Chapter 1
“Strangers never crossed his threshold. Where did you dump him, and who’s screaming behind that door?”
Violetta looked toward the detached guesthouse.
That was enough.
I turned to Roselle.
“The key.”
She stared at the brass key I had just placed in her palm.
“Guesthouse,” I said.
Her eyes widened.
Violetta immediately snapped:
“Bram—”
I raised one hand.
She stopped.
Roselle did not.
She ran.
Across the terrace.
Past the pool.
Toward the small stone guesthouse beyond the hedges.
Two of my men followed at a distance.
Not to stop her.
To make sure nobody else did.
Then I looked toward the mansion’s upper windows.
My father’s room occupied the north corner.
Curtains closed.
Door locked.
And now that the music had stopped, I could hear it.
A muffled strike.
Then a voice.
Old.
Male.
“Open this damned door!”
I knew that voice.
Silas Merrick.
Seventy-four.
My father’s valet for thirty-two years.
The only man outside the Ashcombe bloodline my father had ever allowed to enter that room freely.
I looked at Violetta.
“What did you do?”
Her expression hardened.
“He knows something.”
Not denial.
Good.
“What?”
Nothing.
Behind us, Roselle reached the guesthouse.
The brass key turned.
The door flew open.
A small boy stumbled into her arms.
She dropped to her knees and held him so tightly he disappeared against her chest.
My jaw locked.
Six years old.
Thin face wet with tears.
A plate sat untouched inside the doorway.
Bread.
Water.
Not starvation.
But enough deprivation to make Violetta’s threat believable.
I looked back at my fiancée.
“You kept a child in there.”
“He was safe.”
There it was.
The favorite word of people who confuse survival with permission.
“Why?”
“To make his mother cooperate.”
At least she had stopped pretending.
I pointed toward the mansion.
“And Silas?”
She swallowed.
“He wouldn’t show me where your father hid it.”
I became still.
“Where he hid what?”
Violetta looked at the upstairs window.
May you like
Then at me.
“The name of the man who destroyed my father.”
