The Billionaire's Broken Stand-in

Make her stop. I don't care how you do it.

And if you can't, don't make me do it for you.

I chased Lennox Sinclair for four years. He got tired of me. So he handed me to my own family and told them to fix the problem.

Pills. Hypnosis. The shocks.

They worked.

I forgot what it felt like to love him. After a while his face went soft at the edges too, the way a name does when you stop saying it out loud.

Now I leave any room he walks into. My mother taught me that much. That man is not someone people like us get to cross.

So when I caught him kissing my sister, I don't know what came over me. I took out my phone and took the picture.

His eyes lifted. Cold, with something violent moving under the cold.

I backed into the wall. The words came out in pieces.

"Sorry. I only meantyou two look perfect together. Like something out of a fairy tale."

He never lets anything show. Everyone says so.

His eyes shook.

Chapter 1

Ever since they brought me home from overseas, my head feels like someone walked through it while I was out and moved all the furniture an inch to the left.

Something is wrong with me. Not tired-wrong. Someone-was-in-here wrong, and I can't tell you who.

I sleep through most of the day. I lose the thread of my own sentences. Some mornings I stand in the kitchen and can't remember whether I've eaten.

My mother has an answer for all of it.

"You've been a lazy little thing since the day you were born," she says, smoothing my hair. "Not disciplined, like your sister. Everyone's body is different, sweetheart. If you're sleepy, sleep."

She says it so gently. She says it every single time.

I poured myself a tall glass of black coffee. Nothing happened. I pressed two fingers hard into my temple, like I could push the fog back by hand.

The front door chimed.

"The eldest miss is home," the housekeeper called out. "She's brought Mr. Sinclair."

My parents lit up like someone had thrown a switch behind their eyes. My father was already moving toward the door. My mother started after him, then stopped short, as if she'd just remembered I was in the room.

She turned to me, apologetic. "Seri, you"

I nodded before she had to finish. I'm good at this part.

"I know. Mr. Sinclair doesn't like me. Genevieve's engagement is what matters. I'll go up. I need to sleep anyway."

The relief that crossed her face. She even smiled at me.

I'd made it three steps up the stairs when I remembered the coffee. I wanted to try one more cup. I turned around.

And looked straight into a pair of cold eyes.

I didn't decide to run. My body decided for me. I forgot the coffee, forgot the stairs, and then I was just moving, fast, like something would end me if I were slow.

I made it to my room. Locked the door. Dragged the desk chair under the handle and sat down on the floor with my back against the wood until my heart climbed down out of my throat.

I can't tell you why. I only know that when I see Lennox Sinclair, one feeling arrives ahead of all the others.

Fear.

My mother had an explanation ready for that, too. He's a born predator, top of the food chain; anyone would feel small next to a man like him.

"Especially a born little nobody like you."

Stay out of his sight, she told me. "Mr. Sinclair has no patience for girls who look sweet and have nothing behind the eyes. His attention only stops on someone polished. Someone like your sister." She took my hand. "Do you understand what the Sinclairs are? If this family ties itself to that name, we're set for three generations. Be good, Seri."

I'm very good.

Every time he comes, I'm gone before he can see me. It makes my mother happy. Sometimes she pats my head. That's the best thing I get, so I keep it somewhere careful.

I never told her she didn't have to ask. I'd have hidden from him on my own.

Something about him settles on my chest like a hand closing slow. There's an ache underneath it I've never had a name for. Sour. Old.

Downstairs, everyone was laughing.

I fell asleep inside the sound of it.

When I woke, the light had gone gray. Evening. The house was quiet. He must have left.

I was starving.

I went down barefoot in my white nightgown. The floor was cold, and the cold opened a small clear window in my head. I stood at the counter, warming a slice of bread.

The study door opened.

Lennox Sinclair stepped out in a sharp dark suit. Under the low gold light every line of him looked carved, deliberate. Beautiful the way a verdict is beautiful, a breath before it lands on you.

And cold. Cold in the face. Cold in the eyes. Even the gunmetal links at his cuffs caught the light like something that had never once been warm.

The whole long room lay between us.

His gaze slid the length of it and stopped on me.

Chapter 2

His mouth set into a flat line.

The weight of it crossed the entire room and landed on me.

I came back to myself a second too late. I was already under the dining table, arms over my head, hiding the way a child hides. Badly. In plain sight.

My sister came down the stairs light as a song.

She flew into him and caught his arm and swayed against it. "You're leaving already? You haven't even seen my new stills. Stay for dinner. For me?"

Genevieve is usually all cool distance. Right now she'd gone soft and sweet, her voice tipping up at the ends, pretty as anything. A bright bird with bright feathers and a trained little throat.

He didn't answer her. He was looking under the table. At me. The shaking one.

