Instead, the small screen of my phone glowed against the dim light, my fingers hesitating over the keyboard as I read the title of the article:The Darkest Years of the Thornbury Dynasty.
The title alone made my gut twist. Still, I opened it, only to be met with a blinking message.
We’re sorry, but this site has been removed.
A jolt of annoyance prickled across my skin. I flipped the phone closed and tossed it aside.
So the family was real. That didn’t mean the offer was. But…if it was. In a day, everything might change.
The thought landed like a stone in my stomach. I looked around the room. The walls, once decorated with various nightmare catchers and colourful paintings my mum had made, now stood bare and grey. Only a few lonely nails, hammered deep into the plaster, remained as evidence they’d ever been there.
I curled into the pillow, fear clawing up my throat with every passing breath. I had no chance of knowing if this was the beginning of something extraordinary—or a very well-dressed trap.
It wouldn’t have taken much to make me disappear. I knew that. Girls like me went missing all the time. Poor. Alone. Unremarkable in the eyes of the world. I wrapped the blanket tighter around my shoulders.
Stay, in a life you do not enjoy. Or leave, and discover something else.Anhe Fei’s voice threaded through the dark, laced with something I found hard to name. Hope? Warning? Both?
It was a vulnerable feeling. The not knowing. Like standing on the edge of something vast and shadowed, unable to tell if it was a cliff or a doorway.
But I was greedy.
Greedy for a future that didn’t feel like surviving on scraps. Greedy for a chance. Even if it wasn’t real. Even if it might hurt.
Because girls like me didn’t get gifts from the universe. We didn’t have estranged grandmothers with fortunes and estates, clawing us back into stories we were never meant to belong to.
And yet… if it was true—if any of it was real—I couldn’t miss it.
But there was one question I couldn’t shake. Not even as the sun spilled deeper into the room. Not even as sleep finally pulled at the edges of my thoughts.
Why did my mum leave in the first place?
CHAPTER FOUR
ELODIE
Agrating sound cut through the room and I yanked the pillow over my ears, trying to block it out. This was the third time someone had leaned on the doorbell in the past couple of minutes, but there was only a ghost of a chance I was dragging myself out of bed before my alarm went off.
I squeezed my eyes shut, trying to slip back into the dream I was already forgetting, when the bell shrieked again. I hurled the pillow across the room, toward the crooked front door.
Cursing under my breath, I pushed myself upright, my limbs still heavy with sleep. I staggered to the door and peeled the cover off the peephole, tiptoeing to look through.
A boy stood on the other side. He couldn’t have been much older than I was. His black suit was loose, like it belonged to someone twice his size, and the thin moustache on his upper lip seemed as nervous as he did. He had a strange hat on, along with white gloves. Two possibilities crossed my mind: he was either a magician or a very poorly disguised serial killer. My next thought jolted me awake. He must be the chauffeur Cornelius Sterling mentioned.
“Just a moment,” I called, grabbing a pair of trousers from the back of a chair and yanking them on before unlocking the door.
“I—” He cleared his throat when I opened it. “Sorry, Miss,” he stuttered. “I’m looking for Miss Elodie Thornbury.” He looked me up and down, glaring into the flat. “Are—are you her?”
The name twitched on his tongue like stray hair. It made my skin crawl. But if all I had to do was be called by a name that didn’t belong to me for a different life, I could do that.
“Yes,” I said. “I’m her.”
He nodded, awkward and mechanical. “I’m your chauffeur, Miss. I was told you’d be expecting me.” His accent was thick. Welsh, maybe, with edges smoothed by nerves.
I was expecting him. Just not so early on the first day of the weekend, when I could finally sleep in.
As if sensing my thoughts, he added, “It’s a long drive to Thornhill, Miss. I was instructed to get you there before sunset. Wouldn’t want you missing dinner.”
I blinked at him, then at the sour hallway. Right. We wouldn’t.
