destroying your life, and he was the reason you almost died that night.”
Brows lowered, he steps deeper into the room. “I’ve tried to forgive you all these years. For forcing me into marriage. Forcing me into that bullshit institute.” Lips peeled back, he snarls and stalks closer. “What have you done?”
“Your father put you in that Institute. Not me. He put too much faith in that doctor. They both swore you’d forget that woman after a while.”
Woman? Amelia?
It seems to dawn on him, and he lifts his gaze to Laura, eyes darkening with betrayal. “Solange?”
The woman whose name Lucian spoke when he seemed to be having a hallucination a while back. When I asked about her, he told me she wasn’t real. She was a different affliction, he said.
“The sound of her name still makes me want to wretch.” Laura grimaces, as if she might just do that. “I knew from the very beginning she was trouble. The way she paraded around you and your father.”
“She was real.” Uncertainty bleeds through his voice, as if he doesn’t trust the answer.
“Of course she was real. It’s a wonder to me that you ever fell for all that brainwashing.”
Eyes narrowed, he stares back at her, his mind seemingly lost to unseen images. “You … never acknowledged her.”
“Why would I acknowledge the woman? She was nothing to me.”
Brows pinched tighter, he lowers his gaze, as if more images are coming to mind. “The staff … they always gave me strange looks.”
Laura scoffs and rolls her eyes. “Of course. The two of you looked ridiculous together. It was obvious to everyone that she was obsessed with you, Lucian. The way she’d pet you and fawn all over you. She couldn’t keep her hands off you.”
He rubs his hand over his head, back and forth, as if he might rub the hair right off. “She’d disappear for days at a time. Days.”
Rolling her shoulders back, Laura clears her throat. “I became privy to a cage your father kept in his chambers. Locked away in some secret little room. He’d lock himself up with her for days at a time, fucking her like his little pet, when he wasn’t torturing her. I’m surprised you couldn’t hear her screams through the walls.”
A strange numbness settles over me, and I can’t even begin to imagine what has settled over Lucian with this revelation. To think it even possible that he could’ve been brainwashed for so many years, into believing that woman didn’t exist. And for what purpose?
“You … you tried to convince me she wasn’t real.” Clutching his skull, Lucian paces at the end of the bed, while I sit trying to piece together the how’s and why’s of such a thing. “Do you have any fucking clue what they did to me there? Their methods of making me forget!” His bellow bounces off the walls, and I flinch at the flourishing anger in his voice. Judging by the cold disgust creeping across his face, it must’ve been torture. “All the drugs they pumped into me!”
“All your father’s brilliant idea. He figured since you suffered years of hallucinations with Jude, what was one more?” She sighs and mindlessly toys with a loose string on my shirt, making me lean away from her, eyeing the opposite side of the bed for escape. “Not like I’d ever let you run off with that dirty child molester, anyway.”
Breath stutters in my throat at that, and I look back to him. “Lucian?” He’d only ever mentioned that she’d taught him things, never that he was molested.
He offers only a quick glance toward me, not bothering to dispute her choice of words. “She was twenty-five. Half the age of my father when he fucked her. And at least I consented. At least she didn’t threaten me, if I refused.” His expression hardens again as he stares back at Laura. “You killed her, didn’t you?”
“How humiliating do you think it was, to know both my husband and son were fucking that filthy little harlot? Of course I killed her. And if I hadn’t stopped your father, he’d be fucking her, too!” She points a trembling finger at me. “He wanted a grandson to offer up so badly, he was willing to make one himself.”
“What do you mean, stopped him?” he says past clenched teeth. Bunched shoulders and the tension in his jaw are clues that he’s one second from snapping.
Laura’s dark chuckle is unfitting for the moment, leaving me to wonder if she’ll snap,