Chapter 4
Then he turned off the two-way radio.
Turned off.
He didn't want to hear anymore.
He didn't want to hear my breathing, my silence, or the color draining from the sister he'd given up beneath a criminal's blade.
Emily was loaded into an ambulance.
Through the crowd, I saw her lying on a stretcher under a blanket, pale and fragile, looking every bit the pitiful little victim.
But her eyes were still on me.
Across the crowd, from dozens of yards away, she looked straight at me.
This time, she wasn't smiling.
Her expression looked complicated: pity, guilt, unease.
If I hadn't seen that smile a moment earlier, I might really have believed she was kind.
But now I knew.
I knew what was hiding under that pretty face.
A snake.
A snake that had lived under my family's roof for eighteen years, eaten my family's food, worn my family's clothes, and enjoyed everything that should have been mine.
And now, she had stolen my last chance to survive too.
And she'd done it so beautifully, so gracefully, so cleanly that no one could point out a flaw.
She had even "asked" James to save me first.
How kind of her.
How selfless.
How fake.
"Kid," the kidnapper whispered in my ear. His voice wasn't shaking anymore. It had gone strangely calm. "See that? Nobody wants you."
I said nothing.
He continued, "James picked her, not you.
"Your mom said you're blessed.
"Your dad keeps yelling, 'What do we do?'"
His blade scraped my throat again, and another gush of blood spilled out. "No one's coming to save you now."
I looked at the ambulance in the distance. I watched Emily get lifted inside, watched the doors close, watched the red lights flash on.
Then I looked at the Carter family gathered around the ambulance asking over and over, "Emily, how are you?" "Emily, don't be scared." "Emily, we're all here."
No one turned back to look at me.
No one said, "Sophia's still there."
I laughed.
Not because anything was funny, but because I suddenly understood something.
I had never really been welcomed back into this wealthy family.
I had only been informed that the Carter family had found me.
Then I was told to show up for a family reunion gala.
Then I was kidnapped, together with the fake heiress.
Then I was abandoned, all in the name of fairness.
From beginning to end, nobody had ever asked what I wanted.
Whether I even wanted to come back.
Whether I wanted to forgive them.
Whether I wanted to accept them as family.
Whether I was willing to die in Emily's place.
"Take her," the kidnapper shouted to someone.
A van came screeching over, the side door slid open, and I was shoved inside. I slammed onto the floor of the van, smearing blood from my neck across the metal.
Before the door shut, I saw Charles finally look up.
His gaze crossed the crowd and found me.
His lips moved. He shouted something, but the van door slammed shut and I couldn't hear it.
I could only read his mouth. "Sophia."
He said my name.
After abandoning me, before the door closed, he finally said my name.
Too late.
The van pulled away. Through the blurry window, I watched the world behind me get farther and farther away.
The ambulance, the police cars, the crowd, the manor.
My parents, James, and the fake heiress who had stolen everything from me.
Everything was fading into the distance.
Shrinking into a dot, then a grain of sand, then a life that had ended before it ever really began.
I closed my eyes.
My neck was still bleeding, my whole body ached, but the worst pain wasn't in my throat.
It was in my heart.
The heart James had carved apart with the word fairness.
"Kid," the kidnapper's voice came from the front. "Do you hate them?"
I didn't answer.
"I'll remember it for you," he said. "If you survive, you can hate them nice and slow."