Rebel Reborn

Chapter Seven: The Glass Doll

Tristan

I had brought my sister back to life, but my hands still didn’t believe it.

They kept opening and closing on nothing. I’d be reading and look down and find them curled in my lap, waiting for the next instruction, like they expected the work to start up again — the chest compressions, the count, the breath forced past lips that didn’t want it.

Muscle remembers what the mind would rather forget. Mine remembered the stillness of her chest, the coldness of her lips. They remembered the exact moment the stillness broke.

I set the book aside. I’d read the same paragraph four times and still had no idea what it said.

The lamp threw a small circle of light across the desk and left the rest of the room in shadow. I liked it that way. My room at the end of the farthest corridor, far from the rest of my so-called family, had always been the one place I could just be myself — until Eva came back. Mother decided the guest rooms weren’t good enough for a daughter so freshly traumatized, and with no warning the servants moved all of Lily’s things into the spare room down my hall.

I shook my head and made myself think about the rope. The macabre scene was almost enough to scrub away all the other thoughts.

I’d been walking past her room on my way to the back stairs. The door stood open a hand’s width, which was strange, because Lily kept her door shut against the whole house in general and me in particular. I looked in without meaning to, the way you glance at anything that’s out of its usual place. And there she was, in her wedding dress, not standing the way a person stands.

I don’t remember crossing the room. I remember the chair I kicked aside to reach her, and the weight of her when I got her down, more weight than a body that small had any right to carry. I remember laying her on the floor and putting my mouth on hers and breathing into lungs that didn’t want it, knowing the whole time that the girl who lived in that body would rather have died than let me touch her.

She had no pulse. She was already gone before I cut her down. No pulse, yet I kept going past the point where it was reasonable, past the point where Tamara had started to wail in the doorway.

After maybe ten minutes, I stopped. I took my hands off her chest and sat back on my heels and let myself absorb the fact that she was really gone.

And then her body arched off the floor like something had reached in and switched it back on, and she pulled in a raspy breath that I’ll hear for the rest of my life, and her eyes opened.

They were Lily’s eyes. Slate green, the color of sky before bad weather, framed in the long dark lashes she’d been so vain about.

Everything looked the same. But there was something very different about her eyes. I had lifted her from the floor to the bed, and she stared up with an expression of profound confusion.

Always before, Lily had looked at me, on the rare occasions she looked at me at all, like I was a stain someone hadn’t gotten around to cleaning. After twenty years of that, I’d grown so used to her disdain that it hardly registered any more. I had learned to avoid her like I avoided the rest of the family. When I wanted to watch her, I did it secretly. Which wasn’t hard, since Lily regarded me as less than furniture.

The young woman who opened her eyes on that floor looked at me like she’d never seen me before. Her eyes had moved over my face and body like she found me worth a second look.

That was the first wrong thing.

There had been a great many since.

I picked the book back up and put it down again.

Dinner had been agonizing. Not because anything went wrong — by this family’s standards, dinner had gone beautifully. The Alpha made his announcements. The Luna performed her grief in elegant evening wear, the day’s hysteria folded and put away in a drawer. Eva sat where Eva sat now, at our mother’s right hand, soft and pale and precious, the rightful treasure returned.

I’d taken my usual seat, the one beside the empty chair, which tonight was the chair beside Lily.

And Lily had eaten.

Lily’s table manners had always shown perfect restraint, a small pale martyr to the figure she starved herself into, our mother’s eyes tracking every bite like a customs officer.

Tonight the woman in Lily’s body ate fried chicken with her hands, licked the crumbs off her fingertips and asked for more. When the Luna made her little cutting remark about appetite, Lily had simply smiled and agreed she was very hungry and tore into a second piece like she’d never heard the word calorie.

I have never wanted to laugh so badly at a Bradford dinner in my life. I had to stare at my water glass to keep it down.

Then Eva did what Eva does. Dropped Adrian’s name into the conversation like a stone into still water. She pretended it was all sisterly concern, but she was really just waiting for Lily to shatter.

Lily had tried to take her own life over Beta Adrian just hours before.

The resurrected Lily looked at Eva and said it was clearly his loss, dry as salt. It was so shockingly out of character that I choked on a piece of bread.

She patted me on the back. And then — I turned this over more times than I wanted to admit — the patting slowed. Became something else. A soothing circle between my shoulder blades, unhurried, deliberate, while she held Eva’s eyes across the table and didn’t so much as glance at me.

It was almost like she was staking a claim on me. I thought it was how you might touch something you’ve decided belongs to you.

No one had ever touched me like that. Not in this house. Not anywhere.

I spent the rest of the meal looking at my plate, too aware of the warmth of her beside me, the narrow space between us that had started to feel charged in a way I was fairly sure only I could feel.

I got up from my desk and went to the window.

The packhouse had gone quiet below me, the deep quiet after midnight when even the staff had found their corners. My wing — ours now, since they’d moved her into the corridor where the Bradfords keep what they’d rather forget — sat darker than the rest.

She had asked me to walk her back to her room.

I’d stood there like a fool while the whole table watched, certain it was a trap, certain that the moment I reached for her she’d open me up in front of the family the way she’d opened up Timothy on her eighteenth birthday. I knew how this worked. I knew my part. Reach, and get cut down for reaching.

She held out her hand. There was nothing in her face but patience.

I took it and pulled her up, and the second she was on her feet she let go and tucked her hand into the crook of my elbow instead. We walked the length of that long dark hall like that, her hand light and sure on my arm, like she’d done it a thousand times, like it meant nothing.

She even walked differently. The old Lily moved in small careful steps, the gait of a girl taught that taking up space was vulgar. This woman walked like she was going somewhere and the floor could keep up or not.

At her door she looked up at me. And she smiled. Not the weapon she pointed at Eva. Something quieter, calm, and genuine. It reached all the way to her eyes.

Good night, Tristan.

My heart forgot its job. It stumbled in my chest like a man missing a stair in the dark.

I turned and walked to my room without answering her. I passed Tamara in the hall, hurrying, late, wide-eyed, and I didn’t say a word to her either. I shut my door and stood in the dark until I trusted my own hands again.

Now I stood at the window looking at nothing, trying to make the pieces fit together.

Lily was beautiful, but she was my adopted sister, so I had to discipline myself and keep a careful distance. She’d made the distance easy by filling it with scorn. I transformed my forbidden desires into hatred for a girl who was mean and shallow and petty.

In the space of a few hours she had ripped that scorn away and left me stumbling in confusion. She’d even caught me looking tonight and hadn’t made a fuss of it.

For almost twenty years the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen had been a glass doll on a high shelf, untouchable by design. Look but don’t touch.

Today that doll had come down off the shelf.

I had absolutely no idea what to do about that.