Chapter 1 - The Slap and the Spark
The slap cracked across the marble foyer so sharply that the pianist in the ballroom stopped playing. For one stunned second, nobody moved. Nico Alfieri sat on the floor beside his overturned wheelchair, one palm pressed against the cold marble, the other locked around the edge of a console table to keep himself upright. He was thirty-four, eight months removed from the crash that had taken the use of his legs, and still dressed in the white shirt and black trousers he had worn through three exhausting hours of an engagement party thrown in his own home. Thirty guests stood within sight of him. Three men had spent half their lives calling him boss. Two security guards were close enough to hear his breathing. Not one stepped forward.
Above him stood Camille Ashcroft, the woman he was supposed to marry in seventeen days. Her jeweled hand was already rising again. “You embarrassed me,” she hissed. Nico looked up at her. His cheek had reddened where she had struck him, but his voice remained low. “Put your hand down.” Camille laughed. “What are you going to do if I don’t?”
That was when someone moved. A medication tray hit the floor behind Adeline Marsh, scattering a plastic cup and two sealed syringes across the marble. The twenty-seven-year-old private nurse crossed the distance between them before anyone seemed to understand what she was doing. She caught Camille’s wrist in midair. The room inhaled as one. Adeline was not physically imposing. She wore faded blue scrubs, inexpensive sneakers, and her brown hair had been twisted into the same loose knot she had worn during a fourteen-hour shift. But her hand around Camille’s wrist did not tremble. Her other arm extended protectively in front of Nico. “You will not touch him again.”
Camille stared at her. Not with fear. With disbelief. It was the look of a woman seeing a piece of furniture speak. “Take your hand off me.” “No.” “You work for him.” “I care for him.” Camille leaned closer. “You work for this house because we allow you to.” Adeline’s jaw tightened. “And right now, I’m the only person in this house acting like he’s human.”
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Something changed in Nico’s face. Not gratitude. Not yet. Recognition. Because Adeline Marsh had said the one thing nobody else had dared say since the accident. Human. Not boss. Not patient. Not damaged heir. Not a piece of property waiting to be transferred into somebody else’s hands. A man. Camille ripped her arm free. “You have no idea what you’re interfering with.”
Adeline looked at her and thought of the two white tablets hidden in a specimen bag inside the toe of an old shoe upstairs. She thought of the photographs on her phone. She thought of the medication cabinet opened at two in the morning. She thought of a bottle whose label said one thing while everything inside it said another. And she realized Camille was wrong. Adeline knew exactly what she was interfering with. She just didn’t know yet how many people were involved.
