Chapter 1 - The Girl in the Rain
The gunshot came from the chapel beneath the Ashford estate.
Ethan Ashford felt the bullet tear through the sleeve of his coat before the sound finished echoing through the stone chamber. Valerie screamed his name, but he was already moving, dragging her behind the marble altar while shattered glass rained from the high windows.
Across the chapel, Celeste Ashford stood beneath the carved image of a broken-winged bird. Rainwater streamed from her silver hair. In one hand she held an antique pistol. In the other she held the pendant Ethan had spent seventeen years trying to forget.
The pendant that had belonged to his dead sister, Lydia.
“You should have left her on the road,” Celeste said.
Valerie crouched beside Ethan, barefoot and bleeding, the torn hem of her dress dark with mud. Around her neck hung the matching pendant she had placed in his hand only six hours earlier. Its engraving, L.C., had opened a grave Ethan believed was sealed forever.
“Tell him,” Valerie cried. “Tell him who my father was.”
Celeste’s face did not change.
A bell began ringing somewhere above them, though no one had touched the rope.
Then the chapel doors slammed shut.
Ethan looked toward the dark gallery and saw a figure moving behind the iron screen. Not Celeste’s men. Not the police. Someone else.
A voice came through the old speaker system, calm and distorted.
“The Ashford heir has brought the lost child home. Begin the second inheritance.”
The floor beneath Valerie cracked open.
Ethan caught her wrist as the stone panel dropped away. She hung above a black shaft, one hand locked around his, the other clutching the pendant. Celeste raised the pistol again.
“Let her fall,” she said. “Or everything your sister died to protect will be released.”
Ethan stared at the woman who had raised him, the woman he had called Mother, and understood that the story of Lydia’s death had never been a tragedy.
It had been an agreement.
Six hours earlier, the night had begun with rain.
Ethan was driving alone through the northern hills after leaving a disastrous charity dinner in Briar Glen. His driver had been sent home with a fever, and Ethan had welcomed the solitude. The road curved between dense woods and abandoned farmland, far from the lights of the city.
Lightning flashed.
A young woman burst from the trees.
Ethan slammed the brakes. The black sedan spun sideways and stopped inches from her body. She struck the passenger door with both palms, eyes wide, blood running down one cheek.
“Please,” she gasped. “Let me in.”
Behind her, an older woman emerged from the woods carrying a leather belt. She wore a soaked black dress and a silver pendant shaped like a broken-winged bird.
Ethan’s breath stopped.
He pressed the unlock button.
The young woman tore open the rear door and collapsed onto the floor. The older woman reached the car seconds later and pounded the window with the belt buckle.
“She’s a thief,” the woman shouted. “Open the door.”
Ethan lowered the glass two inches.
“What exactly did she steal?”
The woman froze.
For one second the rain seemed to disappear. Her eyes moved from Ethan’s face to the gold Ashford crest on the steering wheel.
Then she smiled.
It was not the smile of a frightened guardian. It was the smile of someone who had found a person she had been hunting for years.
“She stole a family name,” the woman said.
Ethan raised the window and drove.
In the back seat, the girl curled against the leather upholstery, shaking so hard her teeth clicked. Ethan watched her in the mirror.
“What is your name?”
“Valerie Cole.”
“Who was that woman?”
“My stepmother. Mara.”
“Why was she chasing you?”
Valerie reached beneath her torn dress and drew out a pendant identical to Mara’s. She placed it in Ethan’s open hand when he stopped beneath a covered bridge.
The silver was cold. On the back were two letters.
L.C.
“My father gave it to me before he died,” Valerie said. “He told me that if Mara ever tried to take it, I had to find the other family.”
Ethan closed his fingers around the pendant.
His sister Lydia had worn the same symbol the night she died at age nineteen. Her car had gone over a cliff during a storm. The body recovered from the river had been burned beyond recognition. Celeste had identified the pendant.
Seventeen years had passed, but Ethan still remembered Lydia leaning through his bedroom doorway that last night.
If anything happens to me, she had whispered, do not believe the first story.
He had been fourteen. He had believed it anyway.
“What was your father’s name?” Ethan asked.
Valerie looked at him through wet strands of dark hair.
“Leon Cole.”
Ethan nearly dropped the pendant.
Leon Cole had been the Ashford family’s private security chief. He had vanished three days after Lydia’s death and was blamed for stealing two million dollars from the estate. Celeste had called him a traitor.
Valerie continued, “Before he died, he said the Ashfords would either save me or finish what they started.”
A pair of headlights appeared behind them.
The same distance. The same speed. Too steady to be accidental.
Ethan started the engine.
“Did your father tell you which Ashford to trust?”
“No.”
The headlights drew closer.
Valerie looked at the pendant in his hand.
“He only said the one who still mourned Lydia would know where to begin.”
Ethan turned toward the road leading to the Ashford estate.
He had not returned there at night since his sister died.
Behind them, Mara’s car followed through the rain.
May you like
And in the reflection of the rear window, Valerie saw that Mara was no longer alone.
A man sat beside her wearing the ring of the Ashford family.
