r P

r and another man, dragged my body from the ancestral hall.

ly grumbled, giving my leg a car

pits at the edge of the territory, a mas

ng taken out. The servants whispered in the kitchens, their voice

y body past her window. She was far too busy. She was hosting a sma

udience. She'd escaped the fire, she claimed, but the trauma had given her amnesia.

ugh. But no one questioned it. They hung on her eve

ne, pulling her into a desperate embrace, burying his face in her golden hair. He held her at a

is voice thick with emotion.

Fremont. "Sir," he said in a low voi

He didn't even look away from Caroline's face. He jus

eplied, his tone flat. "Froze

easy." Then his voice softened as he turned his full attention ba

of fragile innocence. "I just feel so sad," s

ympathy, cementing my image as the monst

Tucker grunted as he and his partner prepared to

, and this-this was my corpse being thr

inside me re

scrubbing her skin where I'd touched her, Kane throwing my ferns into the fire, Vaughn's fingers digging into my jaw, his voice hissing why didn't you just die. It fed on everything, and it gre

th

back int

reathin

ken through the surface of deep water. My hands flew to my chest, my arms, my face-n

hands again. Small

se were the hands of a girl who hadn't yet spent weeks grip

ed over me. I knew these ha

out the

erything was exactly as I remembered it-because I had lived this before. I had lived this exact moment months ago, on the day I was

as here. In the past. Before the fire.

I had woken up months

carriage seat so hard my knuckles cracked. This wasn't a dream. This wasn't some merciful afterlife. T

embered e

my pulse quieted to the steady, lethal rhythm of a war drum. A smile touched my lips. It was a cold, sharp thing, with no warmth and no joy in it. I lifted my hand and traced the curve of that sm

ew. Something hard. Somethin

d be no tears. No des

there wou

was too soon for that. Revenge was a dish best served cold

ded a

ory. This road... yes. Just ahead, there was a fork. The main

h, the smaller, l

he Pinecres

ne person in the family I had never met. The one