Chapter 2

A dozen new faces turned. Near the fabric wall, a shape that might have been Julian went very still -- and did not look up.

I didn't flinch. I looked up at the woman wearing my mother's dress size, my mother's shade of hair, close enough across a room to pass for a sister -- and kept my voice level. Empty. Clean.

"I came for my things," I said. "The box by the cutting table. That's all."

That was when I noticed the man in the corner. He'd taken the one chair that saw the whole room, and let the room forget he was there. When his eyes moved over me, he priced me. Like stock. Like a length of cloth.

"Mr. Vance is here from Laurent," Cassidy said, too lightly -- the way you name-drop a loaded gun.

Laurent. The word landed soft and cold. A buyer. Someone was selling Maison -- my mother's Maison -- and this quiet man had come to decide what it was worth.

Whose side was he on? His face gave me nothing. And that, I understood, was the frightening part. A man like that didn't take sides.

Cassidy came down the stairs slow, letting them watch. She stopped one step up, just high enough to look down at me.

"Three years, and you crawl straight back to a cutting table." Her smile widened for the room. "Some people never learn they were only ever the help."

A few of the new faces tittered. Cassidy turned, warm and rehearsed, back to Vance.

"Everything in this room is mine now. As I was saying -- every piece cut in-house. Silk-organza underlayer. French seams throughout, hand-finished--"

"French seams." I said it quietly. The room was quiet enough to carry it.

Cassidy stopped.

"On the ivory bias gown behind you?" I nodded at the stand. "It'd pucker the drape inside a week. That's a bound seam, hand-fell, pressed open over a ham. My mother wrote that method. It isn't in any book Laurent could send you." A beat. "You've been selling him a house you can't even read."

For one whole second, Cassidy's face forgot what it was doing.

The employees looked at the gown. Then at Cassidy. Then -- quickly, guiltily -- away.

And I felt it land under my ribs. Clean. Cold. Not a win. Nothing so simple. Just the first crack I'd ever put in the woman wearing my mother's name. And I'd done it without raising my voice.

Then I made the mistake of looking at Vance.

He hadn't moved. Hadn't smiled. And when he looked up, his eyes were exactly as cold as before. Only now they were cold, and pointed at me.

I'd meant to expose Cassidy. Instead I'd shown the most dangerous man in the room that the felon in the gray coat knew things his money couldn't buy. Useful to him -- or a problem to be removed? I couldn't tell.

"Sean." Cassidy's voice had an edge now, all the sweetness gone. "Ms. Nora is leaving."

Security came. A big man, apologetic mouth, a firm hand on my elbow. I didn't pull away. There was nothing in this room worth a second cell.

But on the way to the door I passed the cutting table -- and there it was. The dented tin. Ugly, worthless, the one my mother kept her pearls in. I lifted it without breaking stride and slid it inside my coat.

No one stops you for the thing that looks like nothing.

I let the big man walk me toward the light of the doorway, the tin cold against my heart, that one small crack still humming under my ribs --

At the edge of the room, half behind the coat rack. Thinner than three years ago. In a coat that cost more than everything I owned.

My little sister.

Emma.

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