Hilda had tucked her in and gone, urging her to sleep early. Annabella lay beneath the covers, turning restlessly, until at last she drew her knees to her chest and sat there, hollow and still, for a long while.

Even having come back — even with time itself reversed — she could not forget that scene. Could not forgive it. And as for the child with no name to be called by, she had no idea how one was even supposed to grieve something like that.

“I can’t. I… I cannot forgive the people who did something so monstrous.”

Where had it all gone wrong? If she were to trace it to its root, the first fault lay with Alexis — with the Crown Prince himself. No matter how much Delilah might have tempted him, if he had simply refused to do wrong, none of it would have happened.

“A little cut on the cheek.” Her voice was quiet and flat. “I should have split his heart open instead.”

She meant it. She still genuinely regretted that she had not managed to kill them both with her own hands when she had the chance.

Alexis bore the greater guilt — but Delilah was no less culpable, if anything more so. Both of them had dragged her into hell, and both of them deserved to answer for it.

Annabella turned her mind back to the first time she had ever laid eyes on those two — mother and daughter, the pair who had destroyed her.

‘Annabella, come here.’

Her father had been absent from the manor for a long time. When he finally returned and spoke to her in that grave, measured tone, something in her had felt uneasy without quite knowing why.

‘As you know, your mother was always frail — she died just three years after you were born. This house has been rather cold and empty ever since…’

No. Annabella had been happy here, under Hilda’s care. Of course it would have been better still if her mother had lived — but she had been happy all the same. That was the truth of it.

‘Recently I’ve been seeing a woman, through an introduction. She goes by the title of widow, but in truth she has never been married before.’

How terribly naive she had been then. She had rejoiced for her father — glad that he was finding happiness for himself. She had even felt sympathy for him, thinking how much it must have pained him to live with the absence of his wife all these years.

‘Ah, they’ve arrived. Come down to the drawing room.’

The first meeting took place on a rainy afternoon. Through the window, Annabella had caught a glimpse of a red-haired woman slapping the coachman across the face for splashing mud on her. The sight had been so startling that she’d pressed herself flat against the wall, forced herself to breathe, and pretended she had seen nothing.

‘Now then, Annabella — this is Lady Miranda. I hadn’t told you yet, but we are already engaged.’

No. Something was wrong.

But the red eyes of the woman on her father’s arm were already lit with the certainty of victory.

‘So you’re Annabella. How lovely to meet you.’

She had no standing to address a duke’s daughter by her given name alone — but the confidence of a woman who knew she was about to become a duchess brooked no such concern.

‘The duke and I have actually been together for several years now… but he always insisted you were still too young, and kept putting off a day like this.’

At those words, a flicker of discomfort crossed her father’s eyes. But Miranda only lifted her chin and tightened her grip on his arm, a slow, beguiling smile spreading across her face.

‘I can’t promise I’ll be a perfect mother — but I’ll do my very best. All right?’

She should have put a stop to it then.

No — even then it was already too late. Her father had long since fallen beyond reach.

What she learned later was worse still.

Miranda was not of noble birth at all — she came from the middling ranks of society, and had made no secret of frequenting the salons where wealthy gentlemen gathered, with evident purpose. It was at one of those salons, on some unremarkable afternoon, that she must have learned it: that the wife of the Duke of Lates — a man of great wealth and power — was with child, and that the pregnancy was so precarious the woman had not left her bed.

‘…So you see — Delilah is my child, and Miranda’s. In that sense, she is your sister, with the same

It took the mother and daughter less than a year to swallow the manor whole. Hilda had told Annabella the full truth of it once she was old enough — but sharp and precocious as she was, Annabella had already understood what it all meant long before then.

The magnificent father she had admired and looked up to was, in truth, a shameless man who had taken a mistress while his wife lay confined to her bed, unable to move for fear of losing their child — and had then, several years later, fathered a child with that mistress besides. And Miranda was nothing better than a high-class courtesan who had used her body to climb above her station.

‘Um… would it be all right if I called you Sister?’

They say the child bears no guilt for the sins of its parents. How naive Annabella had been to believe it. What innocence could possibly take root in a child born of such people, raised watching such people?

‘Oh — no, I’m sorry. That was presumptuous of me…’

‘No. We may have different mothers, but we are sisters all the same. You may call me that.’

That had been Annabella’s own failing. She had known she ought to draw a line. She had known those two were dangerous. And yet she had not acted — not firmly, not in time.

Ignorance, too, is a kind of sin. And that was the sin Annabella had committed.

And so, like a python unhinging its jaw, the mother and daughter had swallowed the manor — all of it, every last corner — whole.

‘Sister, you’re going to marry the Crown Prince one day, aren’t you?’

‘Yes, that’s right.’

Even they could not undo a royal betrothal. But it had never occurred to Annabella that they would stoop to something so brazen — seducing her husband by such vulgar means. And then going so far as to kill the child she carried.