Her smile slipped. She caught her lip in her teeth. "If you're busy, another time is fine. Come on. I'll walk you out."

He didn't move.

The weight of him filled the room as though he hadn't heard a single word she'd said.

Her mouth opened. Nothing came out.

A long moment later, low: "Fine. I'll stay for dinner."

My father and my sister wore the same startled look in the same instant.

One corner of his mouth lifted, barely.

"What is everyone so afraid of?" he said. "She's forgotten all of it. Hasn't she?"

He crossed the room on those long legs and crouched down beside the table, the fabric of his trousers pulling tight over the muscle.

"Seri. Do you still know who I am?"

I dragged my eyes up to his, then dropped them. I couldn't hold it. I nodded, slow.

And then the tips of my fingers, the tips of my toes, went bright with pain. Needles, all at once. A body remembering something the mind won't.

I screamed before I knew I was doing it. Squeezed my eyes shut. Shook my head until the room smeared.

"Don'tdon't hit me. I don't know you. I don't know you."

Dinner was a strange, airless thing.

My parents worked the table hard, rushing to fill every silence. Lennox just ate, unhurried, every motion exact, like a man who had never once been told no. He gave them nothing to land on, and their brightness curdled into something close to embarrassing.

Genevieve sat black-faced and said nothing.

I didn't dare reach for a dish. I took small bites of plain rice and kept my eyes on the bowl.

When it was finally over, both my parents seemed to breathe again. I watched him rise to leave, and something surfaced in me, and before I could talk myself out of it, I called after him.

"Mr. Sinclair. Wait."

Every head at the table turned. His did too.

His brow drew together. He was already out of patience.

"Just one second. Please." I held my finger and thumb up, a sliver of air between them.

Then I ran upstairs and came back down with a tin box hugged to my chest.

The whole room watched me carry it in.

I worked the lid off and held it out to him.

"Mr. Sinclair. This is yours, isn't it?"

On top sat a dozen photographs of him. ID size, passport size. Anyone could see they hadn't come from anywhere ordinary. Some still wore the bite of an embossed stamp across a corner. Some had dried glue webbed across the back. Peeled, every one of them, off the surface of something else.

The Lennox in the pictures was younger. Something in his face still unfinished, before it set into what it is now.

Under the photos: candy wrappers. An empty cigarette pack. Pen cartridges scraped dry. One crumpled, graded test.

He looked at me, and his eyes could have set the box alight.

I made myself keep going.

"I found it in the back of my closet. I don't know who put it there. But I recognized your face." I swallowed. "It's yours. Right?"

Chapter 3

His eyes shifted, turning something over. Under that look my shoulders folded in.

"It's not mine," he said. "Throw it out."

"Oh. Okay."

I dropped the box in the wastebasket by the wall and turned for the stairs.

Then something dangerous moved into his eyes.

"Seri. You did that on purpose, didn't you." Not a question.

I didn't understand. "Did what?"

He looked at me like he could see straight through to the back of my skull, and the corner of his mouth curled.

"Nothing. Good performance. Don't bother next time. I'm not interested in watching."

Then he was gone.

My mother shut the door behind him.

Genevieve had been holding it in all night. She dropped her head onto the table and sobbed.

My father couldn't stand to watch her cry. In the end he couldn't hold his temper either, and his hand came across my face.

I didn't see it coming. I went down hard. The corner of the table caught my forehead.

The pain rang like a struck bell.

My mother wrapped her arms around Genevieve's shoulders, stricken, and turned on me.

"Seri, don't you dare blame your father for that. Tonight you have truly, truly disappointed this family."

"Have you forgotten everything I told you, over and over?"

"Why did you come downstairs? Why did you speak to him? Are you really that cheap?"

The cut on my forehead opened. A bead of blood slid down into my eye. The room went red and soft at the edges.

I pressed my hand over it and tried to explain. "I'm sorry. I thought he'd left. I didn't mean to"

Genevieve's hand shot out and twisted into my collar. Her voice tore loose.

"Running downstairs dressed like that. Bare feet, parading around in front of him. Hauling out that pathetic little box to get his attention. Seri, who exactly are you trying to seduce?"

"Do you have any idea who Lennox Sinclair is? Any idea what you are? How dare you even look at him."

"Do you understand that because of your little show tonight, I could lose him?"

"Can you not survive without a man? You'd go after your own sister's, would you."

The blood had reached my jaw by then. I was still holding the cut shut with two fingers, still saying I was sorry, to the people who'd opened it.

Then she threw the door open and walked out.

My mother grabbed for her. "Genevieve. Where are you going this late?"

Genevieve looked back at me, and her eyes were full of hate.

"This house has room for me or for her. Not both. I'm leaving."

A car engine turned over in the garage.

