Chapter 1 - The Dead Man’s Eyes
"Don’t look down, June. Just look at the floor."
Mara’s hand clamped around my wrist like a pair of cold steel handcuffs. Her fingernails bit through the cheap satin of my sleeve. She wasn't just nervous anymore; her whole arm was trembling so hard it shook my shoulder.
"Mom, you're hurting me," I whispered.
She didn't hear me. She couldn't. Her wide, terrified eyes were glued to the seven-foot oil painting hanging under the gold chandelier in the private wing of the Ashford estate.
The boy in the portrait was seventeen, tops. He had a gray thoroughbred horse by the reins, messy jet-black curls spilling over his forehead, and a crooked, reckless smirk that seemed to say the whole damn world was an inside joke only he understood. It was the exact same smirk that used to look down at me over a skillet of burnt Sunday pancakes.
"Why does he have Dad’s face?" I asked, my voice cracking through the hushed silence of the hallway.
The table placement card in Mara’s fingers fluttered to the parquet floor. She didn't bend down to pick it up. Her skin had turned the color of chalk—that awful, bloodless shade I only ever saw on the faces of parents sitting outside the pediatric ICU where she worked.
"June," she said, her voice dropping to a harsh, razor-thin murmur. "Tuck it in. Now."
Before I could move, my fingers instinctively went to the collar of my Sunday dress. Beneath the stiff lace hung the heavy gold ring on its cheap silver chain. It was scratched, worn flat on one edge, and dented where Dad used to tap it impatiently against the steering wheel of his beat-up Chevy truck. He gave it to Mom three days before the brake lines on that truck mysteriously snapped on Blackwood Ridge four years ago.
“Keep it close, June-bug,” he had told me in the hospital room, smelling of sterile alcohol and old cedar. “Never let a stranger see the crest inside.”
I had pulled it out five minutes ago because my collar was itching. It was dangling right there in the open, catching the glare of two hundred crystal bulbs.
Across the velvet runner, ten feet away, a champagne flute shattered against the floor.
The sound sliced through the polite, low-tone murmurs of the charity gala. Crystal exploded into diamonds across the polished oak.
Grant Ashford—the billionaire philanthropist, the man whose foundation had just handed my mother an award for working with dying kids—stood frozen in mid-sentence. His tailored tuxedo made him look like a king, but right now, his face was contorted into an expression of raw, unadulterated horror.
He wasn't looking at the broken glass soaking into his handmade Italian leather shoes.
He wasn't looking at Mara.
His eyes were locked like laser beams onto the dented gold ring hanging against my chest.
"Where..." Grant’s voice came out as a strangled rasp, his throat bobbing frantically. He took a heavy, unsteady step toward me, shoving past a city councilman like the man didn't exist. "Where did you get that ring?"
"We're leaving," Mara breathed.
May you like
She grabbed my hand and yanked me hard toward the grand double doors leading out into the rain.
"Stop them!" Grant’s roar tore through the ballroom, shattering the polite quiet of high society like a gunshot. "Lock the front gates! Don't let that girl leave this house!"
