Chapter 1

After my sister ran from her wedding and died at sea, my parents were terrified the Barnes family would blame them, so they pushed me, the girl who looked seventy percent like her, into the wedding car.

On the wedding night, Mortimer Barnes lifted the veil full of anticipation, and the second he saw my face, his expression changed.

When he demanded to know what was going on, my parents wept and shoved the whole thing onto me.

"It was Kate Sullivan's vanity that got her sister killed!"

"Poor Tilly. Right up to the end she kept sending messages saying Kate was her only sister, begging us never to blame her!"

Because of my sister's dying words, Mortimer accepted the marriage, and then spent the next seven years forcing me to live as her shadow.

If I couldn't master her way of dressing, he made me kneel on broken porcelain all night.

If I couldn't do her favorite hairstyle right, he refused to let me eat for three days.

My sister loved spice like her life depended on it, so Mortimer forced me, with my bad stomach, to eat down an entire plate of ghost peppers.

A week before my thirtieth birthday, I bought my own favorite perfume, secretly dabbed a little on my wrist, then threw it away, guilt-stricken.

Even so, Mortimer found out, and he dragged me into the bathroom and scrubbed me down three times with a steel-wool pad.

"You're really that vicious. It wasn't enough to get Tilly killed. Now you want to erase the only trace of her that's left?"

Mortimer made me kneel in the snow before my sister's portrait and recite her list of likes and dislikes over and over.

My knees went numb with cold, and looking at that face in the photo, the one that was seventy percent mine, I suddenly smiled.

I wanted to be myself again.

Before I died.

...

The second before the cold knocked me out, Mortimer had someone carry me back to the room.

Even indoors at seventy-eight degrees, buried under a dozen layers of down, I still shook with cold.

My mother came to see me and caught the wrongness in one look. She stepped over and threw back the blanket.

The moment she saw my legs, already frozen purple, she slapped me hard across the face.

"Useless! We married you into the Barnes family so you'd win Mortimer over, not so you could play the martyr!"

"Look at the state of you. How is this worth all the trouble we went to?"

Win him over? I laughed out loud.

Seven years ago, on the wedding night, the moment Mortimer discovered the bride had been switched, he took me straight to the Sullivan house to demand an explanation.

But my parents didn't so much as flinch. They laid all the blame on me.

They even produced forged text messages, lying that my sister's dying wish was for them to spare me.

For her sake, Mortimer choked down the marriage to me, and he loathed me for it.

He forced me to mimic every move my sister made.

The slightest deviation, and the punishment was hell.

Seven years. Not one day of it out of the nightmare.

Even in my sleep I fought down my own restless nature and held her poised stillness.

And still Mortimer looked at me like a plague, and every year, before her memorial, he found some new way to humiliate and torment me.

That bottle of perfume that never should have existed, I'd already dumped it at least thirty miles from the Barnes house.

Even the scent on my skin I'd scrubbed off at least ten times, then covered with the perfume my sister liked.

But Mortimer still smelled it on me.

He forced me to scour my own body with a steel-wool pad until the skin all over me was rubbed raw and broken.

He hadn't smelled some scent that shouldn't have been there.

He was blaming me for killing the woman he loved.

And my mother actually still hoped Mortimer would come to cherish me?

She must have seen the mockery on my face, because her brow drew tighter and she stood.

"If you can't hold on to Mortimer's heart, then don't blame me for finding another way."

The mockery at the corner of my mouth only deepened.

"What way? Like seven years ago, when you forced me into the Barnes family? Are you going to shove another person in here?"

My mother's face changed all at once, and she raised her hand to teach me a lesson, but Mortimer pushed the door open.

He felt the wrongness in the room right away and frowned. "What's going on?"

My mother smoothed the disgust off her face and smiled.

"Kate says she fell and hurt herself. I'm afraid she can't handle Tilly's memorial."

"She and I talked it over. We were thinking of sending her cousin to help..."

Mortimer cut her off, cold. "No need. She's the one who got Tilly killed, so she's the one who atones for it herself. No one takes her place."

With Mortimer that firm, my mother had nothing more to say and got up to leave.

Before she went, she didn't forget to warn me with a look, to remind me why I'd been married into the Barnes family.

I couldn't be bothered to think about it. Seven more days, and I'd be dead.

Whoever she wanted to shove in here, it had nothing to do with me.