My mother let out a long breath. My father slammed a door somewhere deep in the house.

I made my voice small. "Maybe I should stay somewhere else tonight."

She hesitated. "Where would you even go?"

"A hotel. I lived in hotels the whole time I was abroad. I know how it works."

Back then, when I couldn't take the treatment anymore, I'd run the second I got the chance. I'd hole up in the cheapest motel I could find, hiding from whatever they had scheduled for me next.

Genevieve always found me fast. She always brought me back.

My mother was quiet for a while. Then she nodded.

"You were in the wrong tonight, so yes, go. When your sister cools down, I'll come bring you home."

The hotel.

I stood at the mirror and cleaned the blood off my forehead, careful.

The cut was bigger than one bandage could cover. But it was late, and I didn't dare leave the room to go buy gauze.

I never used to get enough sleep. Tonight, with the raw sting of it pulsing above my eyebrow, I couldn't drop off at all.

Chapter 4

I don't remember why they sent me overseas.

I only remember that, all our lives, Genevieve was smarter than me. Better than me. Wherever she went she seemed to give off light, and so my parents pinned their highest hopes on her.

She was a child model before she was anything else, and later she broke out wide on the strength of one persona: the beauty who was also top of her class. Ivy-bound, flawless, magnetic.

Me, I had nothing but a face that matched hers. Otherwise, useless.

So I understood why they favored her. I agreed with how they did it, funneling everything toward the daughter who could turn it into more.

But was that the reason they sent me away? That favoritism?

I remember swallowing pills by the fistful overseas, sitting through treatment that hurt, my mother's voice on the phone telling me it would make me smarter.

Funny. Since I came back, my head works worse than ever. I sleep too much. I'm slower at everything.

So which was it. Did the treatment fail, or did they just like me less now that I'd come home stupider than before.

In the daytime I drifted through the streets. As soon as it got dark I went back to the hotel and slept.

A week passed in that hotel and my mother still hadn't called me home.

I was out of money.

I texted her. The message wouldn't go through. She'd blocked me.

At noon I was sitting in the hotel lobby, staring at nothing, when I saw a striking couple across the floor, standing at the entrance to the indoor garden.

The man stood with his back to me. Broad, straight shoulders, nothing else I could read. The woman had curves and an elegant column of a dress, her face tipped up at him, smiling. I could only see half of her profile.

I shook my head, trying to bring them into focus. My head had been aching for days, and everything came to me through a film of fog. It only made the picture lovelier, somehow, softer at the edges.

I lifted my phone and took it.

And I had forgotten to turn off the flash. The shutter sound was cranked all the way up.

They found me fast.

The man's jaw went tight. The look he turned on me had nothing kind in it.

I watched the two of them start across the floor toward me and couldn't sit still in my own skin.

Then Lennox Sinclair and Genevieve were standing over me, looking down.

"Seri. What are you doing here?" His voice was as cold as ever.

I glanced at Genevieve and couldn't make myself speak.

He held out one long hand. "Phone."

I put it into his palm with shaking fingers.

The strange thing. He knew my passcode.

His thumb went to it without looking, the way you key in your own. Six digits I didn't understand myself. I'd run through every birthday in my family once, looking for the logic, and none of them fit. None of them were mine to know, apparently. But his hand knew.

He pulled up the photo. His eyes narrowed, and the danger came back into them.

"Why are you taking pictures of us? Seri. What are you trying to do to Genevieve. Are you trying to hurt her again."

I shook my head hard, so frightened I nearly cried. "No. I'm not. I'm not."

I know my sister is better than me. I am so ordinary that it never once occurred to me to take anything from her.

But my mother told me what happened. That I'd shown up at the premiere for Genevieve's new film, dressed to the nines.

A reporter said the two of us looked alike but carried it completely differently. Genevieve was cool, remote, untouchable. And I had something quick and strange and clean about me, something open. They said I had more range.

And the lead role Genevieve had locked down suddenly came loose.

In the end I didn't play it either.

But Genevieve lost her shot at the A-list.

Chapter 5

So she hated me. For stealing the room on purpose. For not being able to stand it when she shone.

I explained it a hundred different ways. No one believed a single one.

That day I hadn't been trying to take my sister's halo. I only wanted to watch her win. I'd spent every cent of my allowance renting a gown I couldn't afford, just so I wouldn't embarrass her. Instead I stood next to her and made her look like less.

I didn't do it on purpose.

No one believed that either.

The stretch of days that came after, when the whole family took turns telling me how badly I'd let them down. That airless feeling. Like a nightmare I'd do anything never to live again.

"Please believe me. I didn't." I caught his sleeve and begged.

"Please. I didn't. I didn't."

His jaw set. He opened his mouth.

"Seri. Are you still putting on a show? You never lost your memory at all, did you