Prologue
Duchy of Kindubh[1]— United Kingdom
Age Twelve
“You’re the reason we’re orphans, Rodrick. You’re the only one to blame for Dad’s death. It’s not fair. You only lost one person, but I lost my mother too.”
I clench my teeth so hard they almost crack. Hatred and fury spread through me.
“And now I’m going to have to live in a smaller house while you keep the castle all to yourself,” he goes on.
The lawyer told me that because he has no blood tie to me, by the law of my duchy, Gilroy has to leave our home.
“I’ve gotten used to luxury. People are going to mock me because I’ll be an ex-rich kid.”
It’s not the first time my half-brother—no, he’s not my half-brother at all; he’s just the son of that woman—has said something like that, blaming me for the deaths of Dad and Iona, his mother, and for the fact that he’s going to lose his privileges.
For days I’ve wanted to rip his head off. There’s too much anger inside me.
I’m good at hiding what I feel, but today I don’t want to do that.
My father has just been buried, and I have no one left except distant aunts and cousins, and a guardian.
After we returned from the cemetery, the lawyers read the will. I know everything was left to me, even though I don’t really understand the true size of my inheritance.
“Aren’t you going to answer, brat? You want to know something? You should’ve died too. Then all of this would be mine.”
My fist hits his jaw so fast he barely has time to react. I’m three years younger, but I’m tall and strong for my age.
He staggers and falls to the floor. I straddle his body and unleash all the resentment I’ve been storing for years.
I can’t stop, not even when my knuckles are scraped raw and his face is covered in blood.
“Rodrick!” I hear my guardian shout, but I don’t move. The punches keep coming, one after the other.
Athol pulls me off Gilroy and forces my arms behind me, but I’m already temporarily satisfied.
“You’re crazy!” my stepmother’s son screams.
For the first time since my father passed away, I smile. “Maybe you’re right. But I’m also Rodrick Alistair Gastrell MacQuoid, the new Duke of Kindubh, and I’m expelling you from my lands.”
We both know exactly what that means. In Kindubh, my word carries the weight of law.
He pushes himself up from the floor and stares at me, stunned. “You can’t be serious. Leaving the castle is humiliating enough, but if I can’t even stay on Dad’s land—”
“He wasn’t your father. He was just the man who married your mother,” I say.
I wipe his blood on my pants and turn to Athol. “When the sun comes up, I don’t want him here anymore.” I try to keep my voice steady the way my father did when giving orders, but thinking of him locks my throat with pain.
Before I start crying, I run back toward the castle.
Chapter 1
Ten Months Later
“I didn’t want to do this, but you left me no choice, Rodrick,” Athol says.
I don’t look at him, pretending I don’t care that he’s sending me to a boarding school in Switzerland.