Weeping Hollow, Maine
November 15, 2020
Just face the wall,” Kane’s voice slithered into my ear from behind.
He placed my hands on the wall in front of me, dragged his palms down my sides, then piled the skirt of my dress on my hips.
“You know I hate it when you talk to me like that.” I turned back to look at him with daggers in my glare, only to be met with a cold, elegant man.
Kane Pruitt was understated, never trying to attract attention or impress people. For him, it just came naturally. He had thick coffee-brown hair that girls in Weeping Hollow would love to hold on to, but the only person he cared to be with was me. Only because I was his friend for fifteen years, and he refused to let his walls down for anyone else.
He flipped his tie over his shoulder and leaned over me, pressing his chest against my back as he undid his buckle. The cold metal of it grazed my backside when a whisper pushed into my ear. “We’ve been doing this for seven years, and you keep coming back. You know you love it.”
He could not have been more wrong. Heartless sex didn’t leave an imprint. It didn’t penetrate—not the heart, not the soul—no matter how deep I took it. Which meant seven years of faking countless orgasms.
The only ones I’d ever experienced were from my own doing.
Kane’s hand dipped between my thighs, fingers sliding through my sex, numbing my thoughts. “Seven years, and you’re still dry as fuck,” he deadpanned, and an annoyed sigh left him.
I squeezed my eyes and fists closed at the same time. “You literally shoved me in here when we have a meeting in less than five minutes. It’s called foreplay, Kane.” I dropped my head between my shoulders, staring at my feet. “I swear, I don’t think you know how the female body works.”
“I’ve been inside you long enough to know how your body works.” I felt Kane’s smirk graze my neck. “I need you now, A. We don’t have half an hour to get you going.”
I rolled my eyes. “It doesn’t take half an hour.”
“Okay.” He laughed, unconvinced. “Besides, if you didn’t come to my house wearing this dress we wouldn’t be here.” Then he inched back, spat in his hand, and palmed my pussy. I closed my eyes, letting my head fall back on his shoulder as two fingers pushed inside me.
He inched away, grabbed my hip, and dragged his thick head across my center before prodding my entrance. Then he exhaled, a sigh of relief, as he sank inside me. I held my breath from the pressure, and his palm met the wall in front of me.
“Holy fuck,” he moaned, his fingers digging into my flesh. “Why do I do this to myself?”
“What do you mean?” I asked, feeling the man I hated most inside my body.
“I get off on the deprivation.” He dragged himself out. “I hold back until I can’t fucking take it anymore.” He sank back in. “Because it makes everything feel ten times better.” He inched out, then thrust hard. “Why must torture both pain me and give me pleasure?”
Why must we be more similar than I desire?
Why must he share what’s on his mind?
He pulled down the front of my dress and grabbed my breast.
Another rugged moan escaped him. “Fuck, we have five minutes.”
I pinned my gaze to the clock on the left of the small room, watching it tick by as he took me against the wall. I focused on the second hand, the rest of the world fading away, the ticking marching to the sounds of his heavy breathing in my ear each time he pumped into me.
At times, if I closed my eyes, I could imagine Kane as someone different. Someone with the single-minded goal of pleasing me, adoring me, wanting to kiss me while inside me. Never mind a gentle prince sweeping me off my feet in one night. Instead, what I truly wanted to know after sleeping with the same person for seven years, was how it felt to make love to someone. I didn’t know if sex was supposed to feel differently than this. But I knew that it had to because each time he plunged himself inside of me, I repeatedly ached for this feeling I’d never experienced before. One I grieved but always been denied of.
While the discreet room we were in next to the chamber filled with the heady and arousing mockery of us, the walls closed in on me, and a scream piled in my lungs. Not a scream of pleasure but a scream of anger and sorrow.
But I didn’t scream at all.
I stood there, watching the clock, unblinking as my eyes glossed over.
