joanna had been beside herself with joy, buying up piles of expensive jewelry and clothes, determined to catch Ezra's eye.

In the end Ezra never even showed. He'd sent an assistant to inform me of our wedding date.

The day I married into the Hensons, I heard Joanna smashed everything in her room in a rage.

In the middle of it all, Carina brought her hand down hard on the table.

"Baseless accusations, slander with no proof. Is this what passes for breeding in the Sullivan family?"

My father apologized over and over, signaling his younger daughter to behave.

But the arrow was already loosed. Joanna wasn't about to stop.

She snatched my bag and dumped everything out of it.

A diamond ring rolled out into full view.

Joanna said, triumphant, "There's your proof! That's not the wedding ring my brother-in-law gave her!"

"And she was clutching it the whole time, too scared to put it on. She's clearly hiding something!"

The moment Carina got a clear look at the ring, her face changed.

"Edith, you dared steal from the locked room?"

I panicked and rushed to explain.

"I didn't. Percy gave it to me."

The moment I said it, the room went dead silent.

Carina's face changed, her eyes full of shock.

And Ezra, always so composed and remote, wore a look of astonishment I had never seen on him.

I thought they hadn't heard me, so I said it again.

"I'm not lying. The ring really was a gift from Percy—"

Carina's lips trembled as she fixed her stare on me.

"How do you know Percy?"

There was no hiding it now.

The words came out of me in a jumble. "I thought he was Ezra. They look exactly alike... I really didn't know Ezra had a twin brother..."

"It wasn't until he told me he was Percy that I realized I'd mistaken him for someone else."

Carina's eyes went red, grief and fury together.

"Lies, all of it!"

"Percy..."

"Percy died fifteen years ago!"