“Is there anything you want to take from this place?” I ask Elinor, ignoring the stepsister’s tantrum.
“My mother’s shawl. A few letters.” Elinor lifts one slim shoulder and lets it fall. “I want to leave this place.”
I draw her to me and lean close. Her heart pounds like a blacksmith’s hammer ticking on in her throat. Determination shines in her bright eyes. “Then let’s get you out of here, Sunshine.”
* * *
Elinor
“Eww!You’re bleeding on the seat!” Stacia shoves Cilla’s foot off the bench. Cilla’s agonized scream disturbs Tom, who hooks his claws into my arm through the pillowcase before I can move away.
I hiss.
He hisses.
Cilla clutches her leg and howls.
Stacia kicks my shin.
“What was that for?” Rude.
“You’re the maid. You clean it up.” She waves a lace-edged handkerchief at me as if that’s going to do one bit of good. “Well? Go on. You can’t let Cilla ruin the prince’s coach.”
“He offered us this coach knowing she was injured. He or one of his servants can deal with the bloodstains later.” I’m through cleaning up their messes. I’m only worried that she’s going to bleed out before we get to the castle.
Alistair stood watching Cilla carve her own foot in a desperate attempt to fit into the shoe that now adorns mine. He did nothing to intervene when Tremaine stomped her foot to crush it in two.
This is a side of him that I didn’t imagine, in my fervid fantasies of softness and love. I’m happy to be reunited with my “Alex.” Yet now that he’s Prince Alistair, I’m realizing that I don’t know him at all.
Have I jumped from one precarious situation into another?
I touch my nose, rubbing the spot where Tremaine broke it when he kicked me face-first into the stairs. Maxine paid me a visit that night. Let me weep, if painfully, into her lap. I don’t know how she got into my attic room. Witchcraft, certainly. All I know is that she was there when I needed her, and by the time she left, I could breathe without pain again. The next morning, the marks were gone.
But I was still trapped.
Until this morning, when I saw the prince’s carriage coming up the drive and I knew I had to get downstairs. I jimmied the lock and managed to pry it open, uncaring whether I damaged the house.
What was once my childhood home is nothing but an empty shell to me now.
My stepsisters keep glaring at the shimmering slippers like I’ve betrayed them.
“You. Snake.” The carriage hits a stone. Cilla hisses through clenched teeth. “I earned the right to be Prince Alistair’s bride. I sacrificed for it. What did you do, Cinderella?”
Apparently, I am stuck with this unfunny moniker now.
“It’s not fair. You get everything good.” Stacia pouts.
“Good,” I echo. “What, precisely, was good about losing both of my parents?”
“We lost our mother, too.” Cilla grits her teeth and moans.
That they did. I had pity for them when they first arrived at Scinder House. But they never had any for me.
“We lost our baby brother and our stepmother. You aren’t the only one who suffered,” Cilla says bitterly.
“You barely knew my mother.”
“Lady Scinder was nice!” protests Stacia. She shifts on the seat. “I liked her quite well. Then she died and Papa found out there was no money in the estate. We were supposed to be rich from Lord Scinder’s plumbing invention.”
