ella

was a tomb, and I wa

ail. They were chips of obsidian, hard and unforgiving, and they were fixed on me. "This woman made a mockery of our family in the ho

by a stern-faced maid. She was a master of her craft, I had to give her that. Her eyes were red-ri

is true. She... she came to me before the wedding. She had a picture of my little sister back in Naples. She

the villain and her as a tragic victim, forced to cooperate. Julian knelt beside he

hteous sorrow. "She is a monster. She has terrorized t

e with pigs in mud. They would only drag me down to their level. I needed a different

essed the only person in the

ted risk, an assertion of an intimacy I did not yet possess. Her eyes narrowed. "Julian's accusations are... ima

for a moment before del

ched. A symbol of the family's honor." I paused, my gaze sweeping over Clara, who had frozen, her hand instinctiv

went utte

e the color of ash. They had planned for accusations of conspiracy, of ambition, of murder. They had never planned fo

The clicking of the beads stopped. Her suspicion, a palpable force in the room, was shifting

ed my a

dropping, imbued with an urgency that seized their attention. "T

f dawning horror. He knew, somehow, that I was abou

Damien." I turned my full attention back to Elena, a mother desperate for any slive

land like stones

hlands. Its scent is masked by the special lavender-and-frank

just ripped out his heart and showed it to him, still beating.

ving a new truth from the threads of the old. "She taught me

to the matriarch's de

rson on this earth wh

no longer a suspect. I was no longer a problem t

e. The life of her son hung in the balance, weighed against the word of a strange girl who

d face, then at Clara's guilty

speaking to the unseen enforcer at the door. "Take