REBORN: SHE RULES THE WORLD

Eighteen Again The slap came first. It cracked across her cheek hard enough to turn her head, and the pain arrived half a second behind the sound, hot and bright. Evelyn tasted blood. She was on her knees on a cold marble floor, palms flat against the tiles, and above her a crystal chandelier swayed in the morning light. And she knew it. Not the way you know a stranger’s face. The way you know a scar. The sting on her left cheek. The ringing in her left ear. The exact copper taste on her tongue, and the chandelier swaying just so in the pale light. She had felt this slap before. She had lain on this floor before. And in a moment, she knew, a man’s voice would say “Did you hear me, girl?” aHer whole body went rigid. She had spent thirteen years learning to flinch at that voice, and it had spoken the very words she had known it would speak. Her mind lurched. A moment ago there had been white light. Cold steel under her back, a machine beeping slower and slower, and a voice saying, That’s the last of it. She had died. She was certain. She had felt it happen. and Which one is the dream? She dug her fingernails into the tile. Cold. Real. She lifted a shaking hand to her mouth, her fingertips came away red. Real. She looked up. Robert Hart stood over her with his hand still raised. His hair was dark at the temples, not yet touched by gray, and his face was smooth and handsome and bored. Younger, she realized. He was five years younger. So was the bright silver on the long table, and the pale roses in the vase, and the gold watch on Diane’s wrist. Everything was exactly as it had been on one particular morning she had never been able to forget. Her eighteenth birthday. The knowledge hit harder than the slap had. I died. And I’m back. A small sound escaped her. A hiccup. A c***k in glass. Then another, and another, and then she could not stop. She laughed. She laughed with her bleeding hand pressed to her mouth and her shoulders shaking, tears running down both cheeks, laughed until she was gasping on the marble floor like a madwoman. They had killed her. They had killed her, and the moon, or fate, or whatever lived in the dark, had looked at that and said, Again. They had given her five years’ notice. They had given her the date. “Stop that,” Robert snapped. His raised hand wavered. “Stop that at once.” Diane’s spoon clattered against her cup. Vanessa’s handkerchief froze halfway to her face. “Good heavens,” Diane said faintly. “Has she lost her mind?” Evelyn laughed once more, a ragged last breath of it, and then she stopped. Just like that. She wiped her eyes with the heel of her hand, smearing blood across her cheek, and drew a long, slow breath. The silence in the room had turned strange. Diane Dawson sat at the head of the table in a pale silk robe, and she recovered first. She had the kind of beauty that depended on being admired, and the kind of eyes that were always counting. She lifted her teacup with a hand that was almost steady. “I said,” she repeated, each word precise, “that starting tomorrow Vanessa will take your mother’s old room.” Her gaze drifted down. “Eighteen years old today, and still not a trace of a wolf. Every girl in this city shifts at fifteen. Do try to be useful now that you’re a woman.” At her right sat Vanessa, in a ruffled pink nightgown that had cost more than a servant’s yearly wage, pale and delicate and perfectly arranged, as though she had practiced looking ill in a mirror. “Her cough kept her up all night,” Diane added. “The doctors say she needs a room with better light.” There it was. In the life she remembered, Evelyn had screamed at this moment. She had crawled across the marble and begged. That is all I have of her, please. Robert had hit her again, and again, and she had lain on the floor listening to Vanessa’s soft, satisfied sigh. She looked at Vanessa now. Vanessa was watching her over the edge of a handkerchief, eyes shining, no longer waiting for the show so much as uneasy that it had gone wrong. Evelyn wiped the blood from her lip with the back of her hand. Slowly, she got to her feet, and she did not brush off her dress. “Of course,” she said. “Take it.” She let her gaze move from Diane to Vanessa and back, cool and unhurried. “You always do.” The spoon, which had only just stopped rattling, went still. “And Vanessa,” Evelyn added, “enjoy the light. I’m told it’s wonderful for a cough.” Vanessa’s handkerchief drifted down to her lap, and for a moment the delicate mask on her face slipped, and what lay beneath was plain, ugly surprise. “How dare you,” Diane said, setting her cup down with a sharp click. “Speak to your sister that way again and” “I laughed in front of you a minute ago, Madam, and