Chapter 1 - Don't Catch Me
“DON’T CATCH ME, MR. MORETTI!”
Grace Bennett let go thirty feet above a marble floor. A woman screamed. Champagne shattered. Vincent Moretti, the most feared man in New York, threw himself beneath her as if he could stop gravity with his bare hands.
He couldn't. And Grace didn't want him to.
The gold silk snapped tight around her ankle. Her body swung inches above the floor, close enough for her hair to brush Vincent's sleeve. For one terrible second, the ballroom went silent. Then Grace unwound the silk, landed on both feet, and gave a small, shaky bow.
The applause sounded like thunder after a car crash.
An hour earlier, she had been passing drinks at Vincent's engagement party, invisible in a black uniform. His fiancée, Vanessa Whitmore, had spotted Vincent watching her and announced a cruel little game: ten million dollars if the maid could perform on the aerial silks suspended from the ballroom ceiling.
“If you survive,” Vanessa had added, smiling for the crowd.
She didn't know Grace had once flown with the Bellwether Circus. Didn't know that a fall had put Grace in a hospital for seven months, that the medical debt still arrived in red envelopes, or that the sight of gold fabric had haunted her dreams for four years.
Grace had climbed anyway. Not for applause. Not even for the money. Because Vanessa's laughter sounded too much like the voice that had told her the circus accident was her own fault.
Now Vincent was staring at the red mark around her ankle. “You could've died.”
“I knew the wrap.”
“You didn't know if the rigging was safe.”
Grace looked up. One of the ceiling anchors had a fresh scratch beside its bolt. Her stomach tightened. She had inspected that anchor before climbing. The scratch hadn't been there.
Vanessa pushed through the crowd, her diamond ring flashing. “What a wonderful show. Now somebody get this girl back to the kitchen.”
“No,” Vincent said. His voice carried without effort. “Our engagement is over.”
Vanessa's smile stayed in place a beat too long. “Don't embarrass yourself, darling.”
“You did that for both of us.”
Grace moved toward the service door while every phone in the ballroom pointed at the broken couple. She was almost through when a stranger in a gray suit pressed a folded napkin into her hand.
“Your father said you'd recognize this,” he whispered.
Grace stopped breathing. Her father had been declared dead eleven years ago.
May you like
Inside the napkin was a brass circus token and six words written in familiar crooked handwriting:
THE FALL WAS NEVER AN ACCIDENT.
