Julia was shaking so badly that she was rocking his body as he looked over his shoulder and saw Dev standing several feet from the entrance to the roof, a gun in hand.

“You have no idea how long I’ve wanted to do that.” Dev lowered the gun. “Good thing I heard you all shouting.”

Lucian coughed out a harsh laugh. Hell, he’d just knocked Dev on his ass and his brother just saved Julia’s life and . . . killed their cousin.

Lucian’s mind was spinning.

Suddenly, Julia jerked back from Lucian. Her hands dug into his shirt. “Lucian, your sister—”

Dev shouted out a warning that ending in a grunt. A second later, his knees buckled and he fell forward, the gun slipping from his grasp. He went down and didn’t move.

Where Dev once was, Maddie stood, still as a wraith in the white nightgown Julia had dressed her in earlier. “You have no idea how long I’ve waited to do that.”

Chapter 31

Lucian was slow to rise. “Maddie? What did you . . . what did you do?”

“He’ll live. For now.” His sister knelt down, dropping whatever it was she used to knock out Dev with. She picked up the gun. “Is he dead? Is Daniel dead?”

When Lucian didn’t answer, she yelled, “Move! Move away from him.”

Reaching behind him, he felt Julia’s hand fold around his. He pulled her to her feet. They stepped clear of Daniel.

“Damn it,” Maddie cried as she reached his side. She knelt down, placing her hand on his chest. “Daniel. Babe.”

Lucian was in shock, absolute shock. “Maddie, you’re walking—you’re talking. I don’t—”

“You don’t understand. I know. I’m sorry. I really am.” She picked up Daniel’s limp hand and pressed a kiss to it. “I didn’t want you to see any of this. You weren’t supposed to. It wasn’t supposed to go down this way.”

Lucian was thunderstruck. “What wasn’t supposed to go down this way? What in the hell, Maddie? What’s going on?”

His sister straightened and she let her head fall back as she sighed. “I should’ve known Daniel would get himself killed. If he just . . . if he just kept his shit together this entire time, like I’ve made him do for years, this would’ve worked out, but no. The moment he showed up in this house, I knew he was going to screw everything up.”

“You . . . you’ve been with him this whole entire time?” Lucian asked, shocked into stillness.

“Yes,” she said, lowering her head. Wind picked up the long, blond strands, tossing them around her face. “Everything was fine. We . . . we were finally left alone and I was happy, but we just—we ran out of money. We had to do something.”

Shock gave way to repulsion as what his sister was saying began to click into place. “What do you mean?”

Julia’s hands pushed into Lucian’s back. “They were together. They were—”

“We were in love!” Maddie shouted. “I know you all probably think it’s wrong, but I don’t care. We loved one another! And all we ever wanted was to be together.”

Lucian’s stomach roiled.

“That’s all.” Maddie shook her head. “But you know Daniel. He’s so . . . so weak sometimes. All he had to do was trust me to take care of this, and then we’d be together again. That’s all he had to do. And now look at him?”

He didn’t need to look at Daniel. “God, Maddie, what have you done?”

“It’s not my fault!” she yelled. “He messed up and I knew he’d messed up when he showed up here. I knew it would only be a matter of time before he screwed up and it would all be over, so I had to fix this. We can still fix this.”

Reeling from the realization that his sister had been with their cousin, really been with him, and living with him this entire time, he felt sick to his stomach. “Tell me. Tell me what is going on here.”

Maddie glanced back at Dev and then exhaled heavily. “I was coming back because we needed money and I knew how we could get it—not just Daniel and me, but also you, Lucian. I knew what I could do, but . . . but it wouldn’t be easy, so I had to—”

“You had to stay away for ten years? Have me worried that God knows what was happening to you? Do you even know—” He cut himself off before he lost it. “Then you come back and you’ve been faking this illness?” His hands opened and closed at his sides. “Jesus, this was . . . Maddie, this is messed up.”

“Please, let me explain, and then you’ll understand. Okay? Please?” his sister begged.

There was no way Lucian was going to understand any of this, but he nodded, because he needed to try. He had to see what had driven his sister to this. He had to figure out how he could’ve never seen this coming when his brothers . . .

When his brothers had always been suspicious of Maddie’s return.

“I didn’t want to leave all those years ago, but I had to. I just wanted to be with Daniel, but I had to leave you.”

“Because I wouldn’t have accepted what you and Daniel were doing?”

“Because you probably would’ve killed him if you found out,” she said, and damn if that wasn’t the truth. “But I had to because . . .” She pressed her lips together as she stepped over Dev. Walking across the roof, she kept the gun aimed at them until she reached the silver vase Dev filled with fresh flowers. She stared down at it for a moment. “I loved Mom. You know that, right?”

A whole new horror filled Lucian.

“But she found out about Daniel and me,” Maddie said quietly. “She was getting printouts of my texts and IMs. She caught us together.”

“Oh God, no,” Julia whispered, wrapping her arms around Lucian’s waist.

“We were up here when she told me that she knew that Daniel and I were together and that it was wrong. I already knew it was wrong. I’m not stupid, but it didn’t change how I felt.” Sniffling, she reached up, wiping under her eyes. “She forbade me to see Daniel, told me that if I didn’t obey her, she would tell Daniel’s father and I just . . . I don’t know what happened. We were yelling at each other, and I just wanted her—wanted her to stop and be quiet, but she wouldn’t and it just happened.”

“No,” Lucian said. His heart was breaking. “No, Maddie.”

She lifted her gaze to the sky. “I pushed her and she . . . Mom just lost her balance. It was an accident, Lucian. I didn’t mean to. It just happened.”

Everything. Everything just stopped inside of Lucian. His mother hadn’t killed herself? It had been Maddie? This entire time it had been her?

Julia’s arms tightened around his waist just as he swayed. His feet—his world was unsteady, off-kilter.

“I had to leave,” she continued. “So I went to Daniel. I told him what happened, and he took me to his father’s lake house. The one they never go to. I . . . I stayed there with him. I was never going to come back. You would never have to know the truth. I was going to stay away, but . . . but we ran out of the money his father left him and . . . we needed money to survive. So I had to come home. I had to . . . I had to secure our future.”

Lucian was numb. If Julia hadn’t been holding him up, he’d be on his knees.

“I had a plan, because I knew the truth. I knew the truth. I was going to come back and pretend to be sick. It would give me a chance to find mother’s diary.”

“That’s why Daniel asked us to go through her stuff?”

“That’s when the plans changed.” She dragged her hand over her head. “Daniel wasn’t supposed to be here at all—not then. I needed time to get into her room and her diary, because there was a key I needed to get to the papers.”

“What papers?” Lucian demanded, vaguely remembering seeing a key hooked to the journal Julia had found.

“The proof,” Julia said.

What in the hell were they talking about?

Maddie nodded. “The proof—the DNA tests that Mom had done when we were just kids. She knew—she told me, Lucian. She told me the truth and asked that I not tell anyone, and I listened to her. I kept that secret and in the end she still ruined everything!”