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He used to love me.
The loneliness hits me like a brick, shattering the rage and hurt that’s keeping me conscious. Eli’s not coming for me. No one will save me now. The pain of it hurts too much. It’s more than pain – it’s a brittle emptiness in my bones. Grey oblivion wobbles on the edge of my vision, and I long to commit to it, to sail over the edge of the world and never come back.
Eli, Noah, Gabe, I’m so so sorry.
“Brutus was such a convenient scapegoat,” Antony says as he leans over the coffin. “All I had to do was add that note to Brentwood’s body, and you created an entire mythology about him in your mind. In reality, he had no idea you were still alive. He didn’t even know what you looked like. I just wanted to fuck with you. I wanted you to pay.”
He didn’t even know what you looked like.
Antony leans right over me, his body filling the space I need to keep breathing. His lips brush mine, and even though I can’t feel his touch, something in that kiss, in his crushing presence, stirs a darkness inside me, a locked box I’d pushed beneath the surface bobbing on the edge of my consciousness.
“How do you think it felt, cousin, being around you every day knowing you were living the life I was supposed to have, that my Mackenzie should have had?” Antony rasps against my lips. “You were the impostor. It was never supposed to be you, but you mocked me with her face. And one day, I got tired of pretending. I got tired of waiting to have my chance with her. You know what teenage hormones are like. I was going crazy. I couldn’t be inside her, but I had the perfect Mackenzie sex doll right down the hall from me.”
No. Please, no.
The chains shatter, the box of secrets in my mind blows open, and Antony’s scent assaults me. His heavy body presses against mine, the way it had done that night when he pinned me to the bed.
The scream starts in my toes and rises up through my body until even my skin itself is screaming. A scream that can’t leave my lips, that struggles against the drug for freedom as I writhe in the truth of what he says.
It wasn’t Brutus in my room that night. It wasn’t my uncle who violated me.
It was Antony.
Claudia
My stomach churns, desperate to disgorge its contents. But I can’t move. I can’t push the demons Antony’s unleashed back into their box. They press against my skull as the full horror of it rolls over me.
And in that moment, something inside me snaps.
I lost everything.
All those years I lived alone in this house, I dreamed of a family, of people who had my back no matter what. And through chance and happenstances and sheer dumb luck, I got everything I dreamed of. I had friends who cared for me, and I had three princes who loved me, who worshipped me. But I blew it. They put me on a pedestal, and I showed them that I was no goddess, but a demon in disguise.
I cost them everything – their futures, their college plans, their families, their innocence. Noah lost Grace because of me.
I piled up the house of sand that crumbled around us.
No wonder they left me.
No wonder they hate me.
I’m too broken to see that my beloved cousin is my rapist.
I’m too selfish to realize that everything I dreamed of was right under my nose.
I’m too corrupted to understand that the freedom I sought was in their arms the whole time.
I took three guys who had bright, brilliant futures and pulled them into my nightmare. I made them give up everything they are for my love, and never did the same in return.
I’ll never be able to right the evil I’ve done to them. But they gave me so much of themselves, it’s time for me to give something back. To give them their dreams back. They deserve that much from me. They deserve so much more.
I close my eyes – the only part of me still able to move – and I picture their faces. Sweet Eli with that too pretty smile. Dark-eyed Noah who mirrors my soul. Gabriel with those sinful lips that sing the stars.
I give them the only gift I have left to give.
I let go.
I stop fighting the grey fog. I sink into nothingness, letting the drug take me. I welcome oblivion. I greet death as my father, Julian August, would have done – with open arms.
