Fighting every protective instinct he had.
He’d heard her. Truly listened to her when she’d said she needed to fight for herself.
Feral need sank deep in her belly. To reach out. To touch him. To show him all the ways his trust eclipsed her anger, her resentment.
Two emotions that had faded with every passing hour.
He’d called her stubborn. Unchanging.
She’d accused him of the same.
They’d both been right.
But they were both wrong.
And she’d show him just how much.
“Sir Alexander was just leaving,” she said, her gaze pointed at her cousin. “He will not be returning.”
A muscle jumped in Alexander’s cheek, but his smile was genteel. “A lack of manners does not suit you, Annabeth. I thought my father and I taught you better.”
Jackson stiffened.
But Anna wasn’t without power, without support. Not when her husband held his tongue yet again, allowing her to lead this fight. To do what needed doing for her to regain a piece of herself too long left forgotten.
No more secrets.
No more hiding from the shadows.
“What you taught me,cousin, was that those possessing a title do not always, in fact, deserve the honorifics.” She stepped forward, and a sense of justice washed through her as her cousin jolted back. “You are as weak and repulsive a creature as youever were. A man without morals or decency or basic familial loyalty. And I pity you.” Saying the words out loud, Anna knew them as truth.Hertruth.
A truth that she would never let be silenced again.
Her slippered feet marched across the wooden boards underfoot.
One step. Two. Another.
And another. Six years of fear and trauma dispelled, one for each step forward until she stood directly in front of her cousin.
She looked up into his frozen face, nothing but challenge in her eyes, for him to look away, to forget all he’d taken from her. “You were the monster of my waking hours. Always lurking, always watching. Looking where you had no business. Touching when you had no right.” She bit the inside of her cheek, the pain keeping the tears burning behind her eyes from falling. A shake of her head. “I know the egregious way my uncle treated you, the ways he too acted in ways a father should never toward their children.”
Alexander paled. “You knew?”
Anna nodded. Her uncle had been an unwell man: the hitting, the beratement, the harassment, taking sick pleasure in causing those weaker than him pain. None more so than toward his son.
“I was there. I suffered alongside you,by you. I felt. I heard. I saw.” She wouldn’t look away now. “And I understand you.”
The words were like glass in her throat, but Anna kept going.
“You’ve had every opportunity to see the truth of the world for yourself. To witness right from wrong with your own two eyes, away from the cruelties of your father, and you’ve chosen to remain as you’ve always been.”
She raised her chin once again, this time for the last time. “For your insult here, I willneverforgive you. We may share blood, but that is all we will ever share.”
Words had power. So did airing one’s grievances. Something like peace settled around her shoulders, and a smile curled her lips, because she was free.
At last.
A small laugh escaped her, and she figuratively turned her back on her cousin for once and for all. “You are dismissed, Sir Alexander.”
