Page 84 of XV (Fifteen) (War of Roses 1)

Chapter 23

Robert Winthorp is my identity, and he never needed a shiny diamond trinket to prove it. He adorned me with blood instead. With wounds, and scars, and terrifying marks on my psyche that could never be symbolized by something as frivolous as a ring. So how ironic is it now that one of his is all I have left ofhim?

I can’t touch it. I can’t take my eyes off it, either. It speaks to me. I hear it hissing a vow to my very soul:I fucking own you, Elle.

A shadow falls over me, darkening the scarlet sheets clenched beneath my fingers.

“H-how?” I don’t even have to turn to know just who I’m speaking to. Mischa couldn’t leave me alone for long.

No, he couldn’t resist. He had to watch. Whether he saw Robert’s demise with his own eyes or not, it wasn’t enough. After all, he warned me himself: This…this is how he wants to see my husband die.

In my eyes.

“How did you kill him?” I rasp, repeating the question when he hasn’t given me an answer. I can’t look at his face. The ring has my sole attention. Even now, Robert commands obedience. “Tell me how—”

“Do you really want to know the answer?”

I flinch at something I find in his tone—mainly what I don’t: there’s no mocking in it. He’s tired. He’s on edge.He’s not lying.

“All you need to know is that the fucker’s dead, and you’re running out of time to decide whether or not you want to join him.”

My heart falters, but not out of fear. Burning tears well from my eyes, spilling down my cheeks as hot as blood. Are they for Robert? Maybe. Maybe not. Perhaps they’re more selfish than anything else. Ellen Winthorp dies in an instant and it hurts. There’s no one there to mourn her. Just a monster who watches her agonizing end without a shred of mercy to spare.

“Why?”

For once, I’ve given him a question he doesn’t know how to answer. “You know why—”

“No.” I shake my head, still transfixed by the tiny sliver of metal resting on the bed. “Not that. I want to knowwhy. Why you hate the Winthorps. Why you—”

“You have a lot of demands for a dead woman.” There’s nothing to temper the threat in his voice. His tone falls flat as the usual fire is extinguished from that piercing gaze. Left behind is a hollow mask, and for the first time, I’m faced with therealMischa: a creature without a shred of humanity to hide behind. His accent takes over. Was he even speaking English in the first place, or had I conjured up some semblance of intelligible words in the grated series of growled syllables? “I guess you’ve made your fucking choice.”

He advances a dangerous step, but I don’t cringe back. Not even when I focus my blurred vision in his direction and meet his gaze fully.

“Tell! Me! Why!” I hardly recognize the shouting woman who utilizes my body to speak. I’ve only heard her once before, the same night he went too far and slandered my mother’s name. “What did they do to you?”

“You want to know?” He snatches the bloodied cloth from his chest and throws it at me. Rage disrupts its aim and it smacks off the wall, inches from my head. Gritting his teeth against any pain, he wrenches his shirt over his head and turns, revealing the mangled flesh of his back. “You really want to know? Twenty-four years ago, your precious Robert and his fucking father had a plan to end the feud, you see. They meant to take my father but changed their target at the last minute. They took me and my mother instead. They locked us in a cage and placed bets on which death would matter more.”

His vile words paint the scene for me. I see it. I see him. He had to be young. Twenty-four years.

“Robert would have been a child—”

“A child?” He sneers at the word, meeting my gaze from over his shoulder. “I don’t think you’ve ever met a fucking child, Ellen Winthorp. They lined my mother and me against the wall of their fucking dungeon and told me to choose. Your child of a husband gave me my options, barely as old as I was.”

Eight, to be exact. Robert would have been eight. The Winthorps rarely displayed pictures of themselves as children, but I have no trouble imagining him: a beautiful boy with golden curls and soulless, brown eyes.

“He told me to choose who would die. Me or my mother?” Mischa’s voice deepens, straddling the rasping edge of a growl. “They wanted me to pick but she…she made the choice for them. She begged for my life. So—” He breaks off, staring through the walls of the manor and into the past. “They made her watch them carve their mark into my back.” He extends his arm behind him, tracing the rough tip of the scar along his spine. “They made her watch them beat me within an inch of my life. And then they gave her a gun and told her I would only live if she mademepull the trigger—”

I can’t hear this. My hands claw at my ears, but he’s there to wrench them away, ensuring I hear every word he has to say.

“Her fingers shook, but I was too weak to pull away. She died with her brains in my lap, you little cunt. And then I had to watch the rest of my fucking family, picked off one by one. You ask why I hated your husband?” He shoves me back so hard that I fall to my knees. “That is why. Butyoudisgust me more than that piece of shit. He knew what he was. You’re just a pathetic bitch, clinging to his shadow. So I’ll ask you now. Who do you want to be?” He drops something down in front of me. The knife, its edge mocking and bright. “Ellen Winthorp? Or the bitchhenever let you become?”

He kicks the blade closer to me when I don’t reach for it. Then he sinks down, caging my body against the floor with his own. Thick, wet fingers fist through my hair, using it as a tether to force me to face him.

I’m sobbing, gasping and moaning through waves of tears. For Robert? For me? There’s no end to the grief, yet it has no true purpose. It just consumes, like fire.

“Decide,” he snarls.

What?

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