Kane’s hand moved to my shoulder, breaking me from the stare, and I chanced a look back. His weary eyes were lowered, focusing on watching himself enter me from behind. A faded bruise colored his right eye and jawline, and a cut split his bottom lip, most likely a punishment from his father’s heavy fist. However, no matter how many bruises marked his face or how visibly tired he was from the Panic, Kane was disgustingly handsome.
But none of this mattered to me. Kane was the source of all my anger.
Since I was sixteen, I’d suffered through every sexual encounter to be close to him. This gave me the opportunity to rid this coven and town of the one who brought my family and me into a life of misery.
In only two more months, I would kill the prince of Weeping Hollow.
On the night of the Crimson Eclipse, Kane Pruitt would be dead.
Each time he fucked me, if I wasn’t fantasizing about a dreamt-up man, I was fantasizing about slitting his throat. In my mind, I could see my reflection dancing inside the stainless steel of my box cutter. Perhaps I’d use my precious dagger, or even Kane’s knife. I imagined it would be worse if he realized I was using his blade to kill him—if he recognized the engraving of his initials in the steel before it happened or while it was happening. Either way, I would lie there next to him after he fucked me for the last time, warm blood soaking into white sheets and watching life float from his hazel eyes. And once he was dead, Mom would awaken from her catatonic spell, and this evil stirring inside me would finally leave me for good.
It all started when I first found him in my living room all those years ago. The brown-haired boy was the hue of fall, embodying Mom’s tragic end, my vengeance to bring her back, and her awaiting justice. Throughout the years, I remained close to him, threatening any girl standing in my way of this plan, including Fallon when she first arrived in Weeping Hollow.
A heartless friendship with him had been my only chance to get close enough for him to blindly trust me without manipulating my thoughts, as the Pruitt men were capable of doing.
If I couldn’t take Mom outside of this town to break Kane’s hex, then I wanted to live a liberated life within it. One where he was dead, and she was awake. And once he was dead, no other would endure the same fate.
It amazed me how desperate I had become. The passing years only fueled the fury, leading a life with an ambition to kill a man. The one whom I had allowed to steal my innocence. The one who I’d given pieces to, and the one who’d scooped me hollow.
And if I made the wrong move, the one who could steal my life as well.
Footsteps echoed just outside the door as members of Sacred Sea retreated to the chamber under the Pruitt Mansion.
“It’s two,” I edged out. “The coven will be wondering why we’re late.”
Kane leaned back, holding my dress up with one hand, holding my hip with the other. He pounded into me until his thrusts slowed, body seized by an intoxicating force.
After all these years, I knew his body language as well as the tide, and on cue, he pulled out, coating my backside with his climax. I dropped my forehead to the wall, and it didn’t take long before the sound of his buckle jingled as he pulled up his pants.
“Moment of truth.” His breath was shredded. “I bet it’ll be a meeting to remember.”
I remained there, trying to keep my dress raised around my hips. “I need something to clean up,” I tried to say without letting the anger out.
“You’re good. Just leave it until you get home.”
I looked back with an arched brow. “And stain my dress?”
“Relax,” he said, fixing his tie and sleeves. “I’m fucking the seamstress who owns the boutique. I’ll have her make you another.”
“Kane, I’m serious.”
He gave me a gentle look that showed that, despite the things he said, he had a soft spot for me. He loosened his tie around his neck and pulled it from his collar, then handed it to me. “Just toss it when you’re done.”
Sacred Sea Coven had blossomed since the day my ancestors arrived in 1803, but the chamber under the Pruitt mansion was only large enough to hold thirteen of us comfortably. Not all members, but a few from each original family. In the beginning, there were four, which consisted of Pruitt, Cantini, Sullivan, and Morgan. But as far as we knew, Fallon was the last Morgan, and it seemed she chose Norse Woods.
With only three families remaining, Augustine Pruitt became high priest after our former high priest, and Fallon’s father, Tobias Morgan, left the invisible shield twenty-four years prior. And I often wondered what the coven would be like today if he and Fallon had stayed.
