now

“You’re not supposed to be here.”

My cousin stands in the doorway of my Georgetown office, polished and glossy as always, a dress of robin’s egg blue highlighting her slender figure and the small swell of Embry’s unborn child. The sight is like a slow stab in my own belly, going deeper and deeper every minute she’s in front of me.

“You’re not supposed to be here,” I say again. “I would have thought that my refusing to answer your calls made that quite clear.”

Abilene just smiles and walks into the office, finding a chair and sitting down on the other side of my desk. “You did make it clear, but this is important. And if you really didn’t want me around, you would have told your Secret Service agents, but they seem to still think I’m an approved visitor.”

“I could call them,” I warn her, sliding my phone close to me. “Right now. I don’t care that you’re pregnant.”

“Yes, but you won’t call.”

I hesitate as I reach for my phone, not sure what game she’s playing. Of course, up until my kidnapping in May, I had no idea that she was playing any games at all. I’d trusted her. My cousin, my best friend. She’d sold me to Melwas, all because I’d had the audacity to marry the man she was obsessed with, and even my abduction hadn’t been enough—she’d blackmailed Embry into an engagement, and she held the threat of going public about Lyr over all our heads.

It’s for Lyr’s sake, and Ash’s, that I relent.

“Okay,” I say. “I won’t. Tell me what you came here for.”

Abilene pulls a creamy stock envelope out from her purse and puts it on the table. “I wanted to make sure your invitation didn’t get lost in the mail.”

Oh fuck you, I want to say to her. Instead I just say, “I’m afraid I won’t be able to make it.”

“What a shame,” Abilene says mildly. “I really wanted you to be my matron of honor.”

I keep my voice as steady and cool as hers while I say, “Abilene, that will never happen. You must know this.”

She shrugs. “It would make for an excellent story after Embry announces his campaign, you know. If you and Maxen were at the wedding.”

I study her for a moment. I’ve always been good at reading people, and I’ve had more practice with Abilene than almost any other person, but something’s changed inside her that makes her difficult to understand or predict. She’s a satellite with an unstable orbit, destined to swing wide and crash into another moon. “What do you want from all of this?” I ask. “For me to be miserable? For me to know that Embry strayed? For me to get kidnapped again?”

The edges of her mouth curl up in a mocking smile, but when I speak next, the smile disappears.

“You want Ash to love you?” I ask.

She blinks and glances away, and for a split second, I see the girl I used to know. The girl I grew up with. Headstrong and selfish, but not evil. Not this. And it’s in seeing this that I realize I’m right. All of this is about me taking Ash away from her. Embry is a casualty of proximity, just a means to hurt me. All she’s wanted since high school is Ash, and there’s a part of her that realizes she’ll never have him now, not after what she’s done. I hope that knowledge is agony.

I’d been taught in my youth how to identify these weak spots and how to press on them, but I don’t do that now. I don’t want to press on them because I don’t know what will happen. I don’t know her limits anymore, I don’t know the rotten ice edges of her spite, I don’t know what words or looks or gestures might send me plummeting into dark, freezing water. I don’t know that she won’t walk out of here and decide to announce Lyr’s existence in front of the clock tower outside.

So I change tactics, and instead I say, “It was terrible, you know. Being taken by Melwas.”

She looks back to me, the vulnerability fading fast in her face. “Good,” she says. “I wanted it to be.”

“Are you upset that I escaped?”

“I’m upset that you lived,” she says in a bland tone of voice, as though we’re talking about our work schedules or the weather. “That wasn’t supposed to be the case.”

“Sorry to disappoint you,” I respond, unable to keep the bitterness out of my voice. “Sorry for being wanting to be alive.”

She shakes her head. “You still don’t get it, do you? This is just all some fairy tale to you, and it always has been, ever since we were kids. Perfect, sad Greer, all alone in her tower, and she gets rescued and wooed by not one but two men. Don’t you see how stupidly unfair that is? How ridiculous it was when you were already Grandpa’s favorite? When you already had the perfect childhood?”

“My parents died, Abi,” I say, leaning forward in my seat. “I was orphaned. I hardly had the perfect childhood, and if I was Grandpa’s favorite, it was because he had no choice but to take me in.”

“You had everything,” she says angrily. “And Maxen Colchester was the one thing in the world I ever really wanted, and you took him away from me.”

“I’m sorry that I didn’t take your teenage crush into consideration when I fell in love.”

“It wasn’t a crush. Maxen was the goal for me, always,” she insists. “Every congressman I fucked, every lobbyist I dated, it was all to get me closer to him. I knew more about him than he knew about himself, that’s how much I loved and wanted him. It was hard, it took me years to discover all his secrets, but I did it.” She lifts her chin, as if expecting some kind of trophy for this.

