Page 114 of Thorns of Blood

“Because you were mad?”

I shrugged, glancing down at my missing finger.

“More like disappointed. Jealous. Bitter.”

“What happened to your finger, Lia?” Her voice was cautious, almost as if she were dealing with an unpredictable animal. “Why did it end up with Kingston?”

I cleared my throat.

“After Amara and I escaped Perez, I tried to be”—I searched for the right words before settling on the only one I knew—“normal. Away from everything I knew. I was a maid at this resort, then one day I heard the name Royce Ashford.” I twisted my hands, knowing how crazy I’d sound. “I wasn’t in a good place mentally at that time. So out of some crazy despair, I sliced my left pinky finger and left it in Royce Ashford’s room with a note, hoping it would make its way to Kingston and…”I shrugged, knowing how ludicrous it all sounded when uttered aloud. “I don’t know. I guess I thought he’d come and save me.”

Kingston Ashford.

There wasn’t a time when he and Lou didn’t love each other. At first it was a childish kind of affection, until he became my sister’s lover.

“Why the left?” she questioned.

“Because you’re left-handed. I thought maybe he’d think it was you and against all odds, Kingston would get the message and save Amara and me.”

He didn’t.

Since then I learned to keep my expectations in check without letting treacherous hope take over. But hope always found a way to flicker to light, just like it did back then—that someone would come along and save my daughter and me—but the idea died as fast it hatched, along with a piece of me. Until there was nothing left.

“Like I said, it was stupid,” I concluded. I deserved to suffer anyhow considering all the suffering I’d caused. “I wasn’t in a good place, even contemplating ending my life, but Amara needed me. So see, she really did save me. If I didn’t have her, I would have been dead.”

Lou nodded in understanding and silence reigned for several heartbeats.

“What’s done is done. I love you, Lia. No matter what, right or wrong, I will always stand by you. You know that, right?”

My heart tripped, realizing it was time to come clean. “Don’t be so sure, Lou.”

She tilted her chin. “But I am, and there’s nothing you can do or say that would make me betray you.”

I swallowed, pushing the next words past my lips.

“When I pretended I was you and married Santiago, things weren’t good, but they were tolerable.” My eyes darted to thehotel window, staring at the New York City lights that flickered like stars. I closed my eyes, that old pain throbbing in my chest. “Then I lost a baby. No, my baby was ripped from me and murdered. Things were bad after that. Santiago deemed me, and my womb, worthless.” My sister’s soft gasp filled the air, and I opened my eyes to see whether my next words would shatter my world all over again. “Then Amara came into my world. It was my chance at having someone who would love me unconditionally. But it was also a chance for Santiago to use my affection for her against me. In my mind, I thought if I created something big, I’d be invaluable to him and his circle of evil, so I came up with an improvement of the Marabella Agreements.”

I waited and waited for Lou’s face to turn from compassion to disgust and disappointment.

She reached out and took her hand in mine. “You were trying to protect a baby and survive. Do you honestly think I’d hold that against you?”

“But Lara, your own adoptive daughter?—”

“Mother used her,” she cut me off. “She’s Perez’s daughter, and she used her, along with many other children, to get back at those she hated. Whether she used Marabella as an excuse, it doesn’t matter. Even if that concept wasn’t around, Sofia Volkov would have gotten her hands on Lara and made her life hell.”

Those words should have made me feel better, but they didn’t. Maybe my guilty conscience was my harshest critic.

“Lou, it wasn’t just Lara,” I whispered. “There were so many.”

“And you think that all of it is on your shoulders?” she spat. “No, it’s not, so don’t you dare put it all on yourself. We all did shit to survive. We all have sins to atone for.”

My lips curved up in some resemblance of a smile. “I guess some things never change.”

This time she smiled too. “You have my back, I have yours. Someone wants to come after you, I’ll go after them. It’s what we’re all about.”

“Maybe Mother did one thing right,” I murmured pensively.

She scoffed, bitterness flashing across her expression. “What’s that?”