The cold, damp air and the anticipation humming within the chamber fell flat when everyone took their seats.
Dad sat at the opposite end near the bookshelves, wearing his navy-blue jacket that matched the other men: the Trinity Celtic knot embroidered on the front pocket.
I sat between my sisters. Ivy to my right and Fable to my left.
Despite winter’s cold, my sisters, like myself, wore strappy dresses that touched the floor beneath their coats. These dresses were crafted from cotton, linen, and hemp, fabrics harvested directly from the earth. The bracelets wrapping around our wrists revealed the contrasting shades of our whimsical souls. They would make a sound reminiscent of laughter each time we moved—a song of our childhood at sea.
The sound reminded me of Mom, before she could laugh no more, and brought the colors of sea glass to my mind—a time when we used to collect them across the shoreline and drop them into a jar.
A jar full of mermaid tears, she’d once said.
“Please, that’s enough,” Mrs. Murphy cried, stealing me from the memory. “I beg you, Augustine. Please don’t do this to my daughter!”
Shackles clashed when Lena, Mrs. Murphy’s thirty-two-year-old daughter, slapped her palms against her ears with a guttural scream. The cry shook the walls within the chamber, and tiny loose rocks fell and broke apart once they hit the ground.
Clenching my teeth, I peered around Ivy to make a silent plea to Kane.
A void took over his eyes as his father’s magical pulses ripped through Lena’s head.
I imagined it to be painful, like pointed nails stabbing your skull or an electric shock that started in the brain and stampeded down the spine, crawling through every vein.
When the next cry came, I flinched, ready to stand in protest.
Ivy noticed and grabbed my wrist to keep me pinned down.
I fired a warning glare at her. “Someone has to stop this. I can’t just sit here and do nothing.”
“Yes, you can, and you will,” Ivy whispered back. “Or you’ll be next.”
Viola Cantini clutched the table’s edge and leaned over it. “Control yourself, Mrs. Murphy, or you’ll be removed from the chambers,” she scolded, authority seeping from her tone. “Lena understood the consequences before she recklessly used her magic, and now another life has been taken because of it.”
“She was only trying to save her husband from the Shadows, you see,” Mrs. Murphy cried out in despair. “She was only trying to save him. She didn’t mean to hurt anyone. Isn’t losing her husband and now her grandmother enough punishment?”
Lena fell to her knees, another cry rattling our chests.
Fable dropped her head and grabbed my hand. She squeezed it as if her sorrow had no place left to go but through me.
I pushed a whisper into her ear, “This will be your coven, Fable. You have to watch and not turn your eyes away. Don’t let her be in this pain alone.”
Fable lifted her chin and hesitantly gazed at the torment.
“This is our future,” I said, more to myself that time. But then, despite all efforts, my eyes caught on to the black spring swirling behind the shared glass wall beside Fable.
The black waters sucked me in, and I concentrated on the spring with tunnel vision in a way that was like using my eyes to milk a fleeting escape.
I remembered the spring as it used to be when it was an iridescent blue hue.
Once upon a time, it sent spotlights into the windowless chamber and spoke to me. Though no matter the color, each time I came to the chamber, I could not avoid its call. I believed to belong in the water as a sparrow belonged in the sky.
Dad once said that I was born in the ocean and was surprised I didn’t have scales for skin or fins for limbs. When I was younger, I thought I could have been born a mermaid because two of my toes were mended together on both feet. As it was, I still found myself one with the sea and always searched for her salty, shapeless arms. The adoration she teased me with, the bottomless love she took. Cold and cyan, silky and strong. But nothing was ever enough for her.
Yet this spring no longer swirled an enchanting blue shade.
All that lay on the other side of the glass were black, cloudy waters.
Its haunting effects were not the same as they once were.
It now pulled on different heartstrings—told a different tale.