“Congratulations,” I say. “It’s helped quite a lot with your blackmailing him.”

“I never meant to blackmail him,” she says, as if this distinction matters now. “In fact, I never meant to blackmail anybody. When I found the letter in Grandpa Leo’s desk, all I felt was excited.”

I hate that even now, despite everything, I’m curious. “What letter?”

Her smile returns—she’s happy to know something I don’t—but it’s not mocking this time, either. She genuinely lights up as she tells me, and I realize it’s because she’s proud. She’s proud of herself for putting it all together. “I was staying with Grandpa at his penthouse, years ago. He was out doing something—you remember how he was never home—and I was bored, so I started looking through his desk.”

“You went through his desk?” I don’t know why after all she’s done that this feels like such a transgression, but it does. Grandpa Leo’s desk had been sacrosanct, inviolable, a shrine of politics and business that we’d never been allowed near. Even as small children, we’d been swept up in his arms any time we got close to the desk and deposited elsewhere. He always claimed the ecosystem of reports and memos and letters was too delicate to be disturbed.

“Greer, the reason he didn’t want anyone inside his desk is because he had the most incredible things in there. Dossiers on almost every politician you can imagine. Ledgers with money trails that went to all sorts of interesting places. And letters. Letters from so many people…including Penley Luther.”

Something fits together in my mind, and I start to see. “Luther confessed the affair to Grandpa Leo?”

Abilene nods. “He was in agony with guilt during his last days,” she says. “He knew he was dying and knew he’d failed this child, failed his precious dead Imogen. But even though he felt all this guilt, he still couldn’t bring himself to find Maxen. See his son for himself. He still worried about what the press would say.”

God. I’d grown up hearing Luther’s name invoked like some sort of ritual blessing on a politician or a new bill, hearing him talked about as if he were an uncanonized saint. And to learn that this hero was actually so weak is unsettling. My heart twists for Ash and for the long-dead Imogen, who died in order that Ash could live. Two people Penley Luther failed in the most unforgivable ways possible.

Abilene correctly reads my expression. “Exactly. Reprehensible. And Grandpa told him exactly that—that he had a duty to this son and that he wouldn’t die in peace unless he’d found some way to make amends. Luther’s version of making amends was to set aside some money for ‘Imogen Leffey’s youngest child,’ and it was a laughably small amount given the size of his estate.”

“So that’s how you learned Luther had a secret child with Imogen Leffey. But how did you learn that child was Maxen Colchester?”

She smiles like a teacher might smile, as if I’ve asked exactly the right question. “Because Grandpa was named the executor of his will. He knew that Imogen’s youngest child was also Luther’s, and after Luther’s death, he hired a law firm that employed a young Merlin Rhys to find this child. He knew who Maxen was all along. He knew before almost anyone else.”

I sit back in my chair. “Grandpa never uttered a word about any of it…” I say, mostly to myself. I think of all the times we talked leading up to my wedding, of the time we saw Ash in Chicago. Never once had he breathed a word about Ash being Luther’s son.

“Luther swore him to secrecy, and I’d imagine Grandpa felt invested in protecting his legacy.”

“And you knew this years ago?”

“Yes,” she says. “A year or so after Chicago.”

“You never told me.” Until this last year, Abilene had confided everything in me. I’m shocked that she kept something so huge to herself.

“I liked being the only one to know,” she admits, glancing down at her lap. “It felt special, to know something that important, that secret. And so exciting—I could just see the story when it blew up. Handsome War Hero Actually the Son of Revered Leader…I mean, it has this epic feeling, you know? Like something out of a soap opera.”

“Or Thomas Malory,” I murmur. “But then how did you find out about Lyr? Surely Grandpa couldn’t have known about that.”

“He didn’t,” Abilene agrees. “That came later, only a couple of years ago. I finally decided to tell Morgan Leffey, and there was something about her when I told her the truth. Like, something about her face. She just looked so sick, sick and sad and scared. It was not at all what I expected. That she might want to exploit it for political gain, yes, that she might be angry at Penley Luther or at her mother or even me, certainly. But it was none of that. It was like she’d just seen a dead body or something equally horrifying.”

I trace the wooden edge of my desk with a fingertip, that hateful invitation still within sight. I can’t believe I’m sitting here talking with her, letting her explain herself, letting her preen over all her victories. But I still don’t reach for my phone.

Instead, I ask, “So that tipped you off that she must have had a secret child of her own?”

