Rebel Reborn

Chapter Five: Nothing To Be Ashamed Of

CHAPTER FIVE

Rebel

“Tami,” I called, already reaching for the hooks at the side of the bustier. “I need your help.”

She appeared at my elbow immediately, her fingers finding the first hook before I’d finished speaking. There were at least thirty of them, tiny and precise, running the full length of the boning from hip to bust. Whoever had designed this particular instrument of torture had clearly never had to wear it for longer than ten minutes.

“How did Lily ever breathe in this thing?” I muttered.

Tamara said nothing, but I caught the ghost of a smile at the corner of her mouth as she worked her way methodically down the hooks. Her fingers were warm and deft against my back, efficient in a way that spoke of long practice — she had done things like this before, many times, for the girl whose body I was wearing.

But her hands were not entirely steady.

I noticed. I noticed everything.

The laces at the front came next, and I reached up to work those myself, loosening the tension incrementally until I could finally draw a full breath for the first time since I’d woken up in this body. The relief was almost indecent.

“Gods,” I exhaled. “That’s better.”

Tamara drew the bustier away from my body in one careful motion and stepped back.

I straightened and rolled my shoulders, feeling the muscles decompress with profound gratitude, and then I walked to the bathroom and stood in front of the mirror and looked.

Lily was beautiful.

I had registered this abstractly since I’d first opened my eyes in her skin, but I hadn’t truly looked — not with the lights this bright and nothing between me and the reflection.

Her body was extraordinary. Slender but not fragile in the way her family treated her — there was architecture here, good bones, proportion that no surgeon could have engineered better if they’d tried. Her waist was narrow, her hips curved, her legs long. Her breasts were high and natural, pale and perfectly shaped, her n*****s a soft pink that had tightened slightly in the cooler air of the bathroom.

I ran my hands over them slowly. So different from the body I had lived in before. For a brief moment I had a memory of myself. Taller, heavier, built for power rather than beauty.

I was aware of Tamara in the mirror behind me.

She was trying not to look. She was failing.

I watched her watch me — the careful way her eyes kept drifting and then pulling back, the flush creeping up from her collar, the way she was holding herself very still. She was trying very hard to appear casual and succeeding at nothing.

Ten years of this. Ten years of dressing and undressing this body, of wanting quietly in the dark and never, never saying a word. Never allowing herself even the dignity of being seen wanting.

Lily, I thought again, with a familiar mixture of exasperation and something almost like grief. You really were blind.

“Do you want to touch them?” I asked.

The sound Tamara made was not quite a word. It was somewhere between a sharp intake of breath and something that might have been a squeak. Her face went from pink to crimson in the space of a single second. Her hands twisted together in front of her. Her eyes, caught in the act, went wide with a complicated tangle of want and terror.

She wanted to. It was written all over her in letters large enough to read from across the room.

She was also absolutely certain that wanting this was something she was not permitted to do. That it was dangerous. That it would be taken from her and used against her the moment she admitted to it out loud.

I turned from the mirror and closed the distance between us.

Her breath stuttered.

I took her hand — her strong, capable, trembling hand — and placed her palm against my breast, covering the back of her hand with mine and holding it there gently. Her fingers were cool against my skin. I felt them curve, instinctively, before she caught herself.

I released her hand.

She didn’t move. She stood with her palm curved around my breast as though she had forgotten entirely how to make her body do anything else, her eyes fixed somewhere below my chin, her chest rising and falling too quickly. A statue of a young woman in the middle of wanting something she had never once allowed herself to reach for.

I waited patiently.

The war moved across her face in slow motion — want and shame and loyalty and terror all fighting for purchase, and then the fear winning, as it always did. She had been trained to be afraid of her own desires.

She let her hand fall and bowed her head. I could hear her heart hammering against her ribs from where I stood.

“Hey,” I said softly. I touched her chin and tipped it up until she was looking at me. Her eyes were glassy. “There is nothing to be ashamed of.”

Her throat moved as she swallowed.

I held her gaze for a moment, letting that land, and then I turned and pushed her gently toward the bathroom door. “Give me some privacy. I need to shower.”

She went, with the slightly dazed quality of someone who had just survived something they hadn’t expected to survive.

I waited until the door clicked shut and then turned on the shower and stepped under the hot water and stood there for a long time, letting the heat work into Lily’s sore muscles and bruised neck.

I thought about Tamara’s face when I’d placed her hand against my skin. The wanting in it. The shame underneath the desire. Ten years of silent devotion to a girl who had never once really seen her.

There was a particular kind of cruelty in being loved by someone you refused to see.

Lily had been full of that particular cruelty. Not malicious, not calculated — just profoundly, catastrophically self-absorbed. The kind of person who moved through other people’s feelings the way you moved through furniture, never noticing the damage because you were never looking down.

I felt the wolf stir in the corner of my consciousness. Still wary. Still withdrawn. But listening.

We have something in common, I told her silently. We both got left behind by that girl.

The wolf’s yellow eyes regarded me for a long moment.

Then, very slowly, she put her head back down on her paws. Not trusting. Not yielding.

Watching. Listening.

I shut off the water and stepped out and wrapped myself in a towel that smelled of expensive fabric softener and someone else’s life. I opened the bathroom door. The maid was waiting, head down, hands clasped in front of her waist in a subservient posture.

“The dress,” I said, giving the white satin a kick. “What should we do with it?”

Tamara blinked. “Should I send it to the dry cleaner, Miss?”

“Gods, no.” I thought about it for a moment. “Take it to Adrian’s manor. Burn it on his front lawn.”

Tamara’s mouth formed a perfect silent O. “I… I wouldn’t dare!”

“Fine,” I said. “Stuff it in a trash bag. I’ll do it myself later.”

The ghost of a smile crossed her face — wider this time, less suppressed. Tamara, when she stopped being afraid, had a very good smile.

I dismissed the dress and went to stand in front of the wardrobe mirror, naked now except for the white lace panties Tamara had dutifully produced. Virginal color. Sinful cut. Lily Bradford had contained multitudes.

I heard a soft sound behind me.

I turned. Tamara was looking at me again with that complicated, helpless expression — the adoration and the wanting and underneath both of those things the slow dawning of something else. Something she was pressing down because she didn’t know what to do with it yet.

Some note that didn’t quite fit. Some wrongness she couldn’t name.

Not yet.

She probably knew the original Lily better than anyone in this world. Naturally, she would be the first to notice that although I looked the part, I wasn’t playing the role.

“Come,” I said, ignoring her confusion. “Help me with my hair.”

She worked the brush through my hair with long careful strokes while I sat on the edge of the bed and let my mind run over everything I had absorbed today. The family. The dynamics. The pieces I was still missing.

When my hair was smooth she began to braid it, her fingers moving with the same quiet efficiency as always, but there was something different in her face now. A softness. A careful tentative hope, like a plant that had been kept in the dark for so long it wasn’t entirely sure what to do with the light.

“Tami,” I said quietly, watching her in the mirror.

“Yes, Miss?”

“I’m not the same person who went up to those rafters.” I said it carefully, not quite a confession, just a truth she already half knew, spoken softly enough that she could choose not to hear it if she needed to. “I won’t pretend to be her. I won’t treat you the way she treated you.” I paused. “And I won’t ask you to pretend either.”

The room was very quiet.

Tamara’s hands resumed their movement in my hair. Slower now. More deliberate.

“I know,” she whispered.

“I know you know.”

She tied off the braid and smoothed it over my shoulder and then stood behind me with her hands at her sides, looking at my reflection with those expressive blue eyes that had been carefully schooled for ten years to show nothing.

They were now showing everything.