Page 49 of Sinful
I open my mouth to speak, but no words come out. It’s the first time in my life I’ve been rendered speechless.
“Will you two stop fucking about and show me who’s at the door?” Nix shouts out. I pull the door open slightly and step back. Dacre does the same.
Nix’s mouth falls open. Apparently I’m not the only one who’s speechless. When I turn to look at the woman at the door, she appears as shocked as the rest of us.
“Josh? So it is you. What are you doing here?”
“Sin?”
I don’t want to be the one to point out the obvious, but someone has to. “If this is Sin. Who the fuck have we had in our bedroom this past week?”
38
LAUREN
Iwas born Lauren Waldgrave. My father didn’t even give me a middle name. I often wonder if he only bothered to give me a first name because the midwife asked what it was. Lucy, born seven minutes before me, was afforded five names as benefitting someone in such a lofty position. Lucinda Alexandria Stephanie Julia Winscote Waldgrave. Our mother was Julia Winscote. She died somewhere in those seven minutes between Lucy’s birth and mine. I had to be cut out of her when her heart had already stopped beating, or at least that’s what Lucy was told. I’ll never know if my birth is the reason I’m blind or if I’d be blind anyway, but either way, it was pretty obvious I wasn’t going to be the perfect progeny my father was expecting. While Lucy was shown to the media and afforded every luxury, I was put in a basement. For the first five years of my life, I was looked after by a nurse of some sort. I never knew her name. In all those years, I didn’t hear her utter a single word. My entire life until that point had been in complete silence. My life changed when Lucy took over my care. I can’t even imagine how awful it must have been for her to first discover she had a twin and then discover that she was still alive. I imagine I was quite a shock to her. I couldn’t see, I didn’t speak. I didn’t know how to. Back then, I didn’t know how to do a lot of things.
Over the years, she taught me to speak, told me about the world. She helped me make sense of who I was. On my tenth birthday, she presented me with a television set. One of the staff had thrown it away because it was broken, but it was only the screen that didn’t work. The sound worked perfectly. From that day on, my world widened some more. Lucy came to play with me every night without fail, telling me of the parties she’d attended, the things she’d done. I loved her, but I was jealous. She was living a life I had never known and would never know. As we got older, she had to go away for days at a time. Sometimes a week or more. Those were the darkest days. I had no access to food, so she would leave me what she could. No one else knew I was down there in my own little world. No one except my father and I couldn’t expect him to feed me. I often wondered if he’d forgotten about my existence at all. I was the family’s darkest secret. As Lucy blossomed, I stayed the same, living my life through the characters on the TV. They were all I knew of the outside world. And when Lucy came to visit, she’d tell me stories. Stories about her life. About a boy called Joshua. Soon, my TV became less important as waited eagerly every night to hear what she and Josh had been doing. Hearing about Josh was the highlight of my day. In time, I grew to love him as much as Lucy did. And then one day she stopped talking about him. When I asked, she changed the subject, just like she often changed the subject when talking about our father. She changed. Oh, she still visited all the time, but for the first time in our lives, she kept things from me. Things I knew were dark, bad. I began to associate Josh with the change in her and though I once loved him; I began to hate him, too. A boy I’d never met and would likely never meet. The years drifted by. We both got older. Lucy had to leave the house more often. I knew it wasn’t her fault. Our father pushed her out into the world. As she became more famous, I once again began to live vicariously though her, waiting impatiently for the breadcrumbs of her life she’d feed me, whilst barely surviving on more than breadcrumbs to eat. She sneaked what she could down to me, but the whole house had security watching her and there was only so much she could do. Until I came to the apartment with Josh and his friends, every meal I’d ever eaten had been a leftover of someone else’s. She only took jobs that were short, or were close enough to New York to be able to get home to me. We spent hours, days, weeks, months, years planning our escape. Last week, we finally got our chance.
* * *
“Lucy?”
My heart stands still as I hear her voice. The other half of my heart. My twin. My entire world.
“Lauren!” I hear the tears in her voice. The whole world falls away as she bounds over to me. When she envelops me in her arms, nothing else matters. I’m whole again. I breathe her in, taking in the light scent of strawberry shampoo. She is all I’ve ever known and as I cling to her as she’s clinging to me, I feel her heart in rhythm with mine, the cadence of her breathing so familiar, the feel of her hair, the warmth and safety of her arms and I’m no longer scared.
She takes my hand and squeezes my palm three times, a throwback to the days when I couldn’t talk, when everything was terrifying. “Oh Lauren, I thought I’d lost you.”
“What did you do to her?” She’s no longer talking to me. The softness in her voice has fallen away, giving way to a sharp edge. I grip her hand, scared that if I let go, she’ll disappear again. I give her three squeezes of her palm with my thumb.
“Does anyone want to tell me what the fuck is going on?” Dacre.
“I told you all along we were being played.” Josh. Memories of last night jolt through my mind. For a short while, it had been like a fairytale. Josh had done things to me that no one had ever done before. All these men had, but it had been Josh that took my virginity. I’d enjoyed every second of it until after when he’d gone back to being surly and aloof, hating me as he had since the second I came into his life. Hating Lucy. I hadn’t second guessed it. Hadn’t asked him. What could I say that wouldn’t make me sound like the naïve child I still feel like I am? I’ve spent the last week hiding who I really am, trying so hard to be my worldly wise sister, and failing at every point, because I know nothing. I’ve experienced nothing. At least I hadn’t before this week.
“This is Lauren. My twin sister,” Lucy says.
“You’re an only child,” Josh says. I hear the uncertainty in his voice. Underneath the anger and bluster, he’s as confused as the rest of them.
“She’s a fucking twin!” Nolan remarks, the excitement evident in his voice. I hear him clap his hands together. “Twice the fun. I’ve never had a twin before.”
Lucy lets go of my hand and suddenly I’m untethered again. Floating. Scared. I breathe deeply to stop the panic that’s beginning to well up. Then there’s a warmth in my hand. Fingers wrapping in mine. Not Lucy’s.
“If you have touched her, I swear to god, I’ll rip your throat out. That goes for all of you.”
I grip the hand tightly. I already know who it belongs to. Lucy is going to turn away from Nolan at any second and see the love of her life holding my hand. I want to let go of Josh, but I can’t. I’m torn between my twin and the man who showed me who I really am.
“Lauren. What did they do to you?” She must have seen that I’m holding Josh’s hand, but her voice is calm. Soft.
I shake my head. I can’t put it into words what they have done to me. They’ve abused me, belittled me, hurt me, fed me, saved me. They’ve shown me a life I never knew existed.
“Us?” Josh shouts out. “We saved her from your fucking father. What have you done to her? Where has she been hiding for all of these years?” His fingers tighten around mine as though he needs to defend me against her. He’s crazy if he thinks Lucy would ever hurt me.
“There’s no mention of a Lauren Waldgrave anywhere in connection to Lucinda or Peter Waldgrave on the internet,” Dacre pipes up.
“No, there wouldn’t be,” Lucy says, her tone hard and sharp. “She doesn’t fucking exist. You never met her, you never saw her and you need to forget the name Lauren Waldgrave. Come on Lauren, we’re leaving.” She takes my hand in hers and pulls. I yelp as I’m pulled between her and Josh.
“Our girl is not going anywhere.”
