Blood and Wine - Margot Scott Page 0,3

being held in a trust for me, along with my mom’s more-than-generous savings, set to be deposited into my bank account three weeks from now, on my eighteenth birthday.

I resent Chastity’s assumption that I’m here to mooch off Edward’s wealth or her hospitality. Greysons take care of their own, which is more than I can say for the man who waited seventeen years to meet me.

“It’s a very nice room,” I say, unzipping my suitcase, which is already waiting for me on the bed.

“If I may,” she says, in her sweetest southern-belle drawl. “Can I ask, how bad was it? Your momma’s passing?”

For my own self-preservation, I try not to think about the days leading up to my mom’s death. We knew it was coming, like dark clouds closing in across the plains, but that didn’t make the storm easier to weather.

Witnessing her mind slipping away from her had to have been the worst of it. I was used to her talking to people I couldn’t see, but this was different. She was all over the place, murmuring incoherently. Saying things like, “I don’t want to go back. They’re calling me back...”

“Who’s calling you where?” I asked, standing over her hospice bed, dabbing at her dry, cracked lips with a damp washcloth. My eyes stung from crying, and I hadn’t left her bedside all day, so my stomach was starting to digest itself.

“I told them I wasn’t...” she slurred. “I couldn’t...not yet...” She was hopped up on so much morphine, it was hard to understand half of what she was saying, and the bits I caught didn’t make sense. “Don’t trust him. Don’t trust his eyes.”

“Whose eyes, Mom?”

Her own gray eyes were staring off into another plane. She went quiet for a while, as her breathing slowed. But in the seconds before she took her final breath, she looked directly at me and rasped, “I’ll see you soon.”

I’m not sure whether she was talking to me, or if she even knew I was there. But her words gave me goosebumps like cold rain sliding down my back.

My throat tightens at the memory. I start pulling things out of my suitcase and piling them haphazardly onto the bed.

“It was really bad toward the end,” is all I can bring myself to say to Chastity.

She nods, like she suspected as much. “Well, however badly your momma suffered, it wasn’t enough to make up for what she did to this family. She got what she deserved.”

My mouth falls open. Did she really just say that to me?

I stand rooted, mouth gaping, as she paints the smile back onto her face as easily as smoothing on lipstick.

“Come on down when you’re ready for lunch,” she says.

Chapter Three

William

The girl is still staring at the open door long after Chastity has turned on her designer heels and strode into the hall.

“Bitch,” she whispers, as her tears start to fall.

I move around her, studying her from different angles. She’s got Radcliff blood in her for sure. I can sense it. But it wasn’t until I heard Isabella’s name that I took a long, hard look at her.

Could this really be Isabella’s daughter? If she is, why can’t I sense her power?

I’m standing four feet away from the girl, yet she cannot see me. I was out among the vines when she and Edward pulled up to the house, and at the top of the front steps during her icy introduction to the family.

I follow her into the attached bath where she pulls a wad of toilet paper off the roll and blows her nose, then sits on the closed seat with her head in her hands.

Soft cries deepen into stilted, gut-wrenching sobs.

Watching her fall apart stirs a need inside me that I haven’t felt in years: the desire to provide comfort. It’s a strange and unfounded feeling, this urge to pull her close. To stroke her face and assure her it’ll all be okay.

Must be the hunger talking...

“Mom,” she croaks. “I don’t think I can do this. I tried to be strong, but I feel so brittle... It was easier to be brave for you because I didn’t want you to worry. I know this used to be your home, but I don’t feel welcome here. I miss you... Please, give me a sign that you can hear me.”

Isabella must’ve been pregnant when Edward sent her away. I was here the night John and Isabella were unceremoniously evicted from the estate, though I use the term here