But here I am.
Letting Iain into my room was a bad idea. Now that the smallest seed of doubt has been planted, I can’t get the idea out of my head. I’ve spent the last few hours replaying every interaction Vin and I have ever had for some hint that I had gotten them wrong. And all I see is anger and hatred.
Then I think about the last few weeks, when I saw a side of Vin I never knew existed.
I tell myself I just want to hear him say it. I need to hear directly from him that Iain is full of shit and that he has never loved me.
Otherwise, the possibility will haunt me for the rest of my life.
Because I have always loved him, even when I hated him.
It’s completely dark when the cab finally winds its way up the long private road leading to Cortland Manor. There are no lights to use to navigate, and my heart is in my throat as I rush down the stone pathway.
The pool house is deserted when I get there, no sign that Vin has been there since we left before our vow renewal, which was almost three days ago now.
I don’t have any choice but go into the main house.
Cortland Manor is as silent as the grave and only slightly warmer. When I call Vin’s name, my voice echoes off the walls before fading away into more silence. I take the stairs two at a time and yell for him again when I get to the second floor.
Giselle appears in an open doorway at the end of the hall.
“I’m so sorry no one came to the door to greet you. Most of the staff is off for the week after working your reception.” She approaches me slowly, bright red nails caressing the wooden banister. “If you’re looking for Vin, I haven’t seen him since last night. I hope there isn’t any trouble in paradise.”
Trouble in paradise might be the understatement of the year. “You don’t have any idea where he is?
“Last I heard, he was going to visit you in the hospital.” Her gaze travels up my body, taking in the hospital scrubs I had to put on since the emergency room staff cut my wedding dress off of me. “I assume that you’re fully recovered.”
“Getting there, thanks. I’m going to call around and see if anyone has seen Vin. Maybe I should ask Duke.”
She shakes her head. “He’s away on business.”
I’m about to turn away when something occurs to me. “Do you remember my mother?”
Her lip quirks. “Vaguely. I wouldn’t say we ran in the same circles.”
“She worked for you, right?”
“She did,” Giselle replies slowly. “But that was years ago. She never came back to work after Vin’s accident. Of course, we would have had to let her go even if she had. Accidental ingestion or not, you expect more from the people caring for your children.”
“Yeah, of course.” I don’t know what drives me to ask her about this. But the more I think about it, the stranger it seems that none of them ever suspected my mother of being involved with his poisoning. She had been Vin’s nanny at the time, after all. “Did they ever figure out how Vin got the oleander in his system?
Instead of answering, she moves to a small end table near the top of the stairs and opens the drawer. “It’s really too bad that Julia decided to leave town. Considering she was the one there at the time, these seem like better questions to ask her. It’s a shame that she hasn’t ever come back to Deception.”
“Julia never came back because you killed her.” Vin says from below us. His voice startles me so much that I stumble on the last step when I turn to see him standing below us in the entryway. He bounds up the stairs and comes to a stop right behind me. “Isn’t that right, mother dearest?”
When I turn back to Giselle, she pulls a gun out of the drawer and points it at my chest.
Forty
My heart is in my throat when Giselle pulls the gun.
“Point it at me,” I insist, looming closer to make myself as large of a target as possible. “I’m the one you’ve always wanted dead, right?”
I let out a harsh breath of relief as the gun swings toward me.
“No…” Zaya cries out, but I silence her with a harsh movement of my hand.
This is between me and my stepmother, Zaya is just collateral damage.
“I tracked your mother down,” I say conversationally, not taking my gaze off of Giselle’s face. Even though I’m ostensibly speaking to Zaya, my words aren’t really meant for her. “Or at least, I tracked down the woman who has been using your mother’s identity. She’s an illegal immigrant who bought Julia Milbourne’s social security number ten years ago and has been using it ever since. The white woman in expensive clothes who sold it to her insisted it was high quality, because the person that the identity belonged to was dead. It’s amazing what people will tell you when they think you’re an immigration agent.”
Zaya’s body is frozen behind me. “I don’t understand.”
“My father didn’t tell me about the restrictions on my inheritance until recently, which almost certainly means that Giselle didn’t know about it, either.” I stare down the woman that had taken the place of my mother when I was still an infant. She was supposed to care for me as if I was her own. And instead, she’d paid someone to poison me. “Emma wasn’t born yet, and Giselle didn’t have any way to ensure her hold on the Cortland fortune with me standing between her and the jackpot. She thought with me out of the way that all money would eventually go
