Page 17

ALISTAIR

“There is one more lady in the house.” A woman’s voice interrupts my cascading dismay. I whirl, but not before seeing Lord Tremaine’s features contort with anger.

Her.

“Elinor,” I breathe. “Othmar. Get the slipper.”

Gingerly, he wrests the bloodied thing from Drucilla’s foot. She whimpers and lurches to the chair, clutching her knee.

“She is only the maid,” whines the short blond. “She is no one.”

“I am Lady Elinor Scinder, and I deserve a chance to try,” says Elsie. Elinor, rather.

Othmar drops to both knees before her. Miraculously, the shoe gleams brightly, free of blood. “My lady.”

The cat leaps down and struts away, his tail high. Elinor toes off her worn flat and balances on one leg. I extend one hand to help her balance. Her hand is familiar in mine. My pulse calms for the first time in days. I have her now. She’s safe. She is mine.

Her foot fits exactly into the slipper. She places it on the floor and holds her skirt aside to demonstrate.

“Noooooo,” wails the younger sister. “It can’t be! Papa! Do something!”

What a torment it must have been for her to be locked away with these vile, shallow cretins all these years.

“Wait.” Elinor pats her pocket and extracts a small object. “This—oh!”

The charm in her palm grows until it matches the one on her foot. Carefully, she sets it on the floor and steps into it, clutching my arm for balance. Magic sings along my skin, pure and powerful, as her dress blossoms like a flower into a gown worthy of a princess.

Anastacia bursts into tears. “This can’t be happening! It was my chance! I was going to be a queen. Nothing good ever happens to me.”

“Is there anything you want to take from this place?” I ask Elinor, ignoring the stepsister’s tantrum.

“My mother’s shawl. A few letters.” Elinor lifts one slim shoulder and lets it fall. “I want to leave this place.”

I draw her to me and lean close. Her heart pounds like a blacksmith’s hammer ticking on in her throat. Determination shines in her bright eyes. “Then let’s get you out of here, Sunshine.”

* * *

Elinor

“Eww! You’re bleeding on the seat!” Stacia shoves Cilla’s foot off the bench. Cilla’s agonized scream disturbs Tom, who hooks his claws into my arm through the pillowcase before I can move away.

I hiss.

He hisses.

Cilla clutches her leg and howls.

Stacia kicks my shin.

“What was that for?” Rude.

“You’re the maid. You clean it up.” She waves a lace-edged handkerchief at me as if that’s going to do one bit of good. “Well? Go on. You can’t let Cilla ruin the prince’s coach.”

“He offered us this coach knowing she was injured. He or one of his servants can deal with the bloodstains later.” I’m through cleaning up their messes. I’m only worried that she’s going to bleed out before we get to the castle.

Alistair stood watching Cilla carve her own foot in a desperate attempt to fit into the shoe that now adorns mine. He did nothing to intervene when Tremaine stomped her foot to crush it in two.

This is a side of him that I didn’t imagine, in my fervid fantasies of softness and love. I’m happy to be reunited with my “Alex.” Yet now that he’s Prince Alistair, I’m realizing that I don’t know him at all.

Have I jumped from one precarious situation into another?

I touch my nose, rubbing the spot where Tremaine broke it when he kicked me face-first into the stairs.

Maxine paid me a visit that night. Let me weep, if painfully, into her lap.

I don’t know how she got into my attic room.

Witchcraft, certainly. All I know is that she was there when I needed her, and by the time she left, I could breathe without pain again. The next morning, the marks were gone.

But I was still trapped.

Until this morning, when I saw the prince’s carriage coming up the drive and I knew I had to get downstairs. I jimmied the lock and managed to pry it open, uncaring whether I damaged the house.

What was once my childhood home is nothing but an empty shell to me now.

My stepsisters keep glaring at the shimmering slippers like I’ve betrayed them.

“You. Snake.” The carriage hits a stone. Cilla hisses through clenched teeth. “I earned the right to be Prince Alistair’s bride. I sacrificed for it. What did you do, Cinderella?”

Apparently, I am stuck with this unfunny moniker now.

“It’s not fair. You get everything good.” Stacia pouts.

“Good,” I echo. “What, precisely, was good about losing both of my parents?”

“We lost our mother, too.” Cilla grits her teeth and moans.

That they did. I had pity for them when they first arrived at Scinder House. But they never had any for me.

“We lost our baby brother and our stepmother. You aren’t the only one who suffered,” Cilla says bitterly.

“You barely knew my mother.”

“Lady Scinder was nice!” protests Stacia. She shifts on the seat. “I liked her quite well. Then she died and Papa found out there was no money in the estate. We were supposed to be rich from Lord Scinder’s plumbing invention.”

“Shh!” Cilla releases her leg long enough to swat her sister’s arm. “We’re not supposed to talk about that.”

“What does it matter now?” Stacia pouts.

“Wait, what? You thought my mother was wealthy?”

“Papa told us we were going to be filthy rich once she died.”

Once .

She .

Died .

Blood throbs in my temples, a cacophonous roar that makes thinking impossible.

Did Tremaine kill my mother? His own son?

It’s the second part that makes me question the idea. I don’t put harming my mother past him, but Tremaine did want a son to carry on his name. The baby didn’t survive the birth. His grief was as genuine as my own.

Still, it’s disturbing to think he might have harmed my mother. “Why did he think there was money?”

“Because your father invented indoor piping.” Stacia sneers. “Instead, someone else patented his idea and got rich. It’s ridiculous that our own house doesn’t have piped water when the previous owner invented the entire concept!”