‘Sister, I’ve come to help you. You must be having such a hard time.’

Delilah had used the pretense of sisterly devotion to worm her way in under the guise of attending to the pregnancy.

A woman who had come to wait on an expectant mother — arriving in the thickest petticoats, her face painted to the hilt. And still Annabella had been fool enough to fall for it. She had not known, not then, that the suffocating cloud of heavy perfume trailing behind that woman would one day close around her throat.

Delilah had shown her face for only the first few days, then taken up residence in the Crown Princess’s chambers as though they were her own — sleeping there, coming and going as she pleased, attending every party the palace had to offer.

Why hadn’t she seen it then? No — why had she ever trusted that man, the one she had called her husband?

She had trusted him. And because she had trusted him, she had lost the child she was carrying. Lost it before she could ever show it the light of the world.

For the sake of a sordid affair, the two of them had committed the unforgivable — and in sharing that guilt, had only bound themselves closer together.

“I never even gave you a name… I can’t even call out to you…”

Annabella murmured into the dark, heavy with grief. Somewhere in the manor right now, Miranda and Delilah were surely together, plotting, counting down to the royal wedding.

Miranda had begun by claiming the large guest bedroom and the drawing room — then, before long, had slipped seamlessly into the late Duchess’s own chambers, and handed the larger room she had vacated down to Delilah.

“Like that… one thing at a time… they were taking it all from the very beginning… and I never even noticed…”

If only I had been a little sharper. A little harder. Perhaps none of this would have happened at all.

But then — who could say. You may know the depths of a river, but you can never truly know the depths of a person. If Miranda had never come, some other woman might have found her way into the manor instead.

Annabella could not lift her head beneath the weight of regret and guilt. Tears fell in steady drops beneath the hands covering her face.

“Oh… my little one…”

All she had ever wanted was a husband who cherished her, children to raise, a life worth living. That wish lay shattered beyond repair.

Just then, a soft knock sounded at the door. Annabella quickly wiped her tears away with the sleeve of her nightgown.

“Miss…?”

Hilda had a perfectly comfortable room of her own to sleep in, yet she had chosen to take the adjoining chamber so she could keep watch over Annabella through the night as well.

“Were you crying again?”

“Hm? No. I just couldn’t sleep.”

Pretending to be asleep had never once worked on Hilda. Neither, for that matter, had pretending to be fine.

“What’s wrong? You’ve been so strange today.”

“I’m just unsettled. Pre-wedding nerves, probably. Nothing more.”

“But you were so happy about becoming Crown Princess.”

The Crown Prince was a sought-after prospect quite apart from his title — tall, strikingly handsome, impeccable in his manners and accomplished on horseback. That he happened to be the Crown Prince on top of all that only made him more so.

“Right now I’m not so sure.”

Hilda climbed up onto the bed with a worried look and settled beside her. In the faint darkness, she could make out the traces of tears Annabella hadn’t quite managed to wipe away — visible only because of Annabella’s old habit of sleeping with at least one lamp burning, ever since she was small and afraid of the dark.

“Are you certain nothing’s wrong?”

“I don’t know…”

So much had happened — but none of it had happened yet. Not here, not now. If she said she had traveled back in time, they would think her mad. And given her circumstances, anyone hearing it would likely add that she was a strange creature besides.

In the end, Annabella said nothing of it and reached for a different thread entirely.

“Hilda. Tell me about my mother.”

Hilda smiled, soft and quiet. It was a story she had been telling since Annabella was very small — and even now, grown as she was, Annabella still asked for it.

“The late Duchess of Lates, Lady Aubrey, was born the only princess of the Kingdom of Elaise, far to the east. A very small kingdom — but one where every soul loved their king and his family dearly, and lived with great contentment.”

“Yes, and then?”

She had long since memorized every word of it. But Annabella always wanted Hilda to be the one to tell it — because of the smile that came over Hilda’s face when she spoke of her mother.

“Princess Aubrey was the treasure of that kingdom. She had platinum hair that shone like moonlight — just as you do now, miss. She took that after Her Majesty Queen Grace.”

Annabella nodded at exactly the same part she always nodded.

“Though the Princess is gone, I’m certain the King and Queen still wish for your happiness.”

And just then, a thought moved swiftly through Annabella’s mind.

“That’s right… they’re still here…”

“Of course they are. Family is family, even when you don’t live under the same roof.”

“What are they like?”

“Wonderfully warm and cheerful, both of them. They’re royalty, but they don’t stand on ceremony the way you might expect — there are times it truly feels like coming home.”

Yes. Annabella had another family still.

“In truth, when Lady Aubrey passed, the two of them wished to take you back to the kingdom with them — but the Duke pleaded so desperately that they couldn’t bring themselves to do it, and so it fell through.”

There was a note of regret in Hilda’s voice too. If she had known the household would come to this, she would have said anything — done anything — to see Annabella go with them to the kingdom then.