Page 134 of His Eternal Claim

Thunder cracks overhead, and her eyes resemble lightning.

“She was mine before she was ever yours!”

Her finger tightens on the trigger. “She needed me—she loved me—she would have stayed if you had never touched her! I did everything so that I could take her away from you!” Hannah laughs, a broken, ugly sound swallowed by thunder.

Rain pours down her face.

“You planned your daughter’s death, staged it so carefully I believed the woman I buried was my wife and not someone else.”

“Yes,” she spits. “Yes, I did it.”

Four years.

Four fucking years of waking up choking on the smell of burning rubber and ash. Four years of staring at a marble headstone, breaking my knuckles against it until the stone was stained red, begging a dead girl to forgive me for letting her burn. I turned myself into a ghost, tore my own empire apart looking for the shadow of whoever put her in that car, drinking myself into blackouts just to see her face in the dark for a fraction of a second.

The only thing that kept me alive was revenge.

I wanted to avenge her for something that didn’t even exist.

And the monster who built my hell is standing right in front of me, holding a gun to my skull.

“Say it,” I rasp as I take a half-step forward, forcing the cold iron of the barrel to bruise the skin of my forehead. “Say how you did it, Hannah. Look at me and tell me how you put another woman’s corpse in her place. Tell me how you fooled the world into believing you were dead.”

Hannah’s face twists. She’s unraveling. It’s in the way her chest heaves, the way the revolver trembles against my brow.

It took me a whole year to piece her plan together, and I still don’t understand why a Mother would do that to her child.

“It was easy,” her voice cracks over the wind. “You think you’re the only one with power in this city? What do they say? Enemy of your enemy is your friend. And Vane Davenport was mine. We planned it. A few signatures. A switch of the dental records under the Novak payroll. It took five minutes to put a dead pregnant woman resembling my daughter in that car, and fewer connections to have Selene transferred.”

“And Adrian was your perfect fucking shadow.”

“He did what he was told!” she screams back, blinking away the water in her eyes. “He loved her. He was willing to be whoever she needed him to be to keep her safe from you. When she woke up fractured, when her mind was nothing but broken glass and fear, Adrian was there. He held her hand. He fed her the stories. He told her, her Mother was dead—we had to make it real, we had to make her believe there was nothing left of her old life to look back for! He played the doting fiancé, hiding her away in the territory where your spies wouldn’t dare look.”

A laugh rattles in my throat. “But you couldn’t erase me, could you? You did everything, Hannah. But you couldn’t wipe me from her life. You wanna know how I found her?”

Hannah’s eyes widen as I step closer. “I recognized one of the paintings she made. I recognized the eyes she paints. Adrian Davenport might have erased her memories, but he couldn’t stop her, could he?”

She shoves the gun harder against my head, her heels sliding in the mud. She wants me to beg.

“Your plan backfired.” I almost laugh. “Why go to such lengths? All because I caught you having an affair with my Father?”

Her eyes blaze. “I loved your Father and he still chose your Mother.” Her voice cracks. “I hated her for it. I hated you for looking like him. And I hated Selene most of all because she was mine until she looked at you and chose you instead.”

My cold eyes meet hers. “You drugged your daughter because she loved the son of the man you fucked while he had a wife and you had a husband? Is this how you rationalize it? By playing a fucking victim?”

“So, what if I drugged her? I made her forget. I faked my death. I buried her where no one would ever find her and fed her lie after lie until she believed every one of them.”

Her chin lifts. “I gave her to Adrian because he was controllable.”

A bitter laugh tears out of her. “And when she remembered you, when she cried for you every night, I let her. Because I loved knowing that every pain you caused me, I was inflicting on the woman you loved.”

My hands shake, and the beep, beep, beep of the tracker pounds in my ears.

“She was pregnant when you caused that accident.” I don’t even register moving until Hannah’s back slams into the wall. The gun jerks between us as my hand closes around her wrist.

It takes every ounce of restraint in my body not to snap the bone. Every last fucking thread.

Because all I can see, all I can fucking hear is her. Curled on cold marble.