I can’t disagree with her. It is silly.

“There will be hot water for everyone at the castle.” No more hauling water for me. No more cleaning chamber pots. I’ll never feel filthy again.

I refuse to consider the possibility that I might soon miss a simpler time, even if it was horrible. The distance between my fantasies of perpetual happiness with Alex—Alistair—might once again be nothing but wisps of girlish hopes caught in the gale winds of reality.

* * *

Alistair

Tremaine and I have a long time to get to know one another during the ride back to Belterre City.

By the time we arrive, I’ve taken the opportunity to probe his ambitions for his daughters.

Unsurprisingly, his sole aim is to see them married well and get him out of the financial predicament he finds himself in.

While this is hardly out of line for a nobleman, I’m disgusted by the way he views his natural daughters as bargaining chips.

They aren’t humans to him. They might be awful, yet I am forced to feel a smidge of sympathy for two young women with no advantages and all their ambitious father’s hopes pinned upon their thus-far unsuccessful marriages.

I hate that.

Once we arrive at the castle, I lead Tremaine straight to my empty study. I don’t offer him a room. He won’t be staying long. It’s no mystery who failed to protect Elinor from her attacker. He deserves to disappear for that alone.

I depress the hidden lever to open my secret stairway and glance upward at the tower where my precious telescope still needs to be brought down before the cold sets in. Then I turn toward the darkness, pounding down the stairs into the dank dungeon.

Within the hour, Tremaine lies pathetically on the cold stone. What I have discovered in the scant time we have spent together horrifies and enrages me.

My boot thuds satisfyingly into his stomach. He rolls to his back, starfishes, then drags himself up and heaves up stomach bile.

“I ought to cut off your manhood and force you to eat it,” I say conversationally. “No one would stop me.”

He manages a low, pained, chuckle, and spits bloody saliva onto the sheening puddle of vomit. “That little cunt has you wrapped around her finger, doesn’t she? Clever little Cinderella.”

My boot connects with his temple. Tremaine falls limp with his cheek in the mess, twitching with tremors.

Alcohol sickness. He’s had none since the sip from a flask I gave him in the carriage. Nothing to eat. No water. He’s cold and alone, and it’s still not enough suffering to make up for what he did to her.

“How old was Elinor when you started forcing her?” I ask.

Tremaine manages to push himself up to sitting.

He looks beyond awful. Open wounds ooze, barely scabbed from the beating I handed him.

I waited until his back was turned to me to open the secret passageway.

Then I threw him down the steps and when the drunkard stopped rolling halfway down, I gave him a sharp kick in the arse for good measure.

Hardly sporting of me. I feel it’s fair considering the way he preyed upon my future wife.

Killian might have been the one with a gift for torture, but I’m rather proud of how well I’ve managed to fuck up this piece of shit all on my own.

“Answer me.” I kick Tremaine’s knee and am rewarded with a grunt.

“Old enough,” he wheezes, the unrepentant bastard.

“Be specific.” My prisoner doesn’t respond. His bloodshot eyes find mine. There’s only a lantern on a peg for light down here. The flickering glow cuts across his battered face. I read guilt, disgust, and despair.

Doubt stays my hand. The possibility of redemption shines in those rheumy orbs.

“Can’t remember. Been drinking, trying to forget.” He spits.

“You don’t know what it’s like,” Tremaine gasps when I shake him. “Being stuck in that crumbling old house with two daughters to provide for, and no money to do it with. Wife dead and buried. No son and heir. Not a whore to be found in that quaint little town. I had no other outlet.”

“I don’t pity you.” I am utterly disgusted.

“Don’t expect you to.” His labored breaths through cracked lips make speech difficult. “She was quiet. Easy to corner. Always hated myself after the act.”

“Didn’t stop you though.” I pace before his slumped body, ready to lash out. I don’t want to know all this, but the more he speaks, the more vindicated I feel about hurting him.

“When she was fourteen or fifteen, her belly began to swell. As badly as I wanted an heir, I couldn’t marry my own stepdaughter without raising eyebrows.

With Drucilla on the cusp of her debut, the risk was too great.

I gave Ellie a potion, and that took care of the problem. ” He coughs. Blood spatters his chin.

Rage blinds me. I haul him up and slam his head against the stone.

“Took care of the problem ?” Slam. “Monster.” Slam. “Elinor was a child . You were supposed to protect her from predators like you.”

“I never?—”

Slam.

“—touched—”

Slam.

“—her—”

SLAM.

“—again.”

His legs give out, dragging his body down, leaving a gory streak on the stone. Not just blood. Gray matter and a clear fluid are mixed into the mess. I drop Tremaine’s body and take one step backward. My hands tremble with unspent rage.

“You weren’t supposed to die yet, you miserable fuck.”

I kick him viciously. It’s like kicking a side of beef. No reaction. Not a grunt or a wheeze or a flinch. The hideous sound of his breath has stopped, and the dungeon fills with silence.

“Fuck.”

Now I have to figure out how to dispose of a body without anyone seeing it.

The obvious solution is to feed Tremaine to the monsters that live in the moat.

But getting him out of here will be difficult.

He’s oozing fluids from every orifice. Rigor mortis will set in soon.

After that, the smell will be impossible to conceal.

I don’t regret what I did. But Elinor will be furious with me if she finds out I killed her stepfather, no matter how badly he deserved it.

Shit.

Killian would have cleaned up this mess for me.

What am I going to do?