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But they do.
They’re impossible, and yet… I wonder if I’ve sensed it all along.
A million tiny details fall into place. The fact that Mackenzie Malloy and I look uncannily alike. The lengths my father took to hide my face from the world – he said it was for my own protection, but really it was to prevent others from discovering the truth. The way I felt a strange sense of… familiarity when I lived in her memories. As if, on some level, they were my memories, too.
The fact that we’re both crazy-ass bitches.
I long to scream, to throw myself at Antony and pound him with my fists until he admits it’s not true. But I’m not twelve years old anymore. Spilling blood won’t change a thing. I swallow. Gabriel rushes to me, but I shrug away his embrace. I close my eyes and ball my fists and I curl the rage into a ball and I shove it inside the locked box of my secrets until it’s bursting at the seams, until it seems impossible I can carry so much pain without exploding. I lock up the box and shove it out into the ocean of my memories. I swallow again, letting the key to that box settle heavy in my stomach.
I open my eyes. When I speak to Antony, it’s with this calm, cold voice I don’t recognize. “You brought me to this house on purpose.”
Antony shrugs, his gaze moving from me across the vast ballroom. He’s squinting, which is weird for him. I wonder if he’s lost in a memory. “I knew to look for this place. I thought we might be able to appeal to your birth parents for protection or something. And then the night I rescued you I saw the news and realized we had a shot at a different plan.”
I rub my temples. The drink cart looms in the corner, and it’s mighty tempting to pour myself a tall martini and blot out this horrible truth. But Gabriel’s dark eyes on mine put paid to that idea. I can’t disappear into a void when he needs me. When they all need me.
Eli paces along the wall, holding Gizmo against his chest as if she might shield him from my DNA. Noah’s dark eyes roam my body, and I wonder if he sees something different in me now that he knows.
I am not my father’s daughter. The cruel streak that runs through me isn’t tempered by his intellect – it’s sharpened on the stone of Mackenzie’s utter insanity.
If I think about it too hard, I’ll break into a thousand pieces. I need to keep this revelation locked away. My fingers slide up my sleeve to caress my knife – that’s all I can trust now.
“Who else knows?” I ask. “Surely the doctor—”
“The doctor and midwife who delivered you and your sister were killed in an unfortunate fire.” Antony’s mouth twists up, and I know this fire was no accident. “Your father had the hospital records altered to make it appear as if Howard Malloy had only one daughter. Eva August gave birth at the same hospital, on the same night. At least, that’s what we’re all supposed to believe.”
“Why didn’t you tell me this?”
“Because I dragged you out of your grave, remember? I know what you’ve been through. Why heap another horror on top of that, especially when it would never matter? We were getting out of the family, remember?” He glowers at me.
I’m too winded to bite back at him. I look to my three princes for comfort. Eli’s a frozen meat-stick. Noah looks murderous, but as he turns to Antony I see it’s for him and not for me. Gabriel reaches for me again, and this time I don’t push him away. I sink into his embrace, letting his familiar scent wash over me, clinging desperately to the vain hope that what we have can’t be broken by Antony’s revelation.
“Didn’t you ever notice you and Mackenzie had the same birthday?” Noah hisses.
“I never bothered to learn her birthday. I—”
“January tenth,” Eli whispers.
Shit. Shit shit shit.
That’s my birthday.
Mine, and my sister’s.
“You never would have needed to know the truth,” Antony says. “But now if you take that test and your DNA comes back without a match—”
“I know.” I hang my head in my hands. “We’re fucked.”
Claudia
I lie on the floor in Mackenzie’s doll room, staring at the ugly-ass gilded plasterwork and garish chandelier on the ceiling.
I can’t believe the girl who collected these creepy dolls is my twin sister.
I don’t have time to meltdown about this. We have the Saturnalia feast tomorrow and Tiberius is out hunting for a tattoo machine and I need to figure out how to run a crime syndicate… not to mention I’m behind on all my schoolwork and I’ve got to figure out how to keep Ms. Drysdale safe from Nero and figure out why Mackenzie is trying to kill me…
But I can’t move. I stare at that ceiling, my mind a battlefield, my stomach heavy from swallowing down my rage. I hold up my hand and trace the lines on my palm. I’ve spent four years living as a ghost, stepping into someone else’s skin, and all along she’s closer to me than I ever thought possible.
Is this why she’s trying to kill me? Is that the natural reaction to discovering you have a secret twin sister who stole your life? In my fake-family, the natural reaction to everything is ‘must destroy,’ so it makes sense. I’ve sat in this house, eating Malloy food, drinking Malloy booze, mocking their frivolous life when all this time, I’ve been one of them.
