An old woman and a young girl, holding together a crumbling household in a circle of wolves.
So I threw everything I had into learning the only currency that mattered in our world: knowledge. Codes, ledgers, the architecture of power. Desperate to shoulder the Family's burden before the last of our name was swallowed whole.
Lydia Everett came from nothing. No Family name, no bloodline, no standing. At the gatherings of the Five Families, nobody gave her the time of day.
When I found out she was an orphan too, I felt for her. I reached out first, paid her way, brought her under the Ashford roof, and told her we'd get through the hard times together.
I never imagined she'd take my kindness as charity.
That she'd resent me for everything I had.
That she'd use every trick she knew to wrap my two blood-bound companions around her finger.
And then, together with them, destroy my life.
While I was still lost in those thoughts, the cars rolled to a stop at the ridge.
What had happened on the drive up had left both of them uneasy. They fell over each other to open my door and carry my things.
"Lydia, look. This is the overlook we used to come to as kids. Maeve and I bought the whole hillside. From now on, it's ours. Private ground. No one sets foot here without our say."
Maeve nodded. "I already had soldiers plant your favorite yellow roses across the ridge. By this time next year, there'll be a whole sea of them."
"Then the four of us can come up here together, drive around, watch the stars."
Their faces were bright with plans for the future.
I stood staring at the land in silence.
This really had been our secret place when we were little. Before blood oaths and Family politics turned everything sharp. It held every happy memory the three of us shared.
But I had never liked yellow roses.
I was allergic to pollen. All of it.
While I stood there turning that over, fireworks burst open across the sky above us. Brilliant colors spelling out a name in fire. Lydia's, not mine.
Under that dreamlike canopy, Daphne produced a ring box lined in black velvet and held it out to her. Inside, on a bed of silk, sat a signet ring bearing the Vale crest. Not his own. A woman's ring, smaller, older, the gold worn smooth by generations of Vale brides.
"Lydia, this is the Family heirloom. My parents told me to give it to the future lady of the Vale house. I've wanted to give it to you for a long time. I just had to wait for the right moment."
"Be with me instead, Lydia. Don't you remember? When you nearly drowned as a kid, I jumped in after you without thinking. I'd give you my life, let alone some ring!"
The night had gone very still around us, the kind of quiet where even the soldiers at the tree line stopped shifting their weight. In my last life, this was exactly what had fooled me. The two of them, performing devotion so convincingly.
Back then I was naive enough to believe it. Blood-bound companions, a happy ending waiting for us. My grandmother and the Ashford name would finally have someone to lean on.
I didn't learn the truth until the day I died.
Devotion that deep can be faked.
I was about to turn and leave them to it.
Then Lydia spoke up. "Vera, why did you tell people I've been spreading whispers about you? Now everyone's attacking me..."
She held her phone up to my face. Her ring finger drifted to the curve of her bottom lip and touched it once, soft, almost reverent, the way a woman blesses a lie she knows has landed.
Under the Westbrook feed, hundreds of comments called me shameless, said I'd sold myself for a seat at the Vale table. The handful of voices defending me became, in Lydia's telling, proof that I'd sent them to bully her.
Maeve snatched the phone from her hand. He cracked the knuckles of his right hand against his jaw, once, twice, the sound loud in that hushed dark, and his voice came out shaking with rage.
"Vera, how could you do something like this? Fine, you've got no shame. But why blame Lydia for it?"
Daphne, the calmer of the two, didn't explode. But his thumb moved slow along the inside of his signet ring, and his eyes pinned me with the same accusation.
I swallowed the storm inside me. "I didn't do it. If you don't believe me, look into it yourselves."
Neither of them heard a word I said. They were already busy comforting Lydia.
"Don't worry, Lydia. I'll have our people scrub it by morning."
"Sweets always help. Come on, I'll take you for something."
One on each side, they flanked Lydia and walked away.
Neither of them looked back.
I let out a long breath and watched the ash drifting down where the fireworks had been. The Vale ring box sat on the stone wall where Daphne had set it down, forgotten, the worn gold catching the last of the light.
Compared to life and death, this much hurt was nothing.
At least I was still alive. I still had a brand-new life ahead of me.
