Page 75 of Solstice

“Of course it was Mother.” Kit rolled her eyes. “Who else has the connections to hire someone that good? I tried to find them, but they covered their tracks. No one is better than me, Ivy. No one.”

I squared my jaw, the fire in my belly surging at the mention of the breakup. We’d never found out how it happened or who prevented us from seeing each other. I thought about sifting through my mother’s memories, but what good would that do?

If I found out she did it, I’d hate her, but I wouldn’t even be that surprised. If it wasn’t her, then it doesn’t change the fact that it happened and I might never know who did it. All my skepticism had done was make me suspicious of my own family, and that had always been the case with Evelyn. I hated to hear that she’d done the same thing to my siblings. Someone had to take a stand. Someone had to stop this.

I balled my hands into fists on the table.

“What if it was the fairies?” Abigail raised her eyebrows and looked between us.

“We don’t know it wasn’t,” I agreed. “But it doesn’t matter anymore. The wedding is happening, no matter what.”

“I’m sorry, Ivy.” Abigail put her palm over my knuckles, genuine sympathy in her gray eyes. “If it’s any consolation, it doesn’t matter who she arranges for me to marry; it won’t make me happy.”

“None of us are happy, Abigail,” Kit said. “That’s the price we pay to live the life we do.” She almost said it with a straight face, and I laughed because I’d been drinking and needed something to do besides cry.

The front door burst open, startling me, and Lex rushed through, slamming it shut behind him. I only caught a glimpse of his face as he stormed up the stairs, but with his tense jaw and piercing eyes, he was pissed.

“Lex?” I called after him, gesturing for my sisters to stay there. My phone buzzed in my hand, flashing Giana’s name, and I realized she had called me six times already. I sent her to voicemail again in favor of chasing down my fiancé in his room. “Lex?”

“Shit.” He stormed around his space, digging through bookcases, toppling things to the ground while he rummaged through the shelves. My gut clenched. Something was wrong. “Fuck!”

“Lex.” I went closer to him, stopped his pacing, and put my hands on his face, forcing him to look at me. “What happened?”

He froze, his mouth open. Of the two of us, I was usually the one that flew into a blind panic. I usually assumed the worse until I knew the outcome, but his eyes were so wide, I could see whites around the pupils.

“You haven’t checked your phone, have you?”

“No, why?”

It buzzed again, this time flashing my mother’s name. I ignored it.

“Ivy…” He shook his head and sighed, pulling up something on his phone before handing it to me. “It’s bad.”

A headline onThe Puckstopped me.

Breaking News: Congresswoman Ivy Washington and Princess Miriam Stuart spent Christmas together at a secret romantic hideaway. “The tryst goes back to boarding school,” our source says. “They were together when they were roommates at Mount Oberon.” Representatives for Miss Washington and the royal family could not be reached at this time.

Below that was a picture of the two of us, naked in bed together. It was censored, of course, but undeniably us.

I remembered the shot. Lex had taken it Christmas morning when it was just the two of us and I’d fucked her before anyone else woke up. The look in my eyes screamed love, and hers equaled mine in intensity. It was more than that. These were artistic shots that bordered on pornography. What we were doing couldn’t be confused. And there it was…right on the internet, for all the world to see.

Then the realization hit.The whole world had seen these pictures.

My mother. My father. My siblings. Her grandparents.

My heart pounded behind my ribs. My clothes felt too tight. I couldn’t get enough air into my lungs quickly enough. My phone vibrated again.My mother.

“It’s all over the place.” Lex went back to the shelves, finally finding what he was looking for, a folder of pictures from our time at our cabin. “There’s only one way someone could have gotten ahold of them.”

“You printed them out?” I balked.

“Yes,” he said. “These are the only copies. I deleted the digitals because I thought we’d get hacked. Again.”

“Fuck!” I ran my hands over my face, ignoring the eighth call from Giana, the tenth from my mother. “Fuck, Lex. This is bad.”

“Yeah, no shit.” He scrambled through them once. Twice. A third time. “They’re not here.”

“What?”

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