The Revenge of the Broken Heiress

Didn't I say to give her a lesson?

The boy crouched over me, frowning, and pulled the stranger off by the collar like he was lifting a dog off the furniture.

Why'd you take it this far?

His name was Roman Vance. When we were seven, he held my callused hand like it was something precious and promised to protect me for the rest of my life.

He was also the one who'd signed off on all of it.

Two scholarship kids transferred into Ravenscroft Academy that fall. One was me. The other was the girl Roman could never stop trying to rescue.

He went abroad for three months. His friends decided that guarding Camille while he was gone was their job, and they turned it into a game.

The boys cornered me and made me eat off the floor after they knocked my tray out of my hands.

The girls locked me in a bathroom and took scissors to my hair.

And the afternoon Camille's eyes went wet one more time, someone held a drink to my mouth until I swallowed, and the room began to tilt.

There was a stranger after that. Paid for. The reek of cigarettes on him, the weight of him, the ceiling going soft and far away.

That was when Roman walked in. He looked down at me like I was a mess that had ruined his afternoon.

I'd belonged to that family since I was seven years old. It took me a long time to walk back through their door.

This time, I came to give the engagement back.

Chapter 1

The second Roman spoke, the laughing stopped.

Nobody wanted to be the last one smiling. They shuffled and traded looks until they shoved one boy to the front, and he put on a grin he didn't feel.

"Come on, Roman. We were doing this for Camille." Brett Doyle. Roman's best friend the way a shadow is the sun's best friend. "You don't know what Nara's really like. She plays so sweet, but she's had Camille in tears for weeks. We couldn't just stand by."

The others found their nerve behind him.

"Camille just got here, and you flew out the same week. Somebody had to look out for her."

"Nara's a nasty little liar, Roman. She had this coming."

"It was only ever going to be a scare. We'd have called it off before anything real happened. I swear."

Everyone at Ravenscroft knew there were two kinds of people in that building. There was Roman Vance, and there was everyone who lived off what fell from his hands. The boys bleeding excuses across that room were all the second kind.

A lesson. That was the word they kept reaching for. Roman had signed off on a lesson.

Funny, then, that the one who pulled the stranger off me at the end was Roman too.

I lay in the hospital bed with something cold sliding into my arm through a tube, and my body still wouldn't go quiet.

They'd pumped my stomach. I kept gagging on nothing. The smell of that man's cigarettes had settled into the back of my throat, and under the bleached white blanket I was shaking and couldn't make it stop.

I pulled the blanket over my head so I wouldn't have to hear them.

They didn't quiet down. Of course they didn't.

I'd asked for help once, before any of this started. I knew now exactly what asking was worth. So I didn't.

Then Roman seemed to remember that everything that had happened to me, he'd set in motion.

He cleared his throat. It came out stiff.

"I just didn't want Camille getting hurt," he said. "I didn't think it would go this far."

Someone in the crowd laughed under their breath.

"She's a parentless little nobody. What's she going to do about it? Lie there and take it, same as always."

Roman's jaw tightened. For a second it looked like he might actually turn on the guy.

Then came the small, pretty hitch of a sob, and his anger cooled over before he could use it.

"Roman, please don't be hard on them." Camille's voice did the soft wet thing it always did. "They only went too far because they care about me. That's my fault, isn't it?"

She let a breath sit in the air.

"I never should have... no. It doesn't matter. I don't need Nara to forgive me. I just don't want the rest of you getting hurt over something I started. I'd rather everyone be angry at me than at any of you."

"Camille, you're too soft on people."

"It's all right," another one cooed. "Roman knows we only did it for you. He's not mad."

And just like that they folded in around her, every one of them, murmuring to the girl who'd cried.

I lay under the blanket where no one was looking, breathing bleach, and went invisible.

Chapter 2

Roman's face softened the moment he turned to her.

He crossed the room, brushed his thumb beneath Camille's eye, and wiped the tears away like they were the only thing in it that mattered.

"There. I'm not angry. Stop crying."

