Chapter 3

His foot moved.

I saw it. I saw it — a small, controlled flex of his ankle beneath the tablecloth while Grayson laughed at the "cripple" across the candles.

Damian Sinclair could feel his legs.

Which meant the wheelchair was a lie. The reclusive invalid was a lie. And if that was a lie — how much of the last three years was theater? My pulse hammered so loud I was sure the whole table could hear it.

Damian's eyes cut to mine. One look. Say nothing.

I picked up my wine glass with a steady hand I didn't feel, and I said nothing.

"To family," Vivian toasted.

"To family," Damian echoed, and only I heard the razor in it.

The rest of dinner passed in a blur of Chloe's bragging. Meridian House was giving her a solo exhibition. The Elena Collection, she called it, without a flicker of shame — twenty pieces, every one of them ripped from the portfolio I'd spent six years bleeding into.

"Inspired by our dear departed stepmother-in-law— I mean, Aria's mother," Chloe said sweetly. "Aria doesn't mind. Do you, sis? You always said Mom's memory belonged to the whole family."

I had never said that. My mother had never been her "Mom." Elena Whitmore had died when I was fourteen — a fall down the stairs of our own house, ruled an accident, three weeks after she'd told my father she wanted a divorce and half of Whitmore Textiles.

Vivian had married my father five months later.

"The exhibition opens Saturday," Chloe went on. "Damian, you should come! Oh — no, of course. The stairs." She giggled.

Beside me, Damian's knuckles whitened on his fork. Then, pleasantly: "We wouldn't miss it."

When the cars finally pulled away down the drive, I stood in the foyer shaking with everything I'd swallowed all night. Damian rolled up beside me in silence.

"Those are your designs," he said. It wasn't a question.

"Every one of them." My voice cracked. "She took my portfolio, my grant application, six years of my life. When I fought back, Meridian's lawyers buried me. My own father testified that Chloe had always been 'the artistic one.'" I laughed, and it came out ugly. "I stopped fighting. It was easier."

"And your mother's fall?"

The question hit me like cold water. "That was an accident."

"Was it?" Damian's voice was very quiet. "Aria. Who inherited your mother's shares when she died?"

"My father. And then he..." The floor seemed to tilt. "He transferred half to Vivian. As a wedding gift."

Damian said nothing. He just watched me put it together — the divorce my mother wanted, the fall, the timeline, the marriage — pieces I'd spent thirteen years refusing to assemble because assembling them meant living in a house with my mother's killer and calling her ma'am.

"You can't know that," I whispered. "Nobody can know that."

"Not yet." He turned toward the east wing — the forbidden wing — and paused. "You saw something at dinner tonight. Under the table."

My heart stopped. "I don't know what you—"

"Don't." He looked back at me, and for the first time the mask was fully off — and what was underneath was not an invalid. It was a predator who had been lying very, very still for three years. "You're either in this house as my ally or as their spy. Choose now."

"They put me here as a punishment," I said. "They think you're a dead end. They gave you the daughter they wanted to throw away."

"And?"

"And I want to watch them realize what they threw away." My voice didn't shake at all anymore. "Both of us."

Something shifted in his eyes — surprise, then heat, then something almost like recognition.

"Then come with me," Damian said, wheeling toward the east wing doors. "It's time you saw what's behind these."

He pressed his palm to a biometric panel. The locks released with a heavy, mechanical thunk.

"And Aria," he added softly, as the doors swung open onto darkness, "everything you think you know about your family, my brother, and that car crash — you have about sixty seconds left of believing it."