Maiselle watched in shock as Hector’s fiancée Odette dumped her entire dinner into her open suitcase and coldly declared she would eat at an orphanage.

The grand banquet hall of Ravenswick Manor blazed with the merciless, diamond-sharp brilliance of three Austrian crystal chandeliers. Light poured across seventy feet of hand-rubbed mahogany, refracting through faceted crystal goblets, silver cloches, and cut-glass decanters until the very air seemed saturated with gold and crimson. Forty guests sat along the imperial table—men in bespoke midnight-wool dinner suits and women adorned in Parisian silks and heirloom diamonds. They were the aristocracy of the Eastern Seaboard’s most ruthless shipping and freight syndicate: dockland bosses, aldermen, corrupt magistrates, and silent partners. Their fair skin glowed with rosy health beneath the chandeliers, their American accents smooth, low, and measured. In this world, blood was an accounting ledger, and violence was an art best served cold.

At the head of the table sat two high-backed chairs carved from solid black walnut. One belonged to Hector Ravenswick, the undisputed patriarch of the empire. Beside it stood an identical chair, fitted with an upholstered velvet booster cushion for his three-year-old daughter, Maiselle.

Hector had stepped away through the arched French doors into the private loggia three minutes earlier to take an urgent call regarding a intercepted freighter in New York Harbor. In the brief vacuum left by his departure, the temperature at the head of the table plummeted.

Maiselle Ravenswick stood on her tiptoes upon the polished parquet, her tiny patent-leather flats clicking faintly against the wood. She was a delicate child with pale, porcelain skin and rosy cheeks that bloomed with innocent warmth. She wore a lace party dress, an ivory silk-knit cardigan buttoned neatly to her throat, and white satin ribbons woven into her golden curls. With careful, small fingers, the girl reached out to adjust the heavy silver fork resting beside her father’s empty place setting.

Behind her chair rested a small, hard-shell leather suitcase, its brass latches flipped open. Inside lay neatly folded toddler clothes: floral cotton nightgowns, knitted cardigans, woolen stockings, and a small plush bear.

A shadow fell over her like a guillotine blade.

Odette rose from her seat to Hector’s left. At thirty-seven, Hector’s fiancée was a woman of devastating, predatory beauty. Her raven hair was pinned into an immaculate architectural chignon, contrasting sharply with her fair, rosy complexion. Her emerald-green silk evening gown cleaved to her slender frame, diamond cluster earrings swung from her lobes, and on her ring finger flashed the twelve-carat emerald-cut diamond Hector had given her six months before.

Her eyes, cold and calculating as polished jade, locked onto the little girl. Without looking away from the child, Odette reached out with manicured nails and snatched Maiselle’s gilded dinner plate. It was heaped with roasted prime rib, buttered fingerling potatoes, and a pool of dark, steaming pan gravy.

Before any of the nearby relatives could fathom what she was doing, Odette tilted her wrists.

With slow, deliberate malice, she tipped the entire plate downward into Maiselle’s open suitcase.

The heavy cascade of beef, greasy potatoes, and dark brown gravy splashed violently across the folded clothes. The sauce oozed through the knitted wool of the sweaters, soaking into the delicate lace collars, drowning the little plush bear in grease.

Maiselle gasped, her tiny hands flying to her mouth. She froze, her blue eyes widening in uncomprehending horror as the warm, foul sludge seeped into the garments her late mother had sewn for her.