Chapter 1 - The plate on the floor
Betsy’s dinner was still scattered across the ballroom floor when Octavia told me my father had changed the heir.
Potatoes.
A piece of salmon.
Green beans.
A broken porcelain plate.
And my eight-year-old daughter standing beside me with one hand against her red cheek.
That was what mattered.
Not succession.
Not money.
Not whatever poisonous family mythology Octavia was trying to resurrect.
I crouched.
“Look at me.”
Betsy did.
Tears sat in her eyes, but she was fighting them because children learn far too quickly when adults are embarrassed by crying.
“You can cry.”
That did it.
She collapsed against me.
Behind us, Octavia pushed herself upright from the overturned banquet table.
Wine covered one side of her emerald gown.
A cut on her palm came from broken glass.
My slap had caused her to stumble.
Betsy was already behind me when I struck.
I knew what that meant.
Protection had ended.
Retaliation had begun.
I would answer for that later.
Octavia wiped wine from her dress and said:
“Ask your father why he changed the heir.”
My father, Victor Maddox, was seventy-six.
Still alive.
Still mentally sharp.
Still capable of answering his own questions.
And three weeks earlier, he had already shown me the document Octavia apparently thought I had never seen.
That was why I said:
“Not him. You.”
Octavia went pale.
May you like
Not because she feared another slap.
Because she realized I knew there were two versions.
