The Contract Half Sisters: Married To The Same Bloodline

Chapter 1

ODALYS

I did not cry at my father's funeral.

People expected me to. I could feel it in the way they looked at me, the way their eyes stayed on my face a second too long, waiting for it to crack. But Ashfords don't cry in public. My mother taught me that when I was six, and my father made sure I never forgot it.

So I stood by his coffin in my black dress and my black gloves, and I shook every hand that came to me.

"He was a great man, Odalys."

"Thank you."

"You're so strong, my dear. So strong."

"Thank you."

"If you need anything at all, anything—"

"Thank you."

I said it so many times the words stopped meaning anything. My face hurt from holding it still. The priest's voice went on and on, and the wind pulled at the white flowers on the coffin, and I kept thinking one thing. He's gone, and he never said sorry.

Then the whispers started.

It began at the back of the crowd, soft at first. Then heads started turning, one by one, like a wave. I didn't need to turn around. I already knew.

But I turned anyway.

She was standing near the gate in a plain black dress that looked cheap even from far away. Her hair was tied back. Her face was bare. She wasn't crying either.

Reign.

"Is that her?" someone whispered behind me.

"The mistress's girl."

"She has some nerve."

"She has his eyes, though. Look at her."

That last one made my hands go tight inside my gloves. She did have his eyes. She always had. I hated that more than anything else about her.

I handed my programme to my aunt and walked across the grass. My heels sank a little into the soil, but I didn't slow down. The crowd opened for me without a word. Everyone wanted to see this.

Reign watched me come. She didn't move back. She didn't look down. She just stood there with her chin up, like she had a right to be here.

I stopped in front of her and kept my voice low.

"You need to leave."

"I came to bury my father."

"You came to make a show."

"I'm standing at the back, Odalys. By the gate. I didn't say a word to anyone." Her voice was calm, and that made it worse. "He was my father too."

"He was your mother's mistake," I said. "Nothing more."

Something moved in her face, just for a second. Then it was gone.

"I'm not leaving until they put him in the ground," she said.

I looked at her for a long moment. Then I lifted two fingers without turning around.

My security came fast. Two big men in black suits. One took her left arm, the other took her right.

"Let go of me," Reign said. "Let go!"

She pulled. They didn't care. They dragged her backwards through the gate while the whole funeral watched. Her feet slid on the gravel. Something fell out of her pocket and hit the road with a sharp crack. Her phone. The screen split right across the middle.

Someone behind me laughed. Just a small laugh, but I heard it.

Reign heard it too. She stopped fighting. She stood up straight between the two men, looked right past them, and looked at me.

She didn't shout. She didn't cry. She just looked.

I turned my back on her and walked back to my father's coffin.

I did not look back once.

Two days later, the lawyer called us to the house.

Our house. My house. The big white house on the hill where I grew up, where my mother died, where my father drank his whiskey alone in the study every night and never came up to say goodnight.

I got there early. I went straight to the study and sat in my father's chair behind his desk. It was too big for me. The leather still smelled like his cologne. I sat in it anyway, on purpose.

Mr. Adeyemi, the family lawyer, came in with his folders and gave me a look over his glasses.

"Miss Ashford."

"Mr. Adeyemi."

"You're in your father's chair."

"I know where I'm sitting."

He cleared his throat and said nothing more.

Silas came in next. My cousin, my father's brother's son. He was tall and smooth, always smiling, always in a suit that cost more than most people's cars. He kissed my cheek.

"Odalys. How are you holding up?"

"I'm fine."

"Of course you are." He sat on the sofa and crossed his legs. "You're always fine."

I didn't like the way he said it. I never liked the way Silas said anything.

"Why is she coming?" I asked Mr. Adeyemi. "She's not in the will."

"Your father asked that both daughters be present."

Both daughters. The words sat in my chest like a stone.

Reign came in ten minutes late. She was wearing a waitress uniform, black trousers and a white shirt with a name tag still pinned on it. She must have come straight from work. There was a small stain on her sleeve.

She looked at me in my father's chair. She didn't say anything about it.

"Sit down, Miss Reign," Mr. Adeyemi said.

"I'll stand."

"It may take a while."

"I'll stand."

Fine. Let her stand.

Mr. Adeyemi opened his folder and started reading. The first parts were small things. Money for the house staff. His watches to Silas. A painting to a church. I barely listened. I was watching Reign's face from the corner of my eye.

Then he got to the main part.

"To my daughter Odalys Ashford and my son Lucian Ashford, I leave the whole of my estate. All properties, all accounts, and all shares in Ashford Shipping, to be split equally between them."

I let out a breath I didn't know I was holding.

It was ours. All of it. Mine and Lucian's.

And then I felt it, something warm and ugly rising up in my chest. Joy. Real joy. Because I knew what came next. Or rather, what didn't come.

I turned my head and looked right at Reign. I wanted to see it. I wanted to see her face fall. I wanted to see her finally understand that she was nothing, that she had always been nothing, that all those years of secret visits and birthday cards meant nothing in the end.

Mr. Adeyemi went on. "To Reign Ashford, I leave no money and no property."