Chapter 4

Chapter 4

REIGNS

That was when I heard the heels.

Click. Click. Click.

It was a sharp, clean sound, nothing like the soft shoes of the nurses. The whole ward seemed to hear it. People turned their heads. Even the crying baby went quiet.

Odalys walked down the middle of the ward like it was a runway.

She was wearing a cream dress and gold earrings, with big black sunglasses on her face. A bodyguard walked two steps behind her. She didn't look at any of the sick people in the beds. She looked straight ahead until she reached us.

Then she stopped at the foot of my mother's bed and slowly took off her sunglasses.

"So this is where she ended up," she said.

I stood up. "Get out."

"I just got here."

"Get out, Odalys. Now."

"I came to see it with my own eyes." She looked around the ward, at the dirty walls and the old fan and Mr. Bassey coughing into his hand. "I wanted to know what it looked like. I've been wondering for fifteen years."

"You cut her treatment. She could die."

"My mother did die." Her voice didn't rise. It stayed cold and quiet. "Nobody cut anything for her. She just lay in her room and stopped eating, and nobody came. Your mother made sure of that."

"That's not my mother's fault!"

"Isn't it?"

My mother pushed the blanket off her legs.

"Mama, don't—"

She didn't listen. She swung her feet to the floor and stood up, holding the bed rail. She was so weak her knees shook. The drip line in her arm pulled tight. She took one step, then another, and she reached out and caught Odalys's hand with both of hers.

"Please," my mother said. "Please, my dear. I know what I did. I know I hurt your mother. I will carry that until I die. Punish me. Please. But not Reign. She was a child. She did nothing. She never asked for any of this."

Odalys looked down at my mother's hands on hers.

For one second, I thought I saw something in her face. Something small. Something that might have been human.

Then she pulled her hand away.

She pulled so hard that my mother lost her balance. She fell back and her hip hit the metal bed rail with a loud bang. The drip line tore right out of her arm. Blood ran down her wrist and dripped onto the floor.

"Mama!"

I caught her before she hit the ground. She was gasping. Her whole body was shaking.

"Nurse!" I screamed. "Nurse! Somebody help!"

People were shouting. Mr. Bassey was trying to get up. A nurse was running down the ward.

And Odalys just stood there.

She didn't move. She didn't reach out. She didn't even look surprised. She took a white handkerchief from her bag and wiped her hand, the hand my mother had touched. Slowly, like she was wiping off dirt.

"You took my father," she said to my mother. "You took my mother's life. This is what you deserve."

The nurse pushed past her and pressed gauze against my mother's arm. I held my mother's head against my chest. She was crying now, quiet broken sounds, and saying sorry, sorry, sorry, over and over.

I looked up at my sister.

"I will never forgive you for this," I said. "Never. Not as long as I live."

"I don't need your forgiveness." She put her sunglasses back on. "I need your signature. Sixty days, Reign. You'll marry Rhett Vance, and you'll smile at the wedding."

"I'd rather die."

"Then she will." She nodded at my mother. "Your choice."

She turned to leave. Then she stopped and looked back over her shoulder.

"Oh. And don't think the Vances want you either," she said. "I met Rhett yesterday. I showed him your picture. He laughed. He said he doesn't touch bastards." She smiled, just a little. "Even the man you're meant to marry thinks your blood is dirty."

Click. Click. Click.

She walked out the way she came in. Nobody stopped her.

---

That night, the nurses moved my mother's bed to the corner, away from the window. They said it was because of the fall. I think it was because she was a problem now.

She fell asleep around eleven with her bandaged arm on her chest. I sat on the cold floor beside her bed because there was no chair.

I didn't want to believe what Odalys said about Rhett. She lied about everything. She was cruel for fun.

But I looked it up anyway.

It took me four minutes. A gossip blog had posted it that same afternoon. A photo of Rhett Vance outside a club, sunglasses on at night, a girl on his arm. And under it, a quote from "a close friend."

Rhett thinks the whole thing is a joke. He said there's no way he's marrying the mistress's kid. He said he doesn't do bastards.

I read it until the words blurred.

So it was true. All of it.

I looked at my mother sleeping in the corner of that crowded, hot, dirty ward. I looked at the blood still dried on the edge of her sheet. I thought about Odalys wiping her hand with that white handkerchief.

And something in me went very, very still.

Odalys needed this deal. She needed it more than she had ever needed anything. Without my name on that marriage paper, she lost her house, her company, her whole life.

She thought that made me her tool.

But a tool can cut the hand that holds it.

I wiped my cracked screen with my thumb. I opened a new search.

Cassian Vance.

If Odalys wanted a war, I would take the one thing she was promised.