One that consumed all my attention and put me into a trance.
Unable to pull away, pain pierced my chest, and I found myself overcome with grief that wasn’t my own. A sorrow that wasn’t for Lena, either. I felt this pain in the deepest parts of me.
Ivy moved my hair off my shoulder, her blue eyes speaking to me in a way that commanded my attention to the front of the room, where Kane and Cyrus stood before our High Priest.
Lena had been taken away. The grand show of her punishment, and an example of what would happen should we use our magic, was over. She would be taken to the cell, then to the Wicker Man, where she’d burn on the border of Weeping Hollow.
“Adora,” Ivy nudged into my ear.
Augustine, our high priest, must have said my name. He was studying me from the front of the room, prompting me to break latency and come forth. He stood sickeningly still, his thoughts at ease with deceivingly comforting creases cornering his eyes.
Cyrus nodded, a silent invitation to join him, to stand by his side.
Why did Augustine call my name? It was rare for me to be nervous, yet a foreboding still crept along the back of my neck.
“Step forward, Adora,” Augustine said with impatience.
Dad watched me from the end of the aisle with both pride and guilt in his eyes. His mixed look confused me as I joined the sons of Sacred Sea.
Cyrus was the firstborn of the Cantini family, and the man Ivy was in love with. He stood taller than me with hair as black as a velvet night and the color of the ocean in his eyes. Perhaps that was why I felt entirely safe standing beside him. Since Adeline’s death, he’d become my best friend, and I held him close as I held the sea. But like the ocean, the color of his blue irises changed depending on his mood.
Cyrus had seven shades like the seven seas, and this was his curse.
The Cantini line had the ability to know your every emotion, whether you were lying, horny, crushed, or desperate. Hyper-sensory, is what he’d call it, and in return, their eyes were a direct window into their soul. But one would have to know him well to decode the shade.
At this moment, his eyes were cobalt blue.
Cyrus was nervous.
I clutched the empty setting hanging from the chain around my neck, and Cyrus took my other hand in a comforting manner. As everyone else, we faced forward and awaited the reasons for being here.
I closed my eyes, imagining Augustine telling me it was time to start my initiation. In a few short months, my magic would ascend completely.
I remembered as if it were yesterday when Ivy stood in this very spot just last year, with Cyrus on one side and Kane on the other. Only this time, Weeping Hollow was under attack by the Shadows—and the Hollow Heathens from our rival coven, Norse Woods, were no longer cursed. Perhaps starting my initiation early would show Sacred Sea hadn’t surrendered to the dangers our home faced.
Before, when the Heathens had been cursed, my coven was the best choice and the only means to keep the town safe, balanced, and in order. Though Norse Woods Coven was dying, with the curse broken, there was a possibility the balance could tip in their favor. This stirred a thick tension in the chamber, and it had been on Sacred Seas’ minds since the curse broke.
To be frank, I hadn’t expected this to be the day my initiation would be announced until Augustine had said my name. I’d been waiting sixteen years for this day. One step closer, I thought. If the moment had arrived, I couldn’t wait a moment longer.
I contained my excitement, anticipation coursing through me with every passing second. Cyrus’s thumb brushed mine, and I gripped my necklace tighter and stroked the metal prong. An iota of pain from the splinter shuddered through me, and I found myself at ease.
“Adora,” Augustine began, and I opened my eyes, fighting back an all-knowing smile. “With recent events, we must convey that we remain united through this and that we are stronger together as one. It has been decided to announce your engagement at the Founder’s Day Ball. You will have a winter wedding in January, and your betrothed will lead your initiation in February.”
Engagement? Wedding? January?
The Crimson Eclipse is in January.
It had always been an initiation before marriage. For over a hundred years, it had always been customary to see what magic a woman would possess once she reached the age of twenty-three. No Sacred Sea man wanted to be tied to a useless vessel for eternity.
