I choked up a mouthful of black blood. As the world dimmed, I heard Edith's vicious laugh cutting through the haze.
"Narelle Donaldson, you should never have come here to disrupt our household. Finn has treated me as his wife for years. If you showed up alive, how was I supposed to go on being the Lady of this house?!"
My daughter and I died like dogs. They rolled our bodies in reed mats and dumped us in a mass grave.
After I was gone, Finn wrapped his arms around a weeping Edith and murmured comfort against her hair.
"She's dead. Let it go. Even if she'd lived, I would've handed her divorce papers and told her to stay away from our family."
The meal I'd once given a starving stranger, the vows he'd sworn under open sky, all of it erased from his memory as though it had never existed.
I died with hatred lodged so deep it followed me into the dark. When my eyes opened again, it was the very day Finn inherited the title.
I threw the wild greens from my hands, sold the house for every coin it was worth, and carried my daughter to my father's ducal estate, where I fell to my knees.
"Father, I've decided to divorce my husband."
——