Chapter 1 - The Ring
The first thing I saw in my son's nursery was my wife's wedding ring.
It sat in the center of the empty crib like someone had placed it there for me to find.
The second thing I saw was blood.
One dark drop had dried on the white wooden rail.
Behind me, my mother said, "Grace left you, Adrian."
I didn't turn around.
I picked up the ring and closed my fist around it until the diamond cut into my palm.
"No," I said. "She didn't."
Six months earlier, I had left the Rossi estate to stop a war that was spreading from New York to three families in Europe. Grace had stood in the courtyard with both hands over her pregnant belly while the helicopter blades whipped her hair across her face.
"You'll be home before he comes, right?" she'd asked.
I had kissed her forehead. "Before he takes his first breath."
I had believed it.
Then the war dragged on. Communications became dangerous. Messages were filtered through my mother because Vittoria Rossi had run the family whenever my father traveled, and nobody questioned her authority.
Every week, she told me Grace was fine.
Then two weeks before my return, she said Grace had run away.
Now I was staring at an empty crib.
"Where is her phone?" I asked.
"She took it."
"Her car is still outside."
"Someone picked her up."
"Her passport is in the safe."
A pause.
Too long.
"She must have had another one."
I finally turned.
My mother stood in the doorway wearing a cream suit, pearls at her throat, gray hair pinned neatly behind her head. She looked like a woman attending a charity luncheon, not a woman explaining why her pregnant daughter-in-law had vanished.
"You're lying," I said.
Her expression barely changed. "Grief makes men cruel."
"And fear makes liars rehearse."
For the first time, her eyes hardened.
I walked past her and headed for the west wing.
Our butler, Elias, appeared at the end of the hall. His face went pale when he saw where I was going. He gave one tiny shake of his head.
A warning.
I kept walking.
At the end of a corridor I had known since childhood stood a steel door that had never belonged in my family's home.
I kicked it once.
The lock held.
Twice.
The frame cracked.
On the third strike, the door burst inward.
Beyond it was not a storage room.
It was a cell.
Iron bars covered the windows. A hospital bed had been bolted to the floor. Leather restraints hung from its sides.
And on the wall, carved into the plaster with something sharp, were seven words.
ADRIAN, IF YOU FIND THIS, DON'T TRUST HER.
My stomach dropped.
Then I heard breathing behind me.
May you like
Not my mother's.
Someone was hiding in the dark.
