Destroyed Destiny (Crowne Point #4) - Mary Catherine Gebhard Page 0,122
into the wall, taking another drink.
The shadows on the floor spun.
The waves crashed behind me.
Too little time. I’d had too little time with her. I squeezed the glass neck of the bottle, grinding my teeth. In that time, my grandfather had refused to let us be happy.
He couldn’t just leave us the fuck alone.
It was his fault.
It’s done. It’s over. I broke us. Let me go.
I spun to the window. She was a shimmering mirage, the only thing clear her heated gaze.
“Story, wait—”
I ran to the window, grasping at air, stumbling through fog and memories that vanished into smoke.
“You’ve waited so long…don’t you want it to be special?”
I spun around and the bottle slipped through my fingers, shattering. Stony hazel eyes, softened and vulnerable, stared up at me from the rug.
“Story—” She vanished like smoke. “Story!”
I couldn’t hear my scream past the memories falling on top of me like stones. I just knew it came out of me by the way my lungs burned.
You’re so goddamn perfect, you know that?
I fell on my knees, onto the broken shards. “You were so goddamn perfect.”
Sixty-Five
STORY
“You are so perfect,” I whispered. “Your dad would light the world on fire for you.” I held my and Grayson’s baby to my chest. Her eyes were scrunched closed, her small fist resting on my chest.
I didn’t think it was possible to love something more than I loved Grayson, but here I was, proven wrong daily.
She was my love for Grayson incarnate.
How does a princess locked in a tower, save a prince prisoner in his own castle?
Every day since I left Grayson at Crowne Hall, I thought about that question. How do I save Grayson Crowne? How do I save all of us? I was desperate for word of him, desperate to get word to him—but I had a debt to pay off first.
Until then, I was stuck here with no way to contact him.
No way out of the underworld.
I was told I’d nearly died. The head of the Horsemen, fucking Grim of all people, had saved my life. That if it wasn’t for him, I would have bled out on the beach before they could have even brought me back here to their doctor.
I owed my life to a man named after taking them.
But I knew if it wasn’t for Gemma, the Horsemen never would have been there in the first place. Somehow, she knew to call them.
The Horsemen had saved my life, and until I repaid my debt…I was stuck here.
In the underworld.
“Have you thought of a name for her yet?” Lottie asked.
I glanced at Lottie, who occupied the twin bed next to mine, then back down to my little girl.
I like the name Sonnet for a girl.
“I think Sonnet, at least, that’s what I’ve been calling her.”
“That’s a pretty name.”
“Have you?”
“No.”
It had been a little over a month, and while Lottie cared for her baby boy, it was with a distant look. Not without love, just…sad.
Our room had no windows, no furnishings save the stark twin beds—nothing. It was completely bare; it didn’t even have a mirror on the wall.
I think we were in the Horsemen’s lair—or, in a part of it. Everyone knew and had probably been to a party in the underworld, but those were not held where the Horsemen slept.
I don’t think they expected us here. If this was the underworld, it felt a little bit like Lottie and I were in purgatory.
I pulled the coin Grayson gave me out from under its hiding spot—my pillow—and held it between my fingers, the blood now crusted. For a month, I spun this coin in my hand.
“It fell from my brother’s hand,” Lottie said weakly. “Both that, and the locket.”
I looked over. “What?”
“He said, ‘Tell her I didn’t get anything out of this. Tell her this time I didn’t do it for me.’ I think he meant you.”
You’ve never done something for anyone if you didn’t get something out of it, have you West?
“I should have told you earlier. I just…” Her brow pinched. “Everything that happened, you know.”
All these months, West had it?
“I don’t understand,” I whispered. “None of this makes any sense to me. Why didn’t he use it?”
I’ve been thinking about his death a lot, because I don’t feel very much of anything. I think I grieved him all the time he was alive, and that night on the beach I finally stopped grieving.
I’m sad he died, because I’m sad he doesn’t get a chance to be a better person.