Chapter 6

Caroline's face turned an ugly shade of red. Her composure, usually so immaculate, cracked.

"Insolent girl," she hissed.

She walked over to an antique desk and opened a drawer. She took out a thin, leather-wrapped cane. It was an object of discipline from another era, a symbol of the Burke family's cold, unyielding tradition.

"I will ask you one more time," she said, her voice dangerously low. "Will you do your duty to this family?"

I stood my ground, my back straight. I just shook my head.

The cane sliced through the air. It struck my back with a sharp, stinging blow. Pain radiated through me, hot and immediate.

I bit my lip, refusing to cry out. I would not give her the satisfaction.

"Will you obey?" she demanded, her voice rising.

The cane fell again. And again. The sound echoed in the silent, cold room. My back was on fire. My legs trembled, but I forced myself to stay upright.

I could feel warm blood seeping through the fabric of my dress. My vision started to blur at the edges.

"Useless... ungrateful..." she muttered with each blow.

Finally, my legs gave out. I crumpled to the floor.

The next thing I knew, I was in a hospital bed again. The pain in my back was a deep, throbbing agony.

Cedric was there, his face a storm of conflicting emotions.

"Why didn't you call me?" he demanded, his voice tight with a strange mixture of anger and concern. "Why did you let her do that to you?"

A laugh, wet with tears, bubbled up from my chest.

"Why, Cedric?" I asked, my voice raw. "So you could check if my heart was okay? So you could make sure her punishment didn't damage your precious relic?"

He flinched as if I'd struck him.

This was it. I had nothing left to lose. My dreams, my memories, my family, even the skin on my body-he had taken it all.

"Cedric," I said, my voice suddenly clear. "There's something you need to know. The heart... it's not Fallon's."

A loud crash from the hallway outside my room drowned out my words. A food cart had overturned.

"What?" he asked, distracted. "What did you say?"

Before I could repeat myself, a nurse bustled in, apologizing for the noise. The moment was lost. The crucial, apathetic look on his face told me everything. He hadn't really been listening.

He helped me sit up, his touch gentle, but his mind was clearly elsewhere. The question was forgotten, buried under his immediate concern for my physical state.

He stayed at the hospital for days, a vigilant guardian. I watched him ignore a stream of increasingly frantic texts from Kortney. He was annoyed with her, but not for what she did to me. He was annoyed that her drama had led to me being in the hospital, my health once again "at risk."

One afternoon, a call came through that he couldn't ignore. An emergency at his London office.

"I have to go," he said, his brow furrowed. "I'll be back as soon as I can."

He gave the nurses a long list of instructions, his voice sharp and commanding. He touched my forehead one last time.

"Rest," he ordered.

The moment the door closed behind him, I felt a wave of relief wash over me. For a few hours, at least, I could breathe.

The peace didn't last long.

The door to my room slammed open. Kortney stood there, her face twisted with rage.

"You think you can keep him from me?" she shrieked. "He's ignoring my calls because of you!"

She stormed over to my bed and ripped the blanket off me.

"He's worried about your pathetic, weak body. Maybe if you were really sick, he'd finally get tired of you!"

She grabbed my arm and dragged me out of the bed. I was weak from the beating, and I stumbled to the floor.

She saw my hands, delicate and pale, the hands of a designer. Her eyes, full of a venomous jealousy, landed on a heavy water pitcher on the bedside table.

She picked it up.

"Fallon was an artist," she spat. "She was brilliant. You think you can be a designer? You think you can create anything beautiful?"

She swung the pitcher down.

It crashed onto my hand with sickening force.

I screamed as an explosion of white-hot pain shot up my arm. I heard the crunch of bone.

"This is for trying to take my place!" she screamed, her eyes wild. "This is for trying to be her!"

She raised the pitcher again and brought it down on my other hand.

Blood bloomed on the white hospital sheets. The sound of my own screams filled the room, distant and strange, as if they were coming from someone else.

The world dissolved into a haze of pure, unbearable pain.

The door was kicked open. Cedric stood there, his face pale, his eyes blazing with a fury I had never seen before.

Kortney dropped the pitcher with a clatter. Her face instantly crumpled into a mask of tearful innocence.

"Cedric!" she cried, rushing towards him. "She... she attacked me! I was just defending myself!"

She tried to collapse into his arms, using the same trick that had worked so many times before. She invoked her sister's memory, her voice choked with fake sobs.

For a moment, Cedric's eyes flickered with the old, familiar confusion. The ghost of Fallon held him captive.