nobody died.” Evelyn’s voice did not rise. “It’s been quite a day for firsts. Let’s see how many more we can fit in before supper.” Robert’s hand twitched at his side. He had not lowered it far. Evelyn turned and met his eyes, and she did not look away, and she did not blink. “You’ve struck me once this morning, Father,” she said. “Do it twice and I’ll start charging interest.” The hand froze. Something moved across Robert Hart’s handsome, bored face that she had never seen there before. It took her a moment to recognize it, because he had never directed it at her. It was unease. “You’ll hand the key to Vanessa’s maid,” he said stiffly. “Tonight.” “At midnight,” Evelyn said. “I have the floors to finish first, as Madam ordered. Unless you’d rather I left them dirty.” No one answered. She turned and walked out of the dining room without running, and nobody dared to stop her. “Evelyn.” The voice followed her into the east corridor, soft as silk. She stopped, because stopping was what she had always done. Vanessa came toward her barefoot, one hand pressed to her chest as though even walking cost her. Up close she smelled of expensive jasmine, and her eyes were not ill at all. They were sharp and bright and furious. “You didn’t cry,” Vanessa said. “Should I have?” “You always cry.” A small, sweet smile. “It’s your best quality. Mother thinks you’ve finally learned your place.” She tilted her head. “I think you’re planning something.” She laughed lightly, to show how silly that was. “But what could you possibly plan? You don’t even have a wolf.” Evelyn looked at her. This was a girl who had worn a sick face for thirteen years and had never once, in all that time, looked tired. “You’re right,” Evelyn said. “I don’t have a wolf, or a room, or a mother. And yet I’m the one you chased down the hall.” Her eyes dropped to Vanessa’s bare feet, then lifted. “You walked all this way without coughing, by the way. A miracle. Perhaps the light is better in the corridor.” For one second the smile held. Then it cracked at the corners. Vanessa’s hand flew up to her chest, a half-second too late, and the cough that followed was thin and badly timed. She turned, her nightgown whispering against the floor, and fled down the hall a little too quickly, a little too strong. She waited until the footsteps faded. Then her knees gave out. She slid down the wall, shaking, while the kitchen clattered awake somewhere below. Her cheek throbbed in time with her heart. She let herself shake for ten seconds. She counted them. Then she pressed her palms flat against the floor, breathed in for four, out for four, and began to think. The dates came first, lined up in her mind like stones across a river. The banquet in three weeks, where a necklace would vanish and her name would be blamed. The exam papers. The garden party, the pond, the little girl in the water. The smiling boy with warm hands who would ask her for one small favor, two years from now, and promise her a proposal in the morning. She knew every trap. Every liar. Every smile that hid a knife. She was eighteen, friendless and penniless, and the whole house thought she was a fool. They had spent thirteen years telling her so. Stop being so clever, Evelyn. Stop reading. Stop asking questions. No one likes a girl who thinks. And she had obeyed. She had obeyed all the way to the end. Not this time. There was one more thing, the thing this house had been built to keep from her. She had a wolf. She had no proof. Only a memory of her mother’s hands, small and cold, pressing hers near the end, and a whisper that had never made sense. Your wolf is only asleep, little one. Evelyn had been five. She had thought it was a bedtime story. She frowned. Something else was surfacing, something she had never thought to question. The day after Vanessa took her mother’s room, there had been smoke over the east wing. A maid was burning rubbish, someone said. Evelyn, nursing a split lip, hadn’t cared. But it had been the middle of the afternoon, and it had smelled of paper. Her blood went cold. Her mother had hidden something in that room, and Diane had found it on the very first day and burned it. In the life Evelyn remembered, no one had ever stopped her. She stood. Her legs held. Down the corridor, behind a door she had dusted every Sunday for thirteen years, was a room she had never once thought to search. She pulled the key from her pocket. Cold brass, worn smooth by all those Sundays. She had always thought of it as a chore. It occurred to her now that Diane had never asked for it until today, and that was strange. She had named midnight herself. It gave her all the hours she needed, and not one minute to waste. This time, she would be in that room first.