My gaze darted to Kane, never expecting to marry him before killing him. His smug grin shuddered my entire existence, but it would never be powerful enough to deceive me or change my mind. It didn’t matter which came first in January, the wedding or the eclipse. Either way, Kane Pruitt was going to die.
Augustine cleared his throat, stealing our attention.
“You will marry Cyrus Cantini,” he finished.
My mind paused.
The room paused.
Complete shock benumbed it.
Those five words felt like branches growing from my bones and wrapping tightly around my throat. Ivy gasped from behind, and I turned back to look at her. A bone-white hand cupped her mouth under her watering eyes. Her palpable heartbreak crushed the entire room.
Cyrus turned to me, his eyes darkening by the second as he took in my reaction. “Adora,” he said, but nothing else. Just Adora. Because he knew this was going to happen, and he didn’t know what to say.
But this wasn’t the plan.
“This wasn’t the plan,” I said aloud that time, gripping my necklace tighter and trying to make sense of this. I swallowed to clear my windpipe and set my eyes on Augustine. “If your plan is to find a wife for Cyrus, then Ivy should be standing here. Not me. She already underwent initiation and has been waiting for this moment with him.”
I stood tall, disguising this outcome’s effect on me, and narrowed my eyes at Augustine, the man who held my future in the slam of a fist. Threats and demands exploded in my mind and burned in my throat. All the things I wanted to say but none that would have made a difference. In the Sacred Sea chamber, this was what was ordered of me, and my refusal wouldn’t make it go away.
I understood this, and still— “I refuse to marry Cyrus,” I said slowly, unwavering. Cyrus’s hand left mine when he hung his head and pinched the bridge of his nose.
“Adora!” Dad urged me from behind. I turned to see him jump to his feet with a demand for obedience in his eyes. His cheeks beamed with embarrassment.
I grabbed Kane’s bicep. “Say something,” I begged him in a whisper.
Kane looked at me then back at his father.
His mouth opened, but nothing came out. And he shrugged.
I squinted at him with a shake of my head before facing Augustine again.
“Why can’t I marry Kane? Is it because your plan with Fallon didn’t work, and now you’re saving your son for someone more powerful than me? Ivy, perhaps?” I no longer cared if I sounded desperate. And my assumptions were not all that ridiculous, considering Ivy was the firstborn and assumed to be the most powerful among us Sullivan girls.
But I couldn’t let this happen, and I couldn’t do this to my sister. I had a plan. I’d suffered through heartless sex with no reward since I was sixteen. I’d already given Kane my virginity and made him believe he owned my mind, heart, and body for him to trust me. For years, I’d prepared myself to live a life with murder on my hands.
“Your accusations are absurd, Adora.” Augustine looked at me with an expression of boredom, and Dad’s mortification radiated off my back.
“Are they? Because regardless, this is not what I want.” A forest of anxiety cultivated inside me, creaking and groaning and growing and stabbing my chest and lungs with its sharp branches. “If you force me to marry Cyrus, I will make this difficult,” I promised, knowing my words were foolish as soon as they left my lips. But even as I said them, I felt the warmth of Ivy’s last flame of hope from where I stood. I had to try for her. “You know, as the rest of the room, I am better suited for Kane.”
“Whether you want it or not, this is your future,” Augustine said, silencing my threats. “Do as you wish, but let me remind you, only you and Cyrus will feel the brunt of your animosity. May as well obey with a smile on your face.”
In that instant, all hope was lost. A coldness swept the room.
My gaze slid between Augustine and Viola when their plan became clear.
Augustine, at some point, had changed his mind and was saving Ivy for his son to keep the Pruitt family the most powerful. But also, Augustine wanted to remain in power while still giving the coven and our town peace of mind.
It was brilliant, really.
If Augustine had announced the marriage of Kane and Ivy on this day, it would bring Kane one step closer to taking the title of High Priest away from his father, and Augustine wasn’t ready to give up power.
