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Chapter One
Sloane
Fox News.
MSNBC…
CNN.
There wasn’t a station my brother or I could turn to that wasn’t stating the same thing.
This can’t be happening.
I literally didn’t believe what I was seeing. This had to be a lie, a mistake.
“You’re everywhere,” Bru whispered beside me. He eased in at my side, flipping to another news station.
The same thing.
Bru appeared in awe himself, and I swiped the remote from him, clicking through stations at a rapid pace. There had to be some kind of mistake here. I wasn’t this… girl they kept talking about on TV.
I wasn’t a Mallick.
This had to be bullshit because I wasn’t one and definitely not a twin.
Ares’s twin.
My swallow shifted my throat, each and every news station reporting the same thing. An anonymous tip had been apparently given to the authorities about who I was. From there, they claimed I’d been kidnapped by the very person who’d done it. My father, Godfrey Sloane, was being accused of taking me and not just once but twice. I’d been stolen initially from a hospital shortly after birth and again today. My parents… Godfrey and Marilyn were kidnappers…
And I was the kid.
My brother adjusted a blanket around my shoulders. When it’d gotten there I didn’t know. I did recall flinching when he’d put it on me, and only partially because my shoulder still fucking hurt from that fall in the warehouse.
My stomach coiled, twisting, and clamped up. I gripped the remote in an iron hold, each pant of breath meeting my brother’s hand when he rubbed my back.
“Sloane, this is insane,” my brother gasped out. He rubbed his mouth a beat, his expression haunted, and it had to match mine. He raised a hand. “But this tip they keep talking about. The anonymous one?” His hand lowered. “How did they even know this baby is… you? And how did they know you were even kidnapped today? One better, how did they know you were coming here after it happened—”
“I don’t know, and this is a lie.” I wasn’t this girl, and whoever had made this tip had to have made a mistake. I shut off the television. “Where’s Callum?”
“I think still downstairs.” Bru’s knees hit mine when he turned. He was still in his jean jacket and sweats from when we had pizza the night prior.
At Ares’s…
I hadn’t even had the thoughts to go over all that, kidnapped and held against my will after and then all this?
My brother cuffed my arm before my thoughts could run away with themselves. “You heard Lucas, and it’s a good thing he was proactive about securing the floor from the press. When you hadn’t arrived yet, I didn’t know what the families would do before you got up here. They really think you’re this girl.”
By families he meant all the families, Legacy families, and the only reason they weren’t here now was because they’d left to come back with an army. An army to get me according to the press.
Dorian and his family had been amongst them.
I’d seen them on the news too, his beautiful parents and the dark prince in the middle of them. All the Legacy parents had been visually striking, Bow and Thatcher with their parents. Wells with his.
I’d gone to my knees on the floor when I’d seen the Mallicks, Brielle I’d met. She’d been there on the TV with her husband, Ares’s dad Ramses.
I searched his face, hers too, and even Ares’s. He’d been with his parents, of course, and they all had dark eyes, a glow to their skin like mine…
I didn’t care what I saw on that screen, or what the world was telling me. These people all had to be making a mistake. I’d wanted to go downstairs after seeing them all, but security told my brother and me we needed to stay put until we were heard from either Lucas or Callum. Neither one of us had our phones either. Mine had been destroyed, and apparently after the press had been blowing up my brother’s phone, he’d given it to Callum’s PR people to man.
