Chapter 2
Nerys did not cry. Her lower lip trembled, but she set the ruined shoe carefully down onto the padded bench beside the stranger. With small, deliberate fingers, she peeled back the crumpled napkin still clutched in her other palm. A remaining piece of the brioche roll—clean, untouched by the floor or the leather—sat nestled inside the paper.
She extended the clean portion toward the man in the overcoat. Her tiny wrist was shaking, but her hazel eyes looked up into the shadow beneath his cap with stubborn innocence.
"This part didn’t touch the shoe," Nerys whispered, her voice soft and thin, fighting back tears.
Beneath the brim of the cap, a pair of steel-grey eyes flickered to life. The man looked down at the crumb of bread held in the child's trembling fingers. Then his gaze dropped to her right foot, standing on the freezing marble in nothing but a thin white lace sock.
A single muscle along the man's jaw knotted into stone.
He did not take the bread. Instead, he stood up.
The bench groaned as his massive frame uncoiled. At fifty-four, Alaric Marwood was an apex predator who had conquered the eastern seaboard’s underworld before half the men in this room had opened their first offshore accounts. He reached up, removed the grease-streaked cap, and tossed it onto the bench. With a single fluid sweep of his broad arms, he parted the heavy overcoat, letting it hang open.
Beneath the rough coat was not a beggar's rags, but a bespoke charcoal three-piece suit cut from heavy English wool, a pristine Egyptian cotton dress shirt, a silk tie the color of dried blood, and a solid platinum wristwatch. On the fourth finger of his right hand, a massive gold signet ring bearing the Marwood family crest—a crowned wolf biting an iron chain—gleamed under the chandeliers.
Winifred’s mocking sneer collapsed. The blood drained from her face so fast that her fair skin turned the color of chalk. Her jaw went slack, and she took a frantic, involuntary step backward, her heels catching on the carpet runner.
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"Uncle... Uncle Alaric?" her breath caught in a strangled choke.
The two private security guards flanking the buffet doors—heavily built veterans with concealed holsters—went rigid. Their shoulders snapped straight, their chins tucked in, their eyes dropping instantly to the floor as if the devil himself had manifested in the ballroom.