Abilene doesn’t miss the skeptical edge in my tone, but it doesn’t seem to bother her. “That’s what tipped me off that something was strange about her and Maxen. I mean, sure, they’d been political rivals during his campaign and they must have crossed paths a few times because of Embry, but even then, that didn’t explain the existential horror I saw. I tried to ask her about it, get her to talk about Maxen, but she showed me out of her office after that and refused to speak with me again.” A look of anger crosses Abilene’s face. “Like I was some kind of crazy constituent and not Leo Galloway’s granddaughter. Like I should be ashamed of myself, when I was the reason she ever learned something so important in the first place!”

I’m impatient to get back to the story. “But if she didn’t tell you, then how did you find out?”

“Ah.” She looks pleased with herself. “It was actually quite easy once I decided to start tracing timelines back. I started with her, used a cute guy in her father’s lobbying firm to dig up old records, old expenses. And guess who’d taken two visits to Ukraine at the same time Maxen was stationed there?”

“Morgan.” I know this part of the story already, about how Morgan and Ash had met, fucked, and then she’d returned and almost died at Glein. “But the baby?”

“About five months after her second trip to the Ukraine, all her expenses stopped, came to an abrupt halt. Except for a fifteen thousand dollar fee paid to a Manhattan law firm.”

“The same one Merlin worked for?” I guess.

“The very same. Merlin arranged everything for Lyr through them—the guardianship transfers, the burying of hospital records, everything—even I couldn’t get to the truth from there. I had to fly out to Seattle and actually bribe an administrative assistant to get into the old records to see for myself. Found the nurse who’d been in the delivery room. I didn’t think she’d remember anything, but it was worth asking her, and guess what? She did remember something unusual: the mother had wanted the name the baby Maxen after his father, and then she changed her mind after a family friend suggested the name Lyr. Uncommon names, the nurse thought at the time, and the birth stuck with her.”

“God,” I say. Even knowing the truth on my own, listening to the story unfold still holds a sordid kind of shock.

“From there, it was pretty easy to track Lyr down, and see him for myself. And once you see him, there’s no doubt.”

She moves her own phone onto my desk, sliding past a screen and pulling up a picture of a dark-haired youth. When she spins the phone around so I can have a better look, I have to catch my breath.

It’s Ash, it looks just like Ash.

Younger, of course, and there are a few differences here and there. Lyr has longer hair, tousled and messy and curled at the ends in a way that surely makes his classmates swoon, and his features are slightly more angular than Ash’s, more otherworldly beauty than the masculine strength his father has. But otherwise I could be looking at a teenaged photo of my husband. The black hair, the full lips with their sharp upper peaks, the eyes as green as old bottle glass.

I understood before, what it meant for Ash to have a son. I understood what it meant for us and for Morgan and the boy himself, and everybody caught in the tragic web around him. I understood that Ash had fathered a child on a woman that I am jealous of, and I understood that we had not yet had a child of our own. I understood that my jealousy of Morgan would grow a thousand fold, that she could do by accident what I so wanted to do on purpose.

But seeing this boy, so handsome and tall like his father, shakes some new kind of understanding into me, which is the same knowledge, but deeper and heavier and more terrible, and it’s crushing my chest and balling my throat.

Ash has a child.

Embry will have a child.

I am not the mother of any of those children.

And in this moment, it doesn’t matter that Ash never loved Morgan or that Embry might actually despise Abilene, because they will still always be bound to these women in a way that can’t be expunged or blanked out. They will share a connection that I have no part of, that I have nothing to do with, and I will forever be exiled from these pieces of them. There are now parts of the men I love that will never belong wholly to me. There are places inside them that are forever stamped with another woman’s name, and even if I have children of my own, I will always, always have to share that title of mother of my children with someone else.

“Handsome, isn’t he?” Abilene says. Too late I realize that I’ve been staring at Lyr’s picture for too long, and although I’m normally quite good at mastering my expression, there’s no doubt Abilene saw a glimpse of the tumult inside my mind.

“He is,” I comment, pushing the phone back to her. “He looks like his father.”

“You can see why I knew for sure after I saw the boy,” Abilene says, taking her phone and giving the picture a fond glance. “And for a long time, I was happy with just knowing. It didn’t taint Maxen for me at all, you see, and I hated the idea that people would take this and turn it into some tawdry V.C. Andrews-style story.”

“But you don’t hate that idea anymore? You’re okay with ruining his life and Lyr’s life and Morgan’s?”

Her eyes flash. “I would never ruin his life.”

