Chapter 3
The afternoon sunlight illuminated the fine mist of Verity’s spilled champagne on the marble, sparkling like scattered glass.
Damon Pike remained unmoving, his heavy frame an impenetrable wall between the child and the room. Cleo was plastered against his thigh, her little face buried in the seam of his dark suit jacket, her small shoulders heaving in silent, shuddering breaths. Damon’s left hand rested lightly on the crown of Cleo’s golden curls, shielding her sightline from the wreckage of her aunt.
Leopold stepped toward the velvet bench. He did not look at the stunned faces of city commissioners, judges, and shipping executives ringing the foyer. His boots made no sound on the runner as he leaned down.
With careful, measured fingers, he reached beneath the dessert table. He picked up the ruined teddy bear by its crushed torso. Loose white stuffing poked through a tear in the synthetic fur where Verity’s heel had pierced the cloth. The plastic battery casing was pulverized, little blue wires dangling like veins.
Leopold turned and walked back to his daughter.
He knelt on one knee, ignoring the crease in his tailored charcoal trousers. He smoothed the squashed ears of the toy and placed it gently into Cleo’s trembling hands.
Cleo looked down. Her little thumb rubbed the broken, sharp edge of the speaker grill inside the belly. Her lower lip stopped quivering, replaced by a strange, hollow quiet that was far too old for a three-year-old child.
She lifted her chin, looking past her father’s shoulder, her gaze settling directly on Verity slumped against the bench.
“The others laughed on her phone,” Cleo said.
Her voice was barely audible—a thin, reedy whisper in the cavernous conservatory. But in the suffocating silence of the room, every word landed with the weight of an iron anvil.
Verity flinched.
Her left hand was still pressed to her bruised, swelling cheek, but her right hand moved with frantic, involuntary guilt. Her fingers clamped down around the small, slim silhouette of a rose-gold smartphone tucked into the sash of her emerald gown at her waist.
Leopold caught the movement.
He didn't blink. He rose from his knee in one unbroken, terrifying ascent, rising to his full six-foot-two height. His dark overcoat hung straight, framing his broad chest.
He took three slow, deliberate strides back toward the bench, stopping eighteen inches from his sister’s knees. He extended his right hand again. Palm flat, fingers spread, hovering directly beneath the phone pressed against her ribs.
His steel-grey eyes pinned her to the velvet cushions.
“Who else enjoys hearing my daughter beg?” Leopold asked.
The question was spoken in a low, gravelly baritone—quiet, flat, and completely devoid of human warmth. It was the tone a surgeon might use to describe an amputation.
Verity’s lips parted. A thin trickle of saliva and blood had formed at the corner of her mouth where her inner cheek had bitten into her teeth, but no sound came out. Her throat worked convulsively. Her gaze darted frantically over Leopold’s shoulder, scanning the semi-circle of paralyzed guests, silently screaming for an ally, for an intervention, for someone to remind her brother that this was polite society.
At the edge of the circle, twenty feet away, a man abruptly lowered his crystal champagne glass.
The stem clattered against his signet ring.
Garrick Vance.
Forty-five years old, senior partner at Vance & Sterling Asset Management, trustee of the Ashbury Municipal Port Trust, and one of the city’s most celebrated philanthropic chairmen. Vance had fair hair meticulously silvered at the temples, fair skin currently draining of all its healthy color, and a three-thousand-dollar tuxedo that suddenly looked two sizes too large for his shrinking frame.
May you like
Leopold did not turn his head, but his peripheral vision locked onto the trembling crystal flute in Vance’s hand.
“Verity,” Leopold said, his open palm still resting beneath her waist, unchanging. “The phone. Now.”
