Chapter 1

Three days after I died, I finally understood how monstrously wrong I had been.

The husband I'd cursed as worthless for seven years killed every last person who had hurt me.

Then, drenched in blood, he walked to the spot where I'd gone over the cliff.

He didn't hesitate. He threw himself off.

And the six-year-old daughter I'd beaten into silence.

She climbed the cliff face until the skin scraped off her knees, down to the bone.

All for a jade bracelet I had dropped.

When the rock gave way, she called out one small, thin word into the empty air. "Mama."

I lunged for her like a woman gone mad.

When I opened my eyes again, the hammer was clenched in my fist, and I was still screaming.

"You don't come first, you don't eat! Kneel down!"

My daughter knelt until both knees bled.

Tristram Stephens rushed in and pulled her into his arms.

"Please. Let her go."

I opened my mouth to explain.

And then I saw the back of the shattered screen, my name carved across it, over and over, so densely there was no bare wood left.

The piece he had spent three years shaping.

Had he been thinking of me the whole time?

The hammer crashed to the floor.

I dropped straight to my knees before the two of them, father and daughter.

"I'm sorry."

"This time, I'll be the one to protect you."

1

What I'd just done was so far out of character.

Tristram went rigid, his whole body locking up.

The daughter hiding behind him eased half her face into view.

Those eyes, almost exactly like mine, were full of stunned confusion.

Both of them looked terrible.

Tristram's eyes were shot through with red, his sleeves rolled to the forearm.

Wood shavings clung to his shoulders, his shirt creased and rumpled.

Like a man who hadn't left the workshop in days, running on nothing.

Looking like that, anyone would take him for exactly what he seemed. A useless man who did nothing but shave wood.

That was precisely what I'd thought, in my past life.

When I saw the fresh sawdust on him, my fury burned clean through whatever reason I had left.

I swung the hammer and smashed his rosewood folding screen, worth millions.

Then I turned the rest of it on our daughter, who had only just come home with her report card.

Screamed that all she was good for was eating, forced her to kneel on the shards of broken wood.

But now, all I could see was that one scene, the one I'd watched after I died.

This man, covered in blood, standing at the edge of the cliff, not a trace of life left in his eyes.

Behind him, every enemy he had slaughtered. Before him, a drop into nothing.

He took one step forward.

"Aria Henson."

Tristram looked at me kneeling on the floor, and there was no anger in his eyes.

Only numbness.

He bent down and lifted our daughter out of the wood chips, shielding her behind him with everything he had.

Those hands, callused hard from the blade, were shaking, and he was fighting to hold them still.

"I made the screen myself. It's nothing that it's broken. If you're angry, take it out on me. Curse me, hit me, whatever you want."

"But Agnes Stephens is only six. She came in second because she was running a fever and didn't dare ask her teacher for leave."

"Let her go."

Those last three words, he all but forced out through his throat.

I stared at the way he had wrapped himself around our daughter, and my eyes burned until they ached.

It took dying once for me to understand.

Tristram had played the worthless carpenter so my family would believe he'd lost himself to a hobby and would never amount to anything.

So they would loosen their grip on my mind.

He had deliberately turned himself into a joke.

Only so the bloodsuckers in the Henson family would stop squeezing me.

And our daughter's fever, that was because last month I'd listened to my sister.

I'd made her kneel on the balcony through an entire night, and the cold had done the rest.

The tears came anyway; I couldn't stop them.

Tristram's whole body went taut, and on instinct he moved our daughter another step back.

The way he looked at me was the way you'd watch a wild animal that might spring at any second.

He thought I was about to reach for a knife.

After all, last week I really had taken a knife to the little wooden rabbit he'd carved for her, and hacked it to pieces.

But I didn't.

"Where's the medical kit?"

I tried to keep my voice soft.

But it had been too long since I'd used that tone with anyone.

All they did was stare at me, terror in their eyes.

"I'm asking you. Where is the medical kit."

The housekeeper moved first, hurrying off to fetch it.

I drew our daughter out from behind Tristram.

The little girl flinched, her whole body shrinking in on itself.

She squeezed her eyes shut on instinct, both hands over her head, trembling like a leaf about to fall.

Her lips worked for a long moment, and only faint puffs of breath came out.

What was she saying?

I had to lean close before I caught it, five words, thin as a thread of air.

"Agnes won't eat anymore..."

Not that she didn't want to eat.

That she didn't dare.

In that instant it was as if someone drove a red-hot spike into my chest, once, and again.

I forced down everything churning up my throat and cupped her bleeding little hands.

My touch as light as if I were handling porcelain.

"No more hitting. Mama won't hit Agnes anymore."

Her eyes flew open.

Tristram, too, was nailed where he stood.

So much moved through those deep black eyes.

Shock. Doubt. Guardedness.

And fear.

He was afraid I was playing some new game.

"Aria."

He seized my wrist.

His grip strong enough to snap bone, his jaw clenched tight.

"What is it you're trying to do this time."

I looked up at him.

His eyes were red, sleepless for nights on end.

I turned my hand and closed it around his.

"Tristram."