Someone leapt to smooth it over. "You've been gone a whole year, Roman. Camille's missed you. Let's get you a proper welcome back. The usual place."

They closed around the two of them and swept out in a tide, and the room emptied.

I pushed the blanket off my face and breathed. Big, greedy lungfuls that didn't taste like anyone else.

My world went quiet.

For a while.

I don't know how long I drifted before a small sound at the door pulled me back up.

I've always slept light. It's a thing you learn when sleeping too deep is what gets you hurt.

Roman cured me of it once, years ago, the way a prince wanders into a story and rearranges it just by showing up.

My hand had found the hem of an old sweater without my telling it to.

A neighbor gave me that sweater. She couldn't stand to see me half-dressed against the cold anymore. Said I was seven now, too old to run around bare-chested like the village boys.

It had been washed colorless. It hung off my small frame like something borrowed.

Roman was seven that year too. He had a stillness no other kid had, and he held his hand out to me slowly, like I might bolt.

"Hi," he said. "Your mom saved me."

I stared at those clean, fine-boned fingers. I let go of the sweater. I put my hand in his, shaking, certain the farm calluses on my palm would scrape him raw.

He didn't flinch. He just closed his hand over mine and held on.

The woman who came with him, Adelaide, took one look around the place I lived in, and her mouth went tight.

Then something softer crossed her face. Pity. I knew it on sight. Everyone who looked at me got there eventually.

They told me later that my mother could have walked off that mountain if my grandfather hadn't been so hungry for money.

Her acceptance letter had come. It crossed a thousand miles of road to reach her hand. Paper light enough to lift on a breath, heavy enough to carry her whole future.

My grandfather tore it into confetti.

He'd already pocketed the payment for her. The marriage was bought. The debts were spoken for, my uncle's tuition was spoken for, and a letter was just paper that didn't pay.

"You finished school so we could ask a better price for you," he told her. "That was the point. Now stop dreaming."

There was no city waiting for her. No crowded streets. There was a chain. The heavy kind, the kind made for a gate.

It held her the rest of her life.

She was sold like freight to the man who became my father. The money went to the city, to my uncle's seat at a school not unlike the one I'd end up in.

She had me first. A girl. She got beaten for it, and worked half to death, and only breathed easier once my brother came.

By then her hands were ruined. Mine were already going the same way.

Her life had quietly become my life.

And the one person who ever loosened the chain at my wrist had just walked out the door, wiping somebody else's tears.

Chapter 3

I didn't understand what my mother had done until the day Adelaide came up our dirt road with Roman at her side.

She'd been gone two weeks by then. I told myself she was where she always ended up: chained in the cellar, behind the door my father kept padlocked.

The food I left at that door every night went untouched. I made myself believe that was a good sign. It meant she was still down there. It meant she was still alive.

It meant I still had one person left in the world.

My father stood next to me wearing his groveling smile, and I had no idea my whole life was about to split down the middle.

I pulled my hand back from Roman's and looked up at the two of them, lit up with hope.

"My mom saved you? Is she at the hospital? Is that why I haven't seen her? Can you take me to her? Please?"

I got loud. Without meaning to, I pushed my sleeve back, and the old bruises on my arm came into the light.

My father put those there. There were a lot of reasons he hit me. Sometimes my little brother kicked his blanket off in his sleep, and if I didn't get it back over him fast enough, I was the one who paid.

That's why I never learned to sleep deep.

Adelaide made a sound low in her throat and pulled me hard against her.

Roman just looked at the bruises. Something moved behind his eyes that I couldn't read, and wouldn't be able to for years.

They told me later.

My mother was dead.

She'd died pulling Roman out of a kidnapping. They said her stomach had been punched through in three places, and she bled out from all of them.

And with the last breath she had, she didn't ask for a doctor. She asked Adelaide for a promise.

One that would reach all the way into the rest of my life.

Adelaide pressed something cool into my palm and folded my fingers over it. A bracelet, old, the kind that gets passed down. Her family's.

