All Chapters of Reborn To Ruin The Sovereign Who Hates Me : Chapter 1 - Chapter 7

"You've humiliated this family for the last time."I open my eyes to a chandelier I don't recognize, hanging from a ceiling I've never seen in my life, and a man standing over the bed like he's already decided I'm not worth the trouble of hating properly.I know that feeling from the inside. I died in it."Say something," he says. "You're good at that, at least."My mouth doesn't work right. Neither does the rest of me too light, too smooth, hands too soft when I lift them off the sheets and stare at them like they belong to someone else. Because they do. There's a ring on my finger I never put there. A bruise high on my cheekbone that throbs the second I touch it. None of this is mine, and somehow I'm more sure of that than I've ever been sure of anything.An hour ago or what felt like an hour, time doesn't really work the way you think it does when you're dying I was on a kitchen floor bleeding out from a knife wound my husband told the paramedics was self-inflicted. My sister sto

Iris asks the question and looks like she regrets it before it's even out of her mouth.I don't answer right away. Truth is I don't have one. I woke up in this body six hours ago. Whatever Rowan Vance did with his life before that, whoever he slept with, none of it belongs to me, except now apparently it does."I don't know," I say finally."You don't know." She says it back flat, like she's weighing the words in her hand."I know how that sounds.""It sounds like the kind of thing that gets people killed in this house." She says it gently, which somehow makes it land harder. She wipes the gel off my stomach with a cloth, helps straighten the nightshirt, doesn't quite look at me while she does it. "Lord Thorn has enemies who would love proof this marriage was never real. A child conceived before the wedding hands them exactly that.""So don't tell him the dates are off.""He already saw the chart. Whatever else he is, he's not stupid." She sits on the edge of the bed. Up close I can s

"Tell him I'm not seeing anyone."It's out before I've thought it through. Garrison's still catching his breath in the doorway, tie crooked, and he looks past me to Caius instead of answering, like he needs someone else to sign off on it first."He wouldn't give it to anyone but you, my lord. Says his name is Dominic Ashworth." Garrison pauses, glances at me. "Claims he's known Rowan for years."Caius goes still. I watch something behind his eyes shut like a door in bad weather."Ashworth.""You know him." Not a question."His family runs half the shipping trade east of here." Caius stops. Starts again, slower. "His mother's on the council. Two seats down from mine." He looks at the photograph again, still face up on the blanket, and his jaw works like he's biting down on something he'd rather say out loud. "Send him away.""My lord, he was quite insistent.""I don't care how insistent.""He said." Garrison hesitates. "He said if Rowan won't come down, he'll come up. He's already past

"The result says he isn't yours."Damaris Reyne says it like she's reading a weather report. She doesn't stand, doesn't raise her voice, just lets the sentence drop onto the table between us and waits for it to do its work.Caius doesn't answer. His fingers are flat on the folder, and I watch the knuckles go pale one by one, like something is draining out of his hand and into the wood."Authorization was signed by the council's medical office," Reyne goes on. "Standard procedure when a consort's pregnancy raises questions of succession. Consent is presumed in matters of the heir.""Presumed by whom." Caius's voice is low enough that the man at the far end of the table leans in to catch it."By the law you swore to uphold, my lord."Nobody at that table looks at me. That's the part I feel most, the way six people can decide, all at once and without a word, that I'm furniture in a room where something is being decided about me. The fire pops. Somebody's chair creaks. I press my palm to