To our standing high priest, Cyrus and I together was his only option.
It all made sense.
It felt like soil packed into my chest, suffocating my options and my ability to think of a way out. Before Augustine could dismiss us, I turned and left the chamber with a held breath.
How could I marry the man my sister was in love with and it not come between us? What was worse, how would there be a chance to murder Kane on the night of the Crimson Eclipse if I were promised to someone else? There would be no reason for us to be alone together anymore. All opportunities would lead to me being caught. After sixteen long years of waiting, with only two more months left, time had run out.
The sky was dimming as I ran through the cold. Every gust of wind was like a whispering warning. Soon, the sky would soak in the shadow-clad night.
I ran until my feet hit sand and the black sea frosted my feet.
“You failed me again,” I screamed into the coming night, my chest heaving, the bones in my chest splintering, slapping the sea in the face with my temper as if it were a disloyal lover. And perhaps it was.
There was no response. There never was.
I spun to my left and right, arms raised at my sides. “Do you hear me? Are you even listening to me?” The wind rolled over the waves, pushing me away from the sea I was calling out to.
I marched forward again, calves pushing past the current as tears pooled in my eyes. I clenched my fists tightly to keep them from falling. I squeezed until my nails pierced my palms, forcing my tears to just sit there on my lashes.
“I’ve given you so much of me, and you still failed me,” I screamed. “This was my only chance to save her, and now she’s stuck for eternity!”
The porch steps of my cottage creaked when I climbed them in haste.
“Oh, good! Adora! Could yah tell yah fathah, if it’s not much trouble, to fix thah wood that fell from mah window? One got loose, yah see, and...” It was Mrs. Madder next door. She was bundled inside a hideous green scarf and her late husband’s long, black puffy jacket. She stood in her half-opened doorway, hiding from the descending sun.
“If it’s not too much trouble,” she repeated in a craggy voice. “I’m afraid a tree branch is gonna come straight through like it did down there at Hobb’s Grocery a few months back. Do yah remember?”
It was almost time.
The sun was dying, and I was in no mood to care about her window.
And why must she stir my agitation on this night of all nights? I took a deep breath and dotted the corner of my eye with the tip of my finger. “My father can’t do everything for you at your beck and call, Mrs. Madder. Night’s almost here. You should get inside, and if he isn’t busy in the morning, I’ll have him stop by.”
“Oh, tomorrow’s no good, yah see—”
“Unfortunately, it will have to do.”
“That’s why I—”
“Mrs. Madder, please!” I shouted, stopping her. “He has three daughters and a sick wife. Give him a break!”
I left her standing there and pushed the front door open to walk up the stairs, a hot soothing bath my only clear and welcome thought.
In moments like these, the need to submerge in water matched the need for my next breath. It was the only way to wash away my new reality.
I turned on the wrought iron faucet before lighting candles that lined the cedar walls surrounding the clawfoot tub. Once the water reached the brink, my dress slipped off me, and I stepped in.
The water turned my skin pink and the steam allowed me to breathe. I slid down the porcelain, sinking until I was submerged, my head under water, with silence embracing me.
As my breath was held in my chest, my first thought was what could be running through Cyrus’s mind. I’d run out of the chamber so fast, not thinking about stopping and asking him how he felt about the decision that had been made.
Then my thoughts strayed to Ivy, and how her entire life crumbled in seconds. What would this do to her?
I squeezed my eyes tight under the water, and after so long, my lungs tingled and my diaphragm spasmed, imploring me to take a breath. It reminded me that I needed air and didn’t live in water. Anyone else would have succumbed to that painful urge, but I held on. Whenever that feeling would start, it felt like I wouldn’t make it. That the water would kill me. But each time, I fought it, strengthening my lungs, strengthening myself. Proof that I was good enough for the sea.
As far as I understood it, there was no choice in the matter. I had to hold on because on the other side of holding on, it didn’t hurt anymore.
