We enter a wide foyer, two stories high. Before me, a sweetheart staircase rises, two identical flights of polished wood stairs curve up from either side and meet at a single landing above. The symmetry is striking, deliberate. The center of each step is worn smooth from generations of footsteps. The balustrades are wrought iron, twisted into delicate rose patterns that catch the light, their detail so fine they look like lacework frozen in metal.
It's the kind of staircase built for slow, graceful descents. For brides. For debutantes.
Cicley points to a room off to the side, and Stevenson tells me to stay put. I wait with my hands awkwardly clasped in front of me. Cicley doesn’t leave. She hovers a few feet away, watching me like she’s not sure if I’m allowed to be left alone.
“I’m Laurel,” I offer, pointing to my chest.
“Hi.” She bobs her head and adds a polite, “Nice to meet you.” Her mouth opens like she might say something more, but she’s interrupted by a piercing, inhuman shriek that rises fromthe room where Stevenson disappeared.
“No!” a woman screams, her voice filled with fury. Crashing sounds follow, the crunch of wood splintering, glass shattering, something heavy thudding to the floor.
The door bursts open and slams into the wall with a bone-rattling crack. Plaster fractures, a jagged spiderweb racing outward.
A woman storms out.
I recognize her instantly. It’s Samantha, the one who cut me in line the other day.
She’s a vision. Long strawberry blonde hair tumbles in spirals and waves down her back. Her aqua-blue eyes flash, her makeup is flawless, lips perfectly glossed. Her body is all curves and elegance, sculpted like a dress out of Paris Fashion Week.
She doesn’t look like she belongs in a sorority house. She looks like she belongs on a yacht. Or a billboard. Or in the arms of a billionaire who buys her islands just to hear her laugh.
Yet she’s here. Raging. Unhinged. Lovely and terrifying all at once.
I have about five seconds to take it all in before her fist makes contact with my nose. I’ve seen girls fight before. There were a couple of skirmishes back in my high school. Those were all about hair pulling, face clawing, open-palmed slaps.
This is not that.
Samantha balls up her fist, pulls back her elbow, and clocks me. Her fist crashes into my nose, and I drop like a sack of bricks. Blood gushes instantly, hot and thick, splattering across the pristine white marble floor. I hit the ground hard, my spine jarring. I lay on my back, blinking up at the ornate chandelier overhead. Its crystals spin in a slow, glimmering blur.
She’s on me immediately.
Straddling my chest, Samantha’s thighs clamp tight around my ribs as she pins me down. She leans down until her face fills my vision, eyes wild and furious, burning with rage, with wrath.
“Get off me—” I choke, but she only leans closer.
Her blouse slips open with the motion, gaping slightly, and that’s when I see it, just over her left breast. Smaller than Carrson’s, but unmistakable, that same stylized square cross.
She’s been branded too.
“You can’t have him.” Her voice is a low, venomous hiss. “Carrson Ashford ismine.”
Ashford? Carrson’s last name is Ashford?
I have two seconds to register what she just said before her beautiful face twists with rage and her hands are around my throat.
My fingers claw at her wrists, useless. No surprise there. I wasn’t raised to fight. My parents were soft-spoken, tender in their own ways. Even my dad, when he was drunk, never lifted a hand to anyone. I have no frame of reference for this. For the sheer violence of it.
She squeezes harder, strangling me, cutting off my air supply. The blood from my nose mixes with the salt of my tears, slick and warm across my cheeks. My vision tunnels, dark spots swimming in the periphery.
That’s when I know.
This is how I’m going to die.
Samantha
Chapter thirteen
Carrson
