My Fiancé Swapped Room Cards So I Mated His Rival novel · Chapter 9 of 24

Chapter 9: First Names

"She's in there," I said, the second the car door shut.

Lucian did not answer.

He sat with his hands flat on his knees, and through the bond I felt him shaking.

"I heard her hum it," I said. "The Water Is Wide. Two lines, and then it stopped."

"I know. I felt you hear it."

"So we go back tonight."

"With what? Six guards on every door and a sire who has the custom of three centuries on his side."

"Then we find another way in."

"We find it carefully."

"She's been in there three years!"

"And I've known where for ten minutes," he said, and his voice cracked on it.

He turned his face to the window.

I let the car move down Fifth Avenue before I said anything else.

"Why didn't you ever find her?" I said. "Three years, Lucian. You're the oldest rival that house has."

"Because everyone I could ask worked for them."

"Everyone but me."

He looked at me then.

It was a bad look, and I felt what was under it before he spoke.

"You wore his ring for two years," he said. "She was supposedly dead, and you wore his ring, and you ate at his father's table, and you never asked why his driver carried a locked case everywhere he went."

My chest went tight.

"I was twenty-five," I said. "My father had just died. His house held my father's debt. I did what I had to do to keep my name."

"I know."

"Then why say it?"

"Because I have been wanting to say it since the key game," he said. "Because I watched you sit at that dinner and smile at him, and I wanted to put him through the wall."

"That isn't a reason."

"It isn't."

"You don't get to be angry at me for not knowing."

"I'm not angry at you." He pressed his palms into his eyes. "I'm angry that I let you be the one they humiliated, and I called it a plan."

I stared at him.

"What did you say?"

"I watched it on a screen," he said, quietly. "I paid for the cameras. I sat in a room forty floors up and watched them hand you to Bridget, and I did nothing."

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