Some of them could not meet her eyes.

It is an uncomfortable thing to discover you have been an accessory to cruelty simply by finding the cruelty easier to believe than the truth.

Cosima watched them absorb it and felt none of the vindication she might have expected.

What she felt, mostly, was tired — the specific exhaustion of a person who has finally, after ten years, been handed the thing she should never have had to prove, and understands in the same moment how much of her life was spent being disbelieved by people who had every means to check and simply preferred not to.

And clipped to the top of the stack was the last document — a certified copy of the true, unedited final will of Cosima’s mother, the one Alaric had spent ten years burying: a will that left one hundred percent of the Ravenscroft empire directly to Cosima, to take effect upon her marriage.

Chapter 14 — Retrieved From My Mother’s Estate