Chapter 4

After the watch broke, I buried the last of my soul under that thin pillow with the shards.

I stopped talking. Completely.

But as long as I could stand, Victor found uses for me.

I drifted through the estate like something already dead — scrubbing floors, hauling crates, taking whatever work no one else wanted. My vision was going. Double images. Edges dissolving. My hearing followed — voices reaching me through deep water.

None of it touched me.

I'd started planning my own funeral. No headstone. No service. Just scatter the ashes off the coast of Sicily and let the tide take them. Clean. Nothing left.

Victor, meanwhile, was getting worse.

He made me stand at the edge of the dining room and watch him feed Lilia a seven-course dinner. He sent me into the unheated pool at two in the morning to fish out a ring she'd "accidentally" dropped. At a staff gathering, he pointed at me in front of every servant in the house and called me the cheapest piece of property he'd ever acquired.

I took it all. Didn't flinch. Didn't blink.

Until the night of the gala.

They put me in the kitchen. Dishes. Ice-cold water sawing into my joints, into the marrow where the disease lived. My stomach turned over in slow, grinding waves. I kept moving. Plate. Rinse. Rack. Plate. Rinse. Rack.

Bang.

The kitchen door hit the wall.

Victor filled the doorway, reeking of whiskey. He crossed the room in three strides, locked a hand around my wrist, and dragged me from the sink.

"The hell are you doing back here?" His eyes were bloodshot, pupils blown. "Everyone on this estate knows you belong to me — and you're washing dishes? You think looking pathetic enough makes me feel guilty?"

My stomach clenched hard. I tried to pull free. "Sir, you assigned me this."

"And now you talk back?"

He swung me into the prep counter. The marble edge caught me square across the spine.

The sound that came out of me wasn't a scream. Something short and involuntary — then gone. Pain flooded every nerve at once.

My vision cut to black. Came back. Barely.

"Evelyn." Victor closed in, caught my jaw, forced my face up. "I am so goddamn sick of that dead look."

He reached into his pocket.

The watch fragments. The pieces I'd fitted back together, shard by shard, with bleeding fingers.

I didn't know when he'd taken them. Didn't know he'd gone through my pillow.

"This is what you care about, right?" His eyes had that light — the one that meant he'd found the nerve and intended to press until it split. He jerked his chin toward the fireplace roaring against the far wall. "I throw this handful of scrap into the fire — do I finally get to see you cry?"

That watch was the last thing my mother ever touched. The last proof she existed. The last anchor I had.

"Don't—" The word cracked out before I could stop it. A fissure in the dead surface.

"Beg me." His voice dropped — low, intimate, poison-sweet. "The way you begged that old man when you needed the money. Get on your knees."

I looked at his face — rage-warped, satisfaction bleeding through at the edges — and felt something shift.

Not anger. Something sadder than that.

Victor. If you ever find out that the dirty money you hate me for bought your life from a hit squad. If you ever feel, even for a second, what I've swallowed these past months — blood and silence and bone-deep rot — what would your face look like then?

I didn't beg.

I gathered everything this ruined body had left and swung.

Crack.

My palm connected with his face. The sound ricocheted off the tile walls like a gunshot.

His head snapped sideways. He froze, the watch fragments still caught between his fingers.

The dying dog had bitten back.

"Victor." I held his stare. Every word separate, deliberate, final. "You're not worth it."

Something detonated behind his eyes.

He lunged. Both hands closed around my throat and drove me flat against the marble counter. The back of my skull hit stone.

"I'm not WORTH it?" Tendons stood out in his neck. "I run half of New York and you — YOU — tell me I'm not worth it?"

The pressure crushed my windpipe shut. Darkness bled in at the edges.

But this time something else came with it. Deep inside my chest, something that had been holding — barely, for months — finally gave way. Not a feeling. A structure. Something physical and done.

A wave of molten heat surged from the bottom of my lungs.

No warning.

Blood erupted from my mouth.

Not a cough. Not a trickle. A thick, blackish-red torrent — across his white shirt, up the side of his jaw, spattering his cheek in dark constellations.

His hands flew off my throat.

He stumbled back. Stared at his palms — slick, red, shaking — then back at me.

The rage on his face didn't fade. It just stopped.

I slid down the counter and hit the floor. Blood kept coming — pooling under my cheek, spreading outward in a slow dark mirror.

"Evelyn?"

Smaller. Like the word had been dragged out of somewhere he'd bricked over a long time ago.

He dropped beside me. His hands hovered, trying to press my mouth shut with his bare palms. It poured through his fingers.

"Someone — get Sophia! GET THE DOCTOR! NOW!"

Something had cracked open in his voice. He didn't catch it.

The kitchen door crashed open. Sophia came through it at a dead run, med kit banging against her hip.

She saw the blood. She saw my white face. Her composure broke the second she crossed the threshold. Tears hit before she even reached me.

"Move." She shoved Victor aside and dropped to her knees in the spreading red. Her fingers tore open a packet of hemostatic gauze, hands fast, eyes blurred with tears.

"What happened to her?" Victor grabbed her shoulder from behind and spun her halfway around. His voice had gone raw. "Why is there so much blood—"

The IV needle slid into my vein. Sophia's hands stilled.

She turned her head. Looked at Victor the way you look at a man standing over the grave he dug.

"You're still pushing her." The words came out through clenched teeth. "Are you blind?"

She held his gaze.

"Her organs are destroyed." A breath. Then the rest of it, quiet as a door closing. "She's dying."