"Take it, sweetheart," she said. "It's a promise."

They stayed the whole summer. The family was in too much turmoil to take me with them yet, so Adelaide did the next best thing. She faced my father with a voice gone to ice and told him money would come every month, on one condition. I was to be kept whole. If she ever came back and found a fresh mark on me, or found me living the way I'd been living, the money stopped that day.

For a little while, on my dead mother's terms, I had good days.

I opened my eyes.

The sleep Roman once taught me how to have, he'd shoved back into the dark with his own two hands.

He went still when he saw I was awake. He'd been moving carefully, like he'd hoped to be gone before I surfaced. When it didn't work, he frowned, pulled the door shut, and stopped bothering to be quiet.

"You're up. You should've slept longer."

I looked at him and nothing moved in my face. I shook my head.

He sat down next to me. His eyes went to the bruise at the corner of my mouth, the one I got when I fought back against the man's hands and someone slapped me hard enough to leave a mark.

We looked at each other and neither of us said a thing.

The truth is, I wanted to. I had the question loaded and ready. I'd had it ready for weeks.

Why are you doing this to me. You were the light that came into the dark of my life when I had nothing left. You're the one who said you'd protect me for the rest of it.

I held his eyes a long moment.

Then I decided he didn't get to hear it.

Chapter 4

After that first summer, Roman came back every break, winter and summer both.

I got color in my face. My hands stopped being so rough. My mother had been a beauty, and I'd gotten her face and then some, and without the old life grinding me down day after day, I came up prettier than I had any right to be. I turned into a girl people looked at twice.

That was the first time Roman looked at me and I felt the heat climb my neck.

"You know," he said, "my mom promised your mom she'd let you marry into our family."

His words went into me like a stone dropped in still water.

That water only ever moved when he came around. This sent it over the banks.

My hand found the edge of my sleeve and held on so it wouldn't do anything else.

The country sky that summer was the kind money can't buy you anywhere. A huge black sweep of it, packed edge to edge with stars. And under all of it the boy reached over, clumsy, and pulled me in against his side.

"It's almost over," he said. "Once my mom has full control of the family, she'll bring you home. We can't yet. Someone would hurt you to get to her."

That was the night I learned what their lives actually looked like.

Roman carried his mother's name, not his father's. Adelaide had married a man who turned out to be after her family's money, and when her own father died, the husband moved to take the whole estate.

She didn't fold. She put her name on her son, announced the divorce, and set out to leave the man with nothing. What followed got ugly.

The men who took Roman that day had been hired, in part, by his own father.

The summer we were sixteen, I caught something low and tired moving through his eyes for the first time. I reached up before I could stop myself and smoothed the crease between his brows.

"So your dad doesn't love you either," I said.

At least we each had a mother who'd give up everything for us.

At least we had each other.

"What are you thinking about?" he asked, finally breaking the quiet.

I shook my head.

The silence came back and stretched until I was sure he was done talking.

Then he looked off, away from me, and spoke slowly.

"If you didn't pick on Camille, they wouldn't have had to go that far to protect her."

I didn't move.

"Don't you think you should take a hard look at yourself, Nara? Camille's easy for people to love. You're not. The way this all turned out, some of it's on you."

And there it was, sitting plain in his eyes. Disappointment. In me.

He was right. I should take a hard look at myself. I should ask how I'd let myself become the kind of girl this happened to.

My mother bought this new life with hers.

It wasn't supposed to look like this.

When did the light start going out of him?

I can tell you the exact season. The New Year I turned seventeen.

The year Camille came home.

Chapter 5

Camille got taken to the city when she was small.

Her family was the first in our village to pack up and move there. They left like royalty. They came back like a cautionary tale.

I watched a man shove Camille out of a beat-up sedan into the road, cursing the whole time.

"Crying again. That's all you do. You cried the luck right out of me, you worthless little drain. You know I never lost a hand of cards before you came along?"

