the point where we couldn’t mention the case or his name, and she hadn’t left the house in months. I knew, point blank, Dad had hired the new nurse not to keep an eye on her, but for suicide watch. She was days away from doing something stupid—we all knew that.
I hadn’t spoken to her, not because I was cruel, but because I genuinely had nothing to say.
I figured she was just as unhinged for not seeing the signs. Cain was crazy. Simple. For her to be so close to him, for her to fail to see that, blew my ever loving mind.
All the while the jury condemned him, he stood there, grinning at me. Our eyes connected. United.
Two faces, so alike that I’d have been screwed if I hadn’t been in Australia with Thea, two hearts that had formed at the same time within our mother’s body, and yet, we were so different.
So distant.
We’d never been close.
We’d come into being closer than two people could ever be, but there was a chasm between us, a chasm, at the moment, I was grateful for.
I smiled back at him when the jury’s declaration was complete, when the judge passed his sentence. His faltered when he learned how long he’d be in jail—until we were both very, very old men—and I carried on smiling when he was taken away.
There was nothing to be amused about.
Nothing.
At all.
But with Cain, it was a show of strength. A smack to the face. A punch to the jaw.
Thea tightened her hand around mine, and she murmured, “It’s over.”
“It isn’t,” I countered. “Won’t be until he’s dead, but if we had a curse, Thea, then it’s been sent away for a long ass time.”
She pressed her lips to mine, and I sighed into the kiss.
My father smacked my knee a second later, and muttered, “Thank God that’s over. Now I have to break the news to your mother.”
“She won’t want to hear it,” I said dismissively.
“No, she won’t. But that’s all the more reason why she should have to.”
She should have heard everything. Every last miserable part of this trial.
I’d loathed Maria with a passion that would have sent me away for the rest of my life, because it would have been easy to pin that on me. But as much as I’d hated her, I hadn’t wanted her dead. I’d just wanted my freedom.
Cain? He’d wanted his son and he’d wanted to hurt me—so he’d decided to kill two birds with one stone. Maria was just a pawn in that, just as she’d been ever since she’d gotten pregnant with Cain’s kid and I’d had to marry her. Turned out, Cain had been in contact with Maria ever since he’d been released—the dumb fuck was even the father of her unborn child. I hadn’t known about it because I hadn’t given a fuck about who Maria consorted with.
But when I’d thrown the divorce notice at her, Maria, being the sly bitch she was, had decided to play games.
And one thing I’d learned in twenty-four years of having a psycho for a brother, you didn’t play games with a nutcase.
“Marry me, or I’ll never let you see Freddie.”
I could still hear Cain as he used that reasoning for taking Maria down—uncaring that he was taking two lives as he did so.
I wasn’t even sure why he was interested in Freddie. He was a selfish asshole with no interest in anyone other than himself, but then it had all started to make sense when the prosecution had looked into his background.
That trust fund of grandfather’s?
The one we earned when we graduated high school?
There was a caveat.
If we didn’t graduate, and didn’t have the right to the trust at eighteen, then had a child, and were living in poverty, we were to be granted half the trust to help raise the child as a Ramsden deserved to be raised.
That was why he wanted Freddie.
As usual, he only saw dollar signs.
The defense, though my mom had insisted on an expensive team—goddamn her—had little to back them up. Unsurprisingly, the prosecution had mauled them, and the jury had only taken forty minutes to deliberate the verdict my twin deserved.
The court began to clear once Cain was taken down with a final sick and twisted smile for me—even though he’d lost and I’d won this insane war he’d started—and we waited, because we were at the front, for the back to empty.
I knew waiting wouldn’t stop what was about to happen. The