Chapter 12: Thorns in Velvet
809 Words
The bedroom door slammed shut behind Leya with a cold, unforgiving clang.
She leaned back against the hallway her chest thudding in her ears. Her father was in jail. Her life had been bought. Samuel's lies went deeper than she'd known—and Harrison knew them. Not all of them, perhaps, but enough to send him to prison.
And now there was another.
Someone Samuel had feared.
A woman who might very well still be within, even.
She hadn't let her fury get the upper hand on her, though. Not yet. She insisted on answers—and her mother was going to provide them to her.
But as she spun, turning to ascend the stairs, the stile slid back down the marble behind her. Leya didn't need to turn. She already knew.
Eleanor.
Particularly, for that so-smooth voice that was finer than had ever uttered. "Entertaining," the voice declared, "when something is amiss in this house, I catch you hanging around."
Leya turned on purpose. Eleanor stood like a statue sculpted out of poison and ice. Everything about her was deliberate—hair tied back into a hard knot, lips red with blood-colored paint, silk dress cinched around her like armor.
Her eyes were the blade.
“I’m not in the mood,” Leya said flatly.
Eleanor stepped closer, her gaze raking over Leya like filth. “No, of course not. You’ve had such a busy evening. Playing house in my brother’s bed. Rummaging through my father’s study. Quite the multitasker for a charity case.”
Leya’s teeth clenched, “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Oh, I know what I'm talking about," Eleanor growled venom seeping from her voice. "You're a parasite, Leya. Samuel paid you to be his friend, and now you're traipsing around this house like you own it. It's not. Never was. You're a distraction—and an expensive one, at that."
Leya stepped forward, jaw jutting out. "You're scared of me."
Eleanor's smile did not succeed. At least, not for a moment. Long enough that it did not.
"Think I don't see?" Leya breathed, low, deadly. "You've clung to your position all these years as if it were the sole thing in existence that ever counts. And the moment you saw me, you knew something—you're not quite so perfect."
Eleanor's mask cracked, a strand, and she shivered. "You're destroying his life. You weren't meant to be. You don't belong in our family."
No, Leya spat, her face ablaze with fury. "I was brought here. And now I have to know why."
Eleanor's smile again, not pretty and cold. "Because your mother sold you like a lamb to the s*******r. And you were dumb enough to come in white and say it was love."
Leya didn't blink. "And you? Playing little sister while your brother dies in a world you don't know?"
Eleanor's eyes flared thin, a hot fire of hatred burning beneath her ice face.
"Don't think you can get away from me with slurring the family name. My brother's name. My name."
"Then why did Leya marry him?" Leya spat.
A slap cracked before the words quite left her mouth.
Leya's head snapped to the side, cheek aflame.
But she didn't weep. Didn't retreat.
She took a step closer, eyes burning, voice cutting like shards of glass.
"Take one."
Eleanor was left panting.
"Four words. And one of them was a cussword. One slap. One threat. Then," Leya spat, "you'd do better to come in on something a bit more substantial than heels and lipstick. Because if you ever so much as laid hands on me again—Blackwood or no—I'll enter you in some early grave here in this house, and nobody even notices you're dead."
They stood and glared, the air tight with tension between them, like a taut wire.
And then Leya turned on her and walked out.
Eleanor didn't.
But her eyes did. They flamed.
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Later That Night – In Eleanor's Room
Eleanor bent over her dresser, her shaking hands to unpin her hair.
She was always the golden child.
The darling one.
The cute one.
The real Blackwood.
And now that child—that loathsome charity case of lies and secrets and passion racing through her bloodstream—was stripping all of this from her.
She opened the hidden drawer at the back of her dresser and drew out the object she'd not been able to make herself look at since Samuel's death:
A flash drive.
Black face.
No sticker.
A note, written in Samuel's handwriting:
"Use only if the girl is a problem."
Eleanor's teeth shook on it.
"Ah, Leya?" she breathed into the darkness. "You are now a very big problem."
If Samuel committed suicide so that the future was complete…
What future was he leaving to be killed?
- Writer
