The Mirror (The Lost Bride Trilogy #2)

“They went through the mirror.” Laying a hand on Cleo’s arm, she steadied herself. “Not just Collin, but somehow my father went through the mirror. Like I have.”

“And more than once, I’d say.”

“We’ll take her downstairs, hang her with Johanna and Clover.”

“One more thing, Son? The portraits, the three of them, are all the same size, and use the same type of frame. Like they’re meant to hang together.”

“And that’s what we’ll do.”

Sonya carried the painting down, and for now, propped it against a wall in the library. She and Cleo would hang it in the music room that evening.

But now she had work, and was grateful to have it. Quitting her job and going freelance the previous fall had been exciting and terrifying.

She supposed she could rate her move into the manor on exactly that same scale.

Now the manor was home, and she had a business. Maybe not thriving at this point, but steady. And incredibly satisfying.

She supposed, in a twisted way, she had Brandon Wise to thank for where she sat right now.

He’d been low enough to cheat on her—just weeks before their wedding—with her own cousin, in her own house, in her own bed. She could wonder now if it had been luck or fate that had brought her home early enough to catch the two of them naked in bed.

Either way, she decided, a lucky escape for her.

And when she’d broken the engagement, refused to listen to his lame excuses, he’d gone on a mission to undermine her at work.

“Corrupting my client files, letting the air out of my tires,” she muttered. “So screw any sort of twisted thanks. I’m here because I took the steps, I did the work, and I took the risks.”

She glanced toward Lisbeth’s portrait and thought she was there, in the manor, to live, to work, and to stand up for seven women who’d come before her.

She buckled down to work.

When she had enough on the layout to send to the client for approval, rejection, changes, she shifted to work on a book cover.

Since the Adirondacks and deep winter set the stage for the thriller, she began with the protagonist’s isolated cabin, under a cold moon. Blue shadows, she thought, that isolation, a sense of dread and danger in the thick line of snow-drowned trees.

Maybe footprints across the snow. A single light in a window—and a silhouette behind it.

Sonya worked on the concept, tried two more for comparison.

While she liked the first design, the sense of cold, of danger lurking, she set them all aside to consider fresh in the morning.

She scrubbed her hands over her face, then dropped them when she heard the Beatles and “I’m So Tired.”

“Yeah, maybe. But not done yet.”

Chapter Five

The Ryder proposal. She looked at her mood board, then opened her file.

Because she had to admit her brain was tired, she told herself she’d just review for now.

This represented an opportunity to take her business from steady to thriving. She really wanted to thrive.

And on a personal level, she wanted to beat Brandon. No doubt, she thought, just none, that he’d head up the team on her main competitor’s proposal.

For all his many miserable flaws, when it came to the work, he excelled.

So she just had to be better.