Page 59 of Break Me: Smith and Belle

“Margot did love to play games.” Nora nodded. “I read her journals. I know that. She began a game with you. Hammond asked her to. But she lost.”

“She died,” I corrected her. I wasn’t certain there was a point. Nora was insane. I wasn’t going to reach her. I wasn’t going to change her mind.

“She lost!” Nora screamed and there was a flutter overhead as some dark, winged creature flew into the night. “Because she forfeited the game. She fell in love with you. She had everything she could want and so much more waiting for her. Hammond told her she had to stay, but you kept breaking her heart. She couldn’t do it anymore.”

“She didn’t love me,” I repeated feebly.

“No, Smith, you didn’t love her,” Nora said.

I knew she was right. I just couldn’t admit it.

“I would never have hurt her.” I was responsible for marrying a woman I didn’t love, but I’d stood by her. We’d taken lovers with each other’s approval. We’d made a perverted version of a marriage work. Our arrangement seemed fine. I’d never really understood why it all fell apart—why she left that night.

Until now.

“So, I decided to return the favor—for my sister, you see,” she continued. “Hammond kept a close eye on me all those years. I didn’t have a big sister to do that anymore. I didn’t have someone to protect me. My mother was never the same after Margot died. You never even bothered to check on either of us. Hammond had to do that. He took care of us. “

My stomach roiled, understanding too well what she meant. After my father’s death, Hammond had groomed me—just as he had the rest of my family. It was Hammond’s gift. He could find the darkness hidden in anyone and dig it out like a pig trained to root out truffles. Where others saw sad stories, he saw potential. Because sadness could be twisted, especially if you dangled poison that looked like love.

“I’m sorry that he hurt you,” I said in a low voice.

“You hurt me,” she spat back. “When you took my sister and used her. When you broke her heart. When you barely acknowledged that she died. Because once she was gone, Hammond showed me how the world worked.”

I knew that lesson all too well.

“Imagine my surprise when Hammond told me you’d fallen for the woman he sent you—the woman you were meant to use just like Margot was meant to manipulate you. But you fell for her. I’d read Margot’s journals, so I didn’t believe it. You weren’t capable of love. She knew it. She was sure of it. I drove to London from university and followed you both. And he was right! You did love this replacement. You didn’t even remember Margot or how much she loved you.”

“I moved on. That’s the benefit of being the one left alive.” It was a lesson she needed to learn next.

“For a while, I thought Hammond was going to deal with you—and then he didn’t. That was a disappointment. I wish I knew who killed him, I would send them a thank you card. He was useless in the end.”

“And you were free,” I reminded her. “You could be free now. Go back to school. Move on with your life, like Margot would have wanted.”

“Like she would have wanted?” Nora shook her head, sending her dark hair rippling over her shoulders. “She only wanted one thing: for you to pay. She wrote about it over and over again. She wanted you to hurt like she did. She wanted you to know what it was like to live without love.” She paused for a moment and looked at me with round eyes, sparkling like the frost on the ground beneath us. “I didn’t get to know my sister. Not well enough. Not until I read those journals. When I did, I knew what I had to do. I had to take the love you’d found away from you. Just like you did to my sister. Until you had nothing left. Just like my sister.”

“So, I waited,” she continued. “I watched you get married and run around with your privileged friends, all while ignoring the lives you destroyed. And then Belle got pregnant and you got cold feet about those friends of yours. You started looking for a house. I needed to get you in place. I knew it would be easier that way, so I tipped off the estate agency about Thornham. It passed to a trust after the old owners died. They couldn’t list the property—not with its reputation around town. And not many people want to live like this anymore. But I knew you. Your bird needed a gilded cage. Then, once you were where I wanted you, I moved heaven and hell to get that interview with the agency. I read everything I could about Belle and her fashion empire. No one else was going to get that job. I wouldn’t let them.”

“How did you even know about Thornham?” I couldn’t understand how everything led back to Nora. She was crazy—that much was clear. But she didn’t have Hammond’s resources or information network.

“A year after my sister died, I was committed to Brighton Sanatorium—”

Everything clicked into place. She’d been able to move heaven and hell as she said, because she’d already faced hell once.

“Everyone knew that story there. It was the warning cry. Get better or you’ll wind up like her, stuck in your room, talking to the walls. She got out one day and screamed about Thornham and ghosts, and I never forgot that. She made it sound like the mouth of madness. When you decided to move to the country, I looked it up. I knew it was just the place for you, Smith,” Nora grinned wickedly.

“You couldn’t have known we would come here.”

“Hammond told me once that there’s two parts to laying a trap,” Nora said. “First, you come up with the snare. Thornham was my snare. It was everything you were looking for, but you kept going back to fucking London. So I had to figure out how to do the second thing he told me. He said you could wait forever for your prey to cross your trap, or you could send them running in its direction. I remembered that Margot wrote about the bullet you carried with you. The one you were saving to kill your father’s murderer. So I sent you both a little present for the new baby.”

“You sent the bullet?” How much time had we wasted searching for connections to MI-18? I should have seen the bullet as the clue it was: this had always been about me—about my past.

“I needed you to leave London. I needed you to call me to come help with the baby.”

“And Belle needed you, but you betrayed her.” I needed something to fight back with.

“Oh, she did most of the work herself at first,” Nora said. “Credit where credit is due. She was so emotional and useless. It was pathetic, but you both just lapped up whatever help you could get. When she started acting crazy, you believed she was.”

“I never—”