Page 15

And then, mercifully, they both left.

The moment they’d gone and closed the door behind them, she stood for a long while.

Or mayhap she stood for mere seconds. Time had ceased to mean anything.

She doubled over and fought for breath, sucking in great, heaving gasps of air. Trying to fill her lungs and exhale. Suddenly, the task of breathing proved impossible.

She’d believed that learning she was in fact a bastard and Charles breaking off their wedding while she’d been waiting at the church to be the worst kind of agony.

Only to discover how very wrong she’d been.

In her mind, she saw the man who’d sired her violently forcing himself upon her mother.

She squeezed her eyes tightly shut and moaned, fighting that vision as much as fighting the truth of her existence.

She wanted neither.

A light knock sounded at the door, and she wrenched up so fast, the muscles of her neck screamed in agony. Her heart pounding, she rubbed at the aching muscles. “Yes,” she called, her voice so very steady. Howwasit so steady?

The panel opened.

Her sisters and brothers—Maisie, Flora, Lionel, and Clarion—hovered in the entryway, each of them in possession of the same flaxen curls as she, Mama, and Papa had.

Only, they were four children who’d been conceived in love. They were not a black stain upon the happiness Marcia’s mother and father had known.

Six, seven, eight, and nine, they were near in age to her own when she’d first come to London, back when she’d known only the lie and had believed wholeheartedly, as only an innocent child might, that the man who’d sired her had been a hero, and he’d loved her mother as much as she had loved him.

To be that innocent again.

“Hullo, little ones,” she said softly when the always precocious lot proved remarkably silent and subdued.

It was the first time she could recall any of them being so still and so quiet.

The sound of her voice seemed to penetrate whatever stupor had befallen them.

After they entered the room, with one of her brothers closing the door behind them, they joined her.

Flora cleared her throat. “We have come to speak with you about something.”

Maisie nodded.

Marcia stiffened. Had they been listening at the door? Her pulse raced, and bile stung her throat as her thoughts grew twisted and—

“We are going to kill him,” her sister said with a remarkable calm for such bloodthirsty words.

Oh, God.

Marcia’s heart pounded all the harder.

They knew. They knew the truth. All of it. All the worst and ugliest parts.

Clasping his hands behind him, Lionel jutted his small chest out. “Happy to do it. After all, a blighter who’d jilt you deserves a good killing.”

“I have to do it,” Clarion said. “I’m the eldest brother.”

Flora gave an emphatic nod. “We’re all going to shoot him. But I’m going to do it first, because I’m the better shot.”

Lionel frowned. “Hey.” And as her brothers and sisters launched into a debate about who would have the honor of killing Charles, it hit her. Her younger siblings weren’t speaking of the horrors their mother had shared a short while ago, or the words in the newspapers but, rather, the scandal of Marcia being jilted at the altar.