Prologue
Rafe
I’m sitting in my father’s armchair, soon to be someone else’s armchair, watching men in high-visibility vests catalogue everything I’ve ever known.
I was never allowed to sit in his chair before. I wouldn't have dared. I may as well take the opportunity now the fucker is behind bars.
Ashford Manor. Twenty-three rooms, built in 1880 and renovated just last year with money that apparently didn’t belong to us. There’s a man with a clipboard standing in the library doorway, photographing the first editions. Another is in the dining room, wrapping crystal in newspaper. I can hear them upstairs, in the bedrooms, opening wardrobes that still smell of my mother’s perfume even though she’s been dead seven years.
It’s half past two in the afternoon. I’ve been sitting here for six hours. I haven’t eaten today. In fact, I haven’t eaten much of anything this week and my stomach won't stop reminding me. There’s no food left in the house; they took the contents of the wine cellar yesterday, and I watched the chef leave three days ago without being paid. No one’s being paid. There’s no money to pay them with.
Every account. Every holding. Every asset. Gone.
Someone knew where to look. Someone gave the prosecutors a complete financial map of the Ashford empire. Every shell company, every offshore account, every hidden penny my father thought he’d protected. They didn’t just stumble onto this. Someone handed it to them.
The man with the clipboard has moved to the drawing room. I can hear him on his phone: “Yes, two Damien Hirst pieces, authenticated. The crystal skull and the butterfly piece...” His voice fades as he walks away.
My father bought those years ago. I remember because Mum hated them. “Tacky nouveau riche nonsense,” she called them. She was right, of course. She was right about most things. I wonder if she ever suspected what he was doing.
Seven years of fraud. Billions in assets that belonged to other people. Pension funds, investment trusts, ordinary people’s savings. He took it, hid it, spent it. Bought houses and art and cars and privilege. Paid for us to attend Blackthorne, gave Charlotte her start in banking, bought the Ashford name its polish.
The Crown Prosecution Service filed charges four months ago. The trial was quick. The evidence was overwhelming. “Whoever got this did their homework,” my father’s solicitor said, looking through boxes of financial records that shouldn’t have been accessible. “This is comprehensive. Detailed. Almost obsessive.”
I remember thinking, “Obsessive. That’s the word I used about Kit at trial.” Funny how things work out.
The sentencing was two weeks ago. My father is sixty-one. He won’t ever be free again.
I don’t feel sorry for him. I feel numb.
Charlotte lost her job the day after his arrest. All those years at Sterling Capital, a VP position she earned through eighty-hour weeks and genuine talent. They called her in. “Your presence is creating difficulties for the firm. The Ashford association is... problematic.” She called me crying, and I had nothing to say. What could I say?
They expelled me from Blackthorne a week later. “Due to non-payment of fees and in accordance with college policy regarding criminal association...” The letter was so polite. So final. They renamed the Ashford Building within days. Erased us like we’d never been there.
People I’d counted as friends looked away. Pretended not to see. No one will associate with us now. The upper class protects itself, and we’re the liability.
Just like Kit was the liability for me.
There’s a particular kind of fear that comes from being intellectually inferior to someone you have power over. I felt it every time Kit spoke. Every time she solved a problem that even Marcus couldn’t solve, despite being two years ahead of her. Every time she looked at me with those analytical eyes, I knew she was calculating exactly how mediocre I was beneath the polish.
Blackthorne accepts brilliant poor students. It’s part of the brand: meritocracy, excellence, opportunity. They accept them, and then they give them to people like me. “Mutually beneficial relationships between scholarship and legacy students.” Mentorship. That’s what they call it officially.
When actually it’s a way to remind brilliant poor students that brilliance isn’t enough. That we’ll still own them. That they’ll still serve us.
Kit was assigned to me at the start of my third year. I saw her the first night: dark hair, a Northern accent she refused to soften, the kind of intelligence that makes the air sharper when she walks into a room. I wanted her immediately. Not sexually, or at least not just sexually. I wanted to own that intelligence. Control it. Make it serve me.
Even just thinking of her now, stirs something in me that I was never ready to address until, like a fool, I destroyed every chance of it. She had this scent, beneath the cheap soap, beneath the ever present exhaustion. Like lilacs and summer rain. If I close my eyes hard enough I can almost smell it.