Minutes had passed by. I didn’t know how many. I’d lost count and focused on my body, listening to what it had to say. My heartbeat slowed, and the leaky faucet dripped, dripped in a rhythmic way.
I felt disconnected from myself, a calmness sweeping through me while my mind took me to a place I’d never been before. Memories that couldn’t have been mine.
The first thing I saw was his face and how his hair bounced off his sun-kissed forehead each time he looked up at me from across the square. The memory was like a faded pastime, and it caused my pulse to race.
There were flashes of him. A man I’d never met but somehow knew.
His striking eyes took advantage of every second with me, leaving me feeling sick. Not as I would feel after drinking too much wine, but as if the wine were a vessel sailing through a raging, unpredictable storm. Motion sickness, perhaps.
Wind tickled windchimes as the sun reflected off the colorful hanging sea glass. It sent bluish-green stars dancing about the market, blinding me and stealing him away.
My body jerked forward. Where did he go?
Before I could make sense of what was happening, my head broke through the surface.
I gasped for air, the water in the tub rocking against my shoulders.
When I opened my eyes wide, a flame’s soft amber glow haloed Ivy’s sullen face. Her shadow shivered on the Cedar wall behind her.
“Almost thirteen minutes.” Her tone was low and hushed as she sat on the wooden chair beside the tub with a glass of pinot noir dangling from her fingertips. “You’re getting better. Almost as good as me. Imagine what you could do come February.”
My shoulders shook at the memory that had invaded me. I slid across the tub to hide it and laid my head atop my crossed arms. I peered out the window and into the darkness that lay ahead.
From here, I could see the unfinished harbor, where the unprotected boats swayed against the docks. My breathing calmed, and the lighthouse’s beam circled Weeping Hollow again.
“I thought I had everything figured out,” I said, feeling her intense gaze on me. I closed my eyes. Nothing I could say would make this go away or make things right. Perhaps if I squeezed my eyes harder, I could manifest a different future for us. One where she was with Cyrus, not me. “I never wanted this. You must know that. It was supposed to be Kane. I’ve always wanted it to be Kane.”
Ivy’s lashes fluttered, and pinot noir swirled in her glass as she circled her tiny, agile wrist. When her eyes fell over me once more, mistrust spoiled her beauty. “You and Cyrus have always been close...”
She blamed me. I should have known. “You think I asked for it?”
“With the two of you together all the time, I’m sure it planted the idea in someone’s head. Look at yourself in the mirror.” She lifted her chin, and I caught my reflection in the French vintage mirror on the wall behind her. “Adora, you’re the embodiment of perfection, and you’ve always been drawn to beautiful things. Have you ever seen a man as beautiful as Cyrus? Two perfect people who make the perfect couple. In their eyes, you two belong together.”
She saw perfection, I saw something entirely different.
I couldn’t stand the sight of the girl in the mirror anymore, so I tore my eyes away. “Cyrus is just a friend, just like you and Maverick are friends. Like we’re all friends, Ivy. I would never do this to you.”
“If you keep telling yourself something, eventually you’ll believe it to be true,” she started to say, standing from the chair, “but it still doesn’t change the facts. I love him, and you took the only man I’ve ever loved away from me.”
I wrapped my fingers around the edge of the tub. “I’m not marrying—”
“You will because Augustine ordered it. What’s done is done, and what’s worse is I can’t leave. I’ve spent my whole life protecting you, and now I’m forced to watch you spend the rest of your life with someone who invades all my thoughts.” In her eyes, I saw the deep ache filling her as she took a full breath. “There’s no one else for me, Adora. At this point, I just need to decide whether to live in this pain you caused or continue fucking your fiancé to dull it.”
Ivy spilled what was left in her glass into the tub.
And upon her exit, she took the steam with her.
The deep-red pinot noir from the Cantini’s wine cellar swirled in the bath water, the threat bleeding all around me.
Anger climbed my spine.
It always did.