I’m suddenly furious again, and I try to hide it by standing up and walking over to the window so she can’t see my face. “Then what is it you think you’re doing now?”

“He needs to know that I’ll love him no matter what,” she says confidently. “Then he’ll see. When everyone else has left him, when everyone else has abandoned him, I’ll be there. And I won’t care what he’s done with Morgan, I won’t care that they had a son. I’ll be the only one to forgive him for everything. So you see, it’s not ruining his life at all. It’s bringing him to the one who loves him the most.”

I turn to look at her, to say something about how delusional she sounds, but before I can speak, I’m transfixed by the look on her face. I’ve never seen anything like it—her lips tilted up in a dreamy smile and her eyes bright with some uncomfortable fire and her cheeks flushed red with excitement. There’s a small tug in the back of my mind, a tug as old as humanity itself, a quiet alarm that says take care, there’s danger, danger from this person. It’s the first time that I’ve truly realized that Abilene is not operating purely out of malice or cold manipulation. There is a fever inside of her, something deep inside of her mind, and whether it was always there or whether it’s only newly developed, I don’t think it matters. It’s tilted her thinking, sent her sliding down paths no human should go down.

She’s beyond being reasoned with. It doesn’t matter what logic I throw at her, what facts I tell her, she will believe this fantasy about Ash above all else. That they’re somehow meant for each other. That his love for me is some kind of aberrant mistake that he’ll realize if only he could see. And she seems blind to the fact that the more she tortures him in the hope that it will drive him to her, the more she pushes him away.

And with a chill that I feel deep under my skin and in my bones, I realize that she could do more than try to kill me by proxy. She really could harm me—and more importantly, she could harm Ash or Embry. She could harm that child nestled inside of her. I no longer believe that there’s anything she wouldn’t do in her wild pursuit of Ash, anything she wouldn’t do in order to punish me for getting to him first.

“And Embry?” I say, trying to betray none of these thoughts, trying to pretend that this conversation hasn’t revealed the slithers and creeps of her mind. “He’s really just a way to punish me? To isolate Ash?”

Abilene tilts her head in something like pity. “You really do love them both, don’t you?”

There’s no point in lying about it, and I don’t want to. “Yes,” I say. “I really do love them both.”

She stands up and tucks her clutch under her arm, sweeping her hair off her shoulder with a smooth shrug. She looks like an ad for high-end maternity clothes, or maybe a socialite, caught in a semi-casual but still glossed-to-perfection moment. “Then I suppose you have your answer. And while you’re pining after Embry, and Ash is missing his best friend, I’ll be there to comfort him. Me.”

She doesn’t know about Ash and Embry, I realize. That’s one secret she couldn’t uncover, and thank God. If she knew that Ash loved Embry as well as me…it would go badly for him. Maybe Embry’s safe for now, at least as safe as anyone can be around Abilene.

So I don’t threaten her as she makes to leave, I don’t say anything provoking. I say what I think she wants to hear so that she’ll leave and go home appeased for the time being, and then I’ll have space to think. Space to fix this.

“You succeeded, you know. Hurting me. Melwas aside, knowing that Embry slept with you—even if it was because you were blackmailing him—cut me deeper than almost anything else you’ve done.” I’m being truthful, and the honesty seems to call to her.

She turns back from the door, and her face is softer, less disquieting than before. She looks genuinely remorseful about something. “Greer, I—well, I think you should know. That night with Embry…” She absent-mindedly touches her belly as she searches for the words. “I wanted to get pregnant. I planned it that way, and if I hadn’t gotten pregnant that month, I would have tried and tried again. If I couldn’t have Ash’s baby, then this seemed like the next best thing.” She looks down at her stomach with a smile, and then back up to me. “I had help from a doctor, because I knew there were a great many things I could make Embry do, but that wasn’t one of them. Embry didn’t know it was me. He was barely even conscious.”

I stand there, stunned and sick, my thoughts racing. “You raped him.”

“If you like,” Abilene says, lifting a shoulder. “I thought I did it rather kindly, as things go. It’s not like I pretended to be you in the dark. It’s not like he has to remember the feeling of betraying you.”

I simply stare. I’m past words, past real thoughts even; my mind is somewhere vacant, someplace where horrors dwell.

“I thought that might comfort you,” Abilene says magnanimously, as if she’s granted me a great gift and hasn’t just admitted to rape. And then she leaves, not bothering to close the door behind her.

I don’t know how long I stand by my desk, how long it takes to reel in these dark fishes of thought, how long it takes for this to forge into action, into a plan. But it’s close to dark when I have the answers I need.

I have to call Embry.

I have to stop Abilene.