Her eyes were always so bright and intelligent, no matter how hard I worked to quash it. God, what I'd give to see it again now. I should never have tried to break it. I should have helped it shine, but that would have meant acknowledging that she was never nothing. She was always worth more than I ever will be.
She cleaned my rooms at Ashford House. Made my bed, scrubbed my toilet, and organised my desk while I watched. She was efficient, thorough, and fast. She rarely complained, even though I could tell she hated every minute. I sometimes made her kneel, just because I could. Made her wait. Made her watch me enjoy things she couldn’t have. Called her “good girl” when she obeyed, and watched her jaw tighten.
And she’d be wet. So wet for me. Such a perfect filthy slut.
I told myself that meant consent. That her arousal was honesty that her mouth wouldn’t speak. That I was giving her what she secretly needed: the control, the degradation, the powerlessness. She was so brilliant, so competent, so in control of everything else. Maybe she needed someone to take that control away. Maybe that’s what her body was telling me.
I was lying to myself. I know that now. But I believed it then. I had to believe it. Because the alternative was facing what I actually was: a mediocre heir terrified of a brilliant girl who made me feel small just by existing.
She outperformed me in every way. Professors loved her. Dr. Whitmore called her work “extraordinary.” They said she was the best student they had taught in fifteen years. To my professors, I was... fine. Acceptable. Good enough because of my name, my father’s donations, my family’s history with Blackthorne.
Without the name, I was nothing. She was everything without any name at all.
That’s why I made her serve me. Not because she wanted it. Because I needed it. I needed to have power over someone who was better than me in every way that mattered.
I’d been drinking. The investigation stress, maybe, or just the usual sense of inadequacy I felt around her. I wanted... I don’t know what I wanted. To prove something. To take something.
I tried to force her.
She fought back. She pushed me off, hard enough that I bled. I was so angry that my fury became an entity that consumed me. My every thought was around punishing her for rejecting me. And so I did.
The trial was six weeks later. I testified perfectly. Made her seem obsessed, unstable, vindictive. A scholarship student who’d developed feelings for me and lashed out when rejected. The story was believable because it fit what people expected. What they wanted to believe about girls like her and men like me.
I thought it would feel like a victory. Instead, it felt like I tore away part of my soul I’d never recover.
The afternoon light is fading. The men in high-visibility vests have finished the ground floor and moved upstairs. I can hear them in my father’s bedroom now, the master suite with the four-poster bed and the view of the private garden.
I should leave. There’s nothing keeping me here. But I can’t seem to stand up.
Charlotte came by yesterday. She’s staying with a friend. Someone from school, not work, because all her work friends have vanished. She’s putting on a good front, but I can see the cracks. Ten years of her life, erased. Her career is completely destroyed. Because of our name. Because of our father. Because of choices we didn’t make, but we bear the consequences anyway.
“Where will you go?” she asked me.
I didn’t have an answer. I’m waiting for them to tell me to leave. Any day now. Then I’ll be on the street properly. Actually homeless. Not temporarily displaced, genuinely without anywhere to go.
“You can stay with me,” Charlotte offered. “Once I find a place.”
The men are leaving. I can hear car doors closing, engines starting. The house is silent now. Catalogued, photographed, scheduled for auction. I’m sitting in an empty room in an empty house.
I think about Kit walking out of prison. Walking out into spring sunshine, free, and finding out what’s happened to us. Will she smile? Will she feel satisfied? Will it be enough? Will she want to hurt me the way I hurt her?
And sitting here in the dark, in this empty house, waiting for them to take even this last space away from me, I realise something.
I’ll let her.
Whatever she wants to do to me, I’ll take it. Not because I’m noble. Not even because I’m sorry, though I am. I’m so fucking sorry it sits in my throat like glass.
I’ll take it because I earned it. Because she deserves it. Because maybe, maybe if I let her destroy me the way I destroyed her, it’ll balance something. Even the scales. Give her back some fraction of what I took.
Or maybe I’m just hoping that if I suffer enough, she’ll look at me again. Really look at me. See me. Want me.
That’s the pathetic truth. I destroyed her, and I want her to want me anyway. Want her to want me still.
