Reborn to Ruin Him novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Door
Reborn on the night her brother is drugged, Camille shoves his true love into his arms, and finds out he has come back too.
My brother's mouth was on my ear, and I was twenty-four again.
I knew it by the red dress, the one I wore the first time this night happened, and by his hands bunching it at my hips.
The last time I stood in this hallway, I said yes to him.
Then I died at sixty-four in a bedroom he kept locked, after forty years as his wife on paper and his dog in the house.
Two floors below, the band was still playing for two hundred guests of the family company.
Upstairs, somebody had drugged the CEO's champagne, and the CEO had dragged me against his study door.
"Cami." His breath scorched my neck. "Help me. Please."
He pushed his hips into mine, and I felt exactly how much he wanted me.
My body remembered him. That was the worst part.
Gabriel was twenty-eight, my parents' adopted son, and the only person who had ever fought for me with his bare hands.
When I was nine, he took a dog's jaws on his own forearm so it would let go of my leg.
Last time, that memory made me loosen my collar.
The door behind my back stood open a hand's width.
Last time, I looked up and saw Rosalind Ellery crying in that gap.
By the next afternoon, her body was in the river. The coroner said she was carrying a child.
I heard heels on the marble, coming fast.
I put both palms on my brother's chest and shoved.
He stumbled back half a step, stunned. Nobody had ever pushed him off.
"I'll bring you ice water," I said.
I pulled the door wide, and there she was.
Rosalind wore white, and her eyes were already wet. Her hand was pressed to her flat stomach.
Trenton Hightower stood a step behind her, Gabriel's oldest friend and the company's chief operating officer.
He had her wrap folded over his arm and a worried crease between his eyes.
"I'm sorry, Cami," he said. "She was looking everywhere for Gabe. I told her he'd gone upstairs to lie down."
"It's fine," I said, and I meant it. "You were being kind."
I took Rosalind's thin wrist.
Last time, I had called her an angel. She was no angel. Nobody turns up crying at exactly the right door.
"Your boyfriend is in the study," I told her. "He's all yours."
I put her through the doorway and shut it on both of them.
The wood shook in its frame. Then it crashed open from the inside.
Splinters flew across the carpet.
Gabriel stood in the wreck of his black shirt, shaking, and he had not touched her.
He drove his fist into the wall.
His knuckles split. Blood ran down his wrist to the cuff.
He was hurting himself to stay off her. For the woman he loved, he would have bled out on the floor.
Then he looked at me with red eyes.
"Camille Lockwood, you are poison," he said. "Rosalind is pregnant with my child."
"You shoved her in with me like this. Do you want my son dead?"
Nobody knew about that baby tonight, and Rosalind had told no one.
In my first life, Gabriel learned of it from a coroner, the day after she drowned.
He took a step toward me, jaw locked.
"I never saw how vicious you were," he said.
He knew.
Gabriel had come back too.
I stood very still and waited for the fear. What came instead was a small, clean calm.
"In one month I am marrying Rosalind," he said. "Big church, the whole city."
"And from tonight you remember what you are to me."
"What am I?" I said, and looked straight into his red eyes.
"My sister."
His gaze dropped to my open collar. Something ugly crossed his face. It looked like pity, and then like disgust.
"We aren't blood," he said. "But you called me brother for twenty years, and that is all you will ever be."
"And stop spiking my drinks. It's pathetic."
I laughed. I laughed until my eyes stung.
So that was the whole forty years. He thought I had drugged him and thrown myself at him.
He had believed it from this very night.
"All right," I said.
It surprised him. His mouth actually opened.
Behind him, Rosalind sat on the study floor with her hand on her stomach and her eyes on me, and she was not crying anymore.
Trenton touched my elbow. "Go lie down, Cami. I'll deal with him."
I nodded and walked away down the hall with my head up.
Gabriel did not know what my parents had left me in Switzerland.
A sealed trust, in my name alone, with one clause he had never read.
If Gabriel Lockwood married another woman, he lost every share, every house and his chair at the head of the company.
He wanted a wedding? He could have one.
I would let him order the flowers and print the invitations.
Then I would stand in the front pew and take everything back.
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