"Your mother took one look at me broke and ran off with another man. Didn't even take you. Left me the dead weight. So shut your mouth."

That was how I learned the shape of it. Camille's father was a gambler who'd struck it rich, gotten worse with money in his hands, and finally been cleaned out by people who saw a fool worth fleecing. Her mother, used to the good life, couldn't stomach the fall and left with someone who still had it. The city apartment went to auction against his debts. All that was left was that ugly car and a mouth that never ran out of cruelty.

That winter, Roman spent the New Year with me in the village.

On New Year's Eve, he was pulling me outside to light fireworks when we saw her. Camille, put out in the snow, shaking.

I knew that cold from the inside. Something in me bent toward her.

I went over and helped her up.

She'd been raised soft in the city, and pretty, and even wrecked like that there was something about her that made you want to gather her up and fix her. A lovely, breakable thing.

I didn't know my own kindness was the hand that pushed Roman the rest of the way into that breakable thing.

After that, he changed. I can see it clearly now.

He'd come back to the village and the first words out of his mouth would be a question about Camille. If he caught something flicker across my face, he'd backpedal, clumsy about it.

"Nari, don't read into it. I just... she reminds me of how you used to be. Every time I look at her I think about the first day we met. It's you I was hurting for."

Later he stopped bothering with even that thin excuse. There was just impatience sitting in his face.

"You're being small about this, Nara. Have things gotten so easy you forgot what you used to be? Where's your sympathy? She's pitiful. What is wrong with helping her?"

By the time Adelaide had both hands on the family and meant to bring me to the city, it was Roman who stepped in front of me.

"The family can sponsor one scholarship kid. It can sponsor two."

"Camille transfers with us. That part isn't up for discussion."

That was the moment it landed. Somewhere along the way, without my noticing, Roman had stopped being my light.

But I was still clawing to hold on.

"Sign this."

He held a document out at me out of nowhere.

I came up off the pillow and stared at him.

"You want me to drop the charges. Against the man who tried to rape me."

If Roman hadn't walked in when he did, there'd be no tried in that sentence.

He wanted it handled quietly. I hadn't really been harmed, had I.

He wouldn't quite meet my eyes.

"If the charge sticks, it pulls in Brett and the others. And Camille's been crying nonstop. She keeps saying it's her fault. That she dragged everyone into this."

Chapter 6

So that was the math. Camille's tears could wipe out everything that had been done to me.

The last of the hope I'd been propping up went out.

Every excuse I'd built for him, that he was only looking at Camille and seeing the girl I used to be, came down at once.

I made myself say it plainly. Roman had forgotten the promise the boy made me a long time ago. He wasn't the light. He was the hand that put me in the dark.

Whatever was holding me steady gave out, and I started to shake and couldn't stop. My hands clamped down on the blanket, and a sharp sting shot up the back of one of them.

"Let go. You're pulling the line."

His voice, flat and serious, dragged a thread of calm back into me. His hand came down over mine, and there was none of the old safety in it. Just cold. And grief.

I let go of the blanket. I looked at him, quiet now.

"Roman. Do you understand that I was almost raped."

The weight of it got through. For one second something like guilt crossed his face.

For exactly one second.

Then he talked himself back out of it.

"You said it yourself, Nara. Almost. You're fine now, aren't you?"

"Camille only got to the city because of you, and she's been miserable about it. My mother gets these fixed ideas in her head. She thinks bringing Camille along was unfair to you, so she bends over backward for you and overlooks Camille. If I don't put some protection around her, what do you want, for them to chew her alive? Yes, I told Brett and the guys to look out for her. I didn't think they'd take it this far. But be honest with yourself. You're not blameless here. If you'd been kinder to Camille, put in a good word with my mother now and then, she wouldn't be so desperate for cover."

He let that sit, and got surer of himself as he went.

"This is on you, Nara."

"I'm giving you my word. Nothing like today happens again."

"Sign the statement. You have to. Or Camille gets hurt."

I looked at him, and the last thing in me that still answered to the word love quietly went out