Cruel Obsession

Blood crawled down the stairs in crooked, spreading lines, bright red against the pale steps. It hurt Sophia Watson’s eyes to look at it.

“Isabella, wake up. Please, don’t scare me...”

She had been fine seconds ago. Fine. How could she suddenly be like this?

One impossible detail kept cutting through the panic: Isabella had been too far away. Sophia had reached for her only after Isabella was already falling, fingers closing on empty air while the blood spread below.

Sophia sat collapsed beside Isabella Watson as if her soul had been knocked loose from her body. Blood soaked into the white skirt of her bridesmaid dress, staining the fabric, staining the air, sealing off the screams and rushing footsteps behind her until the world shrank to the sister lying at her side.

Then the fluorescent lights snapped on above her, brutal and white.

Sophia jerked back to herself. Night had fallen outside.

Ever since Isabella had been carried away, Sophia had sat alone in that room, trapped with the metallic reek of blood and the memory of the fall.

Footsteps struck the marble foyer. Slow. Hard. Measured.

A man in a black suit strode toward her, every click of his dress shoes landing like a drumbeat against her ribs.

“Isabella survived,” he said, his voice scraped raw. “She’s paralyzed from the waist down.”

If Isabella had not fallen down those stairs today, she and this man would have been in their wedding suite by now.

Sophia lowered her head and stared at the hem of her dress. The white fabric was still marked with Isabella’s blood. After so many hours, the stains had dried to a dark, ugly brown.

Evidence, she thought numbly. Evidence that she had almost killed her own twin sister with her own hands.

The man stopped in front of her, tall enough to blot out the light.

“Sophia Watson,” Oliver Williams said. “Isabella is your own sister. How could you do it?”

The cold in his voice made her heart seize.

“I didn’t. She fell on her own...” Sophia tried to explain, but her gaze snagged on his right hand and her pupils shrank.

He was holding the largest golf club she had ever seen.

“You thought if Isabella was gone, I would marry you?” His mouth twisted. “No. Whatever pain she suffered, I’ll pay it back to you twice over.”

The last word had barely left his mouth before the club came down with a vicious whistle and smashed into Sophia’s left knee.

For one suspended second, she heard her own bone break.

After the knee came her calf. Then her ankle.

Oliver moved with a terrible, fluid speed, as if he had rehearsed this in his mind a thousand times. Every blow landed with his full strength.

Sophia’s face went white. Tears burst from her eyes. Terror tore through her, sharpened by the kind of pain that seemed to claw directly at her nerves.

Instinct screamed at her to run.

But the golf club in Oliver’s hand might as well have had eyes. It found her uninjured right leg with perfect accuracy.

Crack.

Bone and club snapped in the same instant.

Sophia crashed to the floor.

Oliver tossed aside the broken shaft and stepped on her injured leg.

The remaining bone gave way. The legs that had once carried her across a stage, light and graceful and alive, twisted beneath her into a shape no body should make.

The pain burned past feeling. Blackness pulsed at the edges of Sophia’s vision.

“Oliver...” Her lips moved, but her voice was barely a breath. “I didn’t...”

Darkness swallowed her.

Before she lost consciousness, the last thing she heard was his frozen voice.

“Take her away. Don’t let her die. Then notify the Watson family. Sophia attempted murder. The evidence is clear. What they do with her is up to them.”

Attempted murder?

There had been household staff in the house, security outside, cameras somewhere in the walls. None of it belonged to Sophia. By morning, every mouth that might have spoken had gone silent, and every record that might have helped had disappeared into the hands of people far more powerful than a bleeding girl on the floor.

She had done nothing.

Three years later.

The height of summer turned Sterling’s sky a hard, glassy blue.

The heavy gates of Blackwood Women’s Correctional Facility, shut tight year-round, opened a narrow crack.

A thin woman stepped through into the scalding sun. Because of her disability, every step made her body sway. From the prison gate to the nearest bus stop was only two hundred yards, but it took her nearly ten minutes to reach it.

The two dollars clenched in her palm had been slipped to her by a kind corrections officer before she left. It was every cent she owned.

The bus stop was empty. She waited more than an hour before one finally came.

Three years.

She was finally free to go home.

But where was home now?

Three years ago, when her parents personally delivered her to the court, Sophia had stopped having one.

They believed she was a murderer. A jealous younger twin who had nearly killed her own sister.

Nothing she said would have mattered.

The witnesses remembered only what powerful people needed them to remember. The camera footage that should have ended the argument had been damaged, missing, unavailable, whichever word made the lie easiest to swallow. Her parents had believed the blood, the accusation, and Isabella’s silence more than they believed her.

During her three years in prison, they had never visited her. On the day of her release, not a single person stood outside the facility waiting to take her home.

Sophia got off the bus after it entered the city and drifted through the prosperous streets of Sterling like a ghost.

Alone. Out of place. Half-erased.

Oliver had broken both her legs that night. Because she never received proper treatment, the bones had healed badly, leaving permanent damage behind.

From now on, she would never walk normally again. If she stood too long or the weather turned damp, the old injuries would begin to ache deep in the bone.

A shriek of brakes ripped through the city noise.

A black Porsche stopped less than two inches from her knees.

Sophia stood frozen in front of the car for several seconds before she realized she had wandered into the road without noticing.

If the driver had braked one second later, she would already be on the asphalt.

The door opened. A man in a flawless suit stepped out, and Sophia’s eyes were dragged to him against her will.

Then she saw his face.

The world dropped out from under her.

That face had haunted her dreams countless times over the past three years.

Once, she had known that face in a completely different way.

At nineteen, Sophia had waited through an entire charity gala just to hand Oliver a glass of champagne he had not asked for. He had taken it only because refusing would have caused a scene, but she had been foolish enough to live on that single courtesy for a week. She had told herself patience could become love. That if she stayed bright enough, useful enough, impossible enough to ignore, one day he might look at her before he looked at Isabella.

Now he was looking at her.

And she wished he would stop.

A chill ran down her spine. Her teeth began to chatter.

Why him? Why, the moment she got out, did she have to run into Oliver Williams?

He was her sister’s fiancé.