Chapter 1
“Davina. Those weren’t my husband’s heart pills.”
My mother’s voice was frail.
The effect was not.
Davina stopped breathing.
Nella stood beside Mother with one hand still hovering near the untouched bread roll.
Around us, forty guests had become statues.
I looked at Mother.
Not Davina.
“Whose pills were they?”
Her concentration flickered.
For one terrible second, I thought the memory had already gone.
Then she whispered:
“Blue.”
My father’s medicine had been red.
I remembered because he hated the color and complained about it every morning during the final year of his life.
“Who gave them to him?”
Mother looked directly at Davina again.
“She brought the bottle.”
Davina shook her head.
“No.”
Too fast.
Mother’s fingers trembled.
“Your father came first.”
I turned toward Davina.
“Whose father?”
Silence.
Her face answered.
I had met Davina three years ago.
My father, Aldric Ashenford, died five years ago.
According to everything I knew, the two lives had never crossed.
Apparently that was another thing I had been allowed to believe.
“Davina.”
She swallowed.
“My father knew yours.”
“What was his name?”
“You know his name.”
Something cold moved through me.
Lucian Vale.
A former Ashenford associate my father had expelled almost fifteen years earlier.
A man whose name disappeared from family dinners long before I took command.
Davina had told me Lucian spent his last years managing properties outside Boston.
She never told me he had once served my father.
Mother closed her eyes.
Then opened them again.
“He came angry.”
I crouched beside her.
“And Davina?”
“She was with him.”
Davina stepped backward.
Nella’s eyes widened.
I kept my voice low.
“What happened after they left?”
Mother looked at the plate on the floor.
Confused suddenly.
“Why is my dinner down there?”
The memory was gone.
Just like that.
Davina exhaled.
Relief.
Small.
Almost invisible.
I saw it anyway.
I stood.
“You have exactly one chance to tell me what happened that night.”
She whispered:
“Torin…”
“No.”
I looked at the food beneath Mother’s chair.
“You’ve already been using her memory against her.”
May you like
Then back at Davina.
“Now you’re going to learn what happens when it comes back.”
