She glances at me, confused that I hadn’t told him yet, then returns to him. “I’m the half-sister of Samil Batorini.”
Sebastian, for how shocked I was, somehow isn’t. “I knew you looked familiar. Your hair is the same color as his. You also have a similar face shape.” He crosses his legs, his ankle on his opposite knee. “I knew Samil nearly all my life. How come I never heard about you?”
Marcella swallows and looks down, retaking her seat. “I was the bastard offspring of an affair his father had with one of the house servants. My mother died during childbirth, or Signoria had her killed. Either way, I don’t know, but I was a secret. I was never given their last name. There is no record of my birth. I existed in their house and didn’t know better until my father died and I became the charge of Signoria and Antonia. The Signoria wanted me dead, but Samil stepped in.”
Sebastian rubs his jaw. “He had you made into this. Into the woman in front of us who breaks into royal weddings in disguise and into palaces as servants under false pretenses with the plan of hurting others.”
“Yes, sir. He helped make me into this…” She laughs lightly, but a tear falls down her cheek as she does. “I thought he was saving me. That he loved me. He would spend time with me. Fencing, playing chess, teaching me how to code and hack. How to hold my breath under water for minutes. Yes, he was training me.”
“But you loved him as a brother.”
It’s not a question, but she nods all the same. “Very much so. And with that, I hated you.”
He leans back and places his elbow on the table. “I’m not surprised by that. I stole Nora from him.”
“They loved each other.”
Sebastian chuckles bitterly. “Not quite.”
Marcella tilts her head. “I met your former queen, Your Majesty. I can tell you, she loved him.”
Sebastian looks like he’s been struck. “You met Nora?”
“Yes, sir. Several times. She came to our family’s home frequently, both before you were married and after.”
Sebastian peeks at me, and I shake my head. This is news to me. He turns back to her. “Are you suggesting they had an affair?”
She holds her hands in her lap, her spine straight, her gaze steady and unwavering. “Yes, Your Majesty, they had an affair. Your entire marriage, she was having an affair with my brother. She was pregnant with his child the day she died.”
Sebastian shoots out of his chair and flattens himself against the wall. “You know this as fact?”
“How else would Samil have known where Nora was that day? Gained access to her family estate so easily?”
Sebastian’s jaw drops, his mind working overtime.
“Holy shit,” I murmur, my hands on my head. “She was pregnant with his child?” They had been having an affair the entire time. I look at Sebastian. The girls. Sebastian and Nora rarely slept together. Zayer is the spitting image of Sebastian, but the girls look like Nora and Nora alone. Blonde hair and green eyes. Nothing like Sebastian. I can see he’s having the same thought, and my heart breaks for him for that.
“Now you know why I hated you,” she continues. “My brother, the only person in the world who loved me, was broken. You stole Nora from him, and he filled my head with what a jealous, spiteful man you were. If you hadn’t done that, if Samil had married Nora, I used to imagine he would have taken me with them, and I wouldn’t have…” She pauses, then redirects. “I understood his hatred of you. Anytime we spoke, it was all he talked about. How he loved Nora, how she wouldn’t leave you. He was obsessed. The morning she died, they fought about that. He begged her to choose him, and she wouldn’t. Not even with the baby. He was going to kill you to get her, but I didn’t know until Bellamy told me that he was going to kill your children with you. He never told me that. He told me Nora was going to have you come alone so the two of you could talk.”
I release a breath and shift, edgy and antsy and not knowing what to do with myself. Sebastian is frozen. I’ve never seen him so still.
“My daughters?” he asks finally.
She shakes her head, clearly reading his question. “I don’t know, sir. He never said anything about them.”
“I killed Samil.”
“Yes, Your Majesty, you did. I never saw the video of it, though. I was simply told that Samil was trying to get back at you the only way he knew how by taking Bellamy. Then the two of you fought, and you threw him out the window and were hurt during the skirmish.”
He folds his arms across his chest. “I see. What’s your purpose here?”
She holds his gaze. “To take you out. Signoria wants me to destroy you by planting files on your computer that likely implicate you in illegal doings, and then I’m to kill you. That edict came down to me this morning when I met her in Tourin.”
I can’t handle how calmly she’s talking about this. The words are hardly affecting her at all.
“Were you going to do it?” I ask, sick to my stomach with all of this.
“No. I was going to sneak into her car and wait there as she drove me home or wherever she was going. Then I was going to kill her and Antonia, take Jaqueline, and leave the country for good.”
