Chapter 37 The Threat
AVERY
The silence that detonated after my words was absolute, like the whole room had been plunged underwater.
Then Mother’s fork slipped from her fingers and struck the plate with a brittle, ear-splitting crack. Her mouth fell open; every drop of blood drained from her face, leaving the thick layer of blush floating on her cheekbones like a cruel joke. I knew exactly what it hid. I’d heard her last night: those thin, animal sounds of pain while he took what he wanted, again. She probably parted her thighs just to keep him from getting angry, whispered please or said nothing at all while he tore into her anyway. If he got off on my tears, he must have come in his pants watching her bleed and beg.
Charles folded his napkin with deliberate calm, the way he always did right before he smiled for the cameras.
“…What did you just say?”
I turned and looked straight into those flat, corpse-grey eyes.
“I said,” I answered, voice low and steady, “I’m not going anywhere near their marriage. Not for your schemes. Not ever.”
He laughed, rich and ugly, and leaned back in the carved mahogany chair like a king who’d never once been told no.
The sheer gall of this vile creature.
Flying halfway across the world to retrieve the daughter he’d discarded at birth because her face wasn’t symmetrical enough for his perfect family portrait. All because I’d vanished the week before the wedding.
Then he sold her off into marriage with that cold, blindfolded man. According to Alyssa, Leitana didn’t even have the deformity on her face anymore. It was gone. How? Even the nuns had said she arrived at the orphanage perfectly fine, no deformity. And of course, the Satan spawn didn’t care why. My mother asked questions; he only cared about results. Get her, marry her off, and make sure Ravial Ashbourne didn’t destroy the company he had built using promises he didn’t intend to keep.
And now, because Leitana knelt in church and spoke to God more than she spoke to people, Charles knew she was useless for the dirty work.
She would never purr lies into Ravial’s ear while sliding a pen into his hand.
I, on the other hand, had been trained for exactly that since I was twelve.
The original plan was simple: marry the blindfolded trillionaire, smile like a good girl, spread my legs when required, and make sure every contract Charles wanted signed ended up with Ravial’s name scrawled across the bottom line. Ashbourne money would flow into Hales Enterprises until the river ran red.
That was the plan when he still believed I was the obedient little doll he’d spent nineteen years shaping: polished, silent, lethal when required.
He never imagined I’d run.
Now that he had found me, his plan was cruelly simple: he would tell Ravial that Leitana was not me, that she had only been pretending to be Avery because they asked her to, back when I refused to marry him. Then they would demand Ravial annul the marriage with Leitana and force me to take her place, to do it all.
All because Leitana was, in his words, “a barefoot, pidgin-speaking island barbarian who never saw the inside of a proper school.” His words echoed in my head: I put you through all that schooling and training so you could do my bidding, and that little mouse can’t do what I want.
How he thought Ravial would believe Leitana was me was insane. Yes, we were twins, but anyone with eyes could see the difference. There were rumors Ravial was blind, but I doubted it. Even if his vision wasn’t perfect, you didn’t need eyes to spot the difference between me and Leitana. Her accent alone, how she spoke like the people of Vanuatu was enough. I had researched the Y-shaped islands; I had seen her recent pictures. She was curvy where I was not, soft where I was sharp. The differences were obvious. I would have been offended if anyone actually thought she was me.
Yet, according to my mother, Ravial had said nothing since marrying Leitana. They probably assumed he had bought it. Maybe Charles was even more foolish than I thought. Unless…
There was always a Plan B. If Ravial refused to annul the marriage—which Charles didn’t think would happen, since Leitana supposedly had nothing to offer a blindfolded trillionaire, then they would send me to stay with them. Send me under the guise of the loving, long-lost twin who only wanted to be near the sister who “selflessly” took her place.
I’d move into their house, smile sweetly, and seduce him until he forgot Leitana even existed.
Then ship the little island mouse back to Vanuatu with a one-way ticket and a pat on the head.
That, of course, was all part of Charles’s meticulous, poisonous plan.
Charles leaned forward now, elbows on the table, fingers steepled like some benevolent king, when in reality he was nothing but a murderer and a rapist who’d put a bullet through the only heart that ever belonged to me.
“Let me make this simple, Avery,” he said, his voice silky and venomous. “You will go to that man. You will do exactly as I have commanded.”
I smiled. Slow. Sweet. Empty.
“No.”
The single word cracked through the room like a gunshot.
Charles’s face went very still. The kind of stillness that came right before he backhanded me across a room.
“You think you have a choice?” he asked, a soft, disbelieving laugh slipping out.
“I know I do,” I said. “Because you need me alive and pretty for this to work. You need me willing…”
He cut me off with a sharp wave of his hand. “I don’t need you willing. They do.”
Then he lifted his phone.
And the moment my eyes focused on the screen, bile rose hot and burning in my throat.
Charles smiled
, slow and triumphant because he knew he finally had me cornered.