Chapter 1 - SHATTERED GLASS
Blood slid over my knuckles while Royce Calloway stared at the crescent scar on the back of my hand as if it had reached up and struck him.
I could still feel Cordelia’s fingers tangled in my hair. My scalp burned. Tiny pieces of mirror glass glittered across the carpet and the cream-colored hallway wall, bright under the hotel sconces. My stomach cramped hard enough to steal my breath.
“Answer me,” Royce said, quieter now, but more intense. “That scar. Where did you get it?”
I pressed my palm over my belly and swallowed against the rising nausea. “When I was six,” I whispered. “A fire.”
Harlan Vance took two quick steps forward. “Della needs a doctor, not questions.”
Royce lifted his head and looked at him with such cold authority that Harlan stopped where he was.
“And she’ll get one,” Royce said. “The doctor. The questions. The footage. All of it.”
Cordelia pushed herself up from the carpet, one hand flat against the wall, the other pressed to her reddening cheek. The silk of her gown had twisted crookedly across her shoulder, but her voice came out sharp and polished.
“She attacked me.”
I let out a broken laugh. It hurt my ribs. “You slammed my head into a mirror.”
“You cornered me.” Cordelia’s eyes dropped to my uniform, my apron, my hotel name badge, as if those things proved something degrading about me. “You should never have been in that corridor.”
My vision pulsed, but not so badly that I missed the look that flashed between Cordelia and Harlan.
Not fear.
Recognition.
As if I had done more than carry a tray into the wrong hallway. As if I had seen something I was never meant to see.
A medic from the hotel’s emergency team arrived with security close behind him. Royce stayed beside me while the medic knelt and checked my pupils with a penlight.
“Any dizziness?”
“Yes.”
“Did you lose consciousness?”
“No.”
“Any abdominal pain?”
“Yes.” My voice cracked. “I’m pregnant.”
The medic’s entire face changed. He glanced toward the security guard. “Call EMS now.”
“I already said medical help,” Royce snapped.
The security guard flinched and lifted his radio.
Harlan crouched a few feet away from me, careful not to come too close. “Della, listen to me. If you’re hurt, we’ll take care of everything. We have a doctor on retainer. We can put you in the executive suite until this is straightened out.”
Straightened out.
The words crawled over my skin.
He didn’t ask if I was all right. He didn’t ask if the baby had moved. He offered a room. Privacy. Containment.
Royce heard it too.
“No one is moving her to a suite,” he said. “She’s going to a hospital.”
Cordelia straightened, smoothing her gown with trembling hands. “This whole thing is becoming absurd. She’s a waitress, not a state witness.”
I lifted my head.
Something hot and fierce moved under the fear.
“She’s right about one thing,” I said. “I’m not a state witness.”
Cordelia’s mouth curved.
“Yet.”
The word came from Royce, not me.
The hallway went still.
Even the medic looked up.
Cordelia’s expression froze for one fraction of a second too long. Then she folded her arms. “Royce, this is a family property issue. Harlan and I can resolve it.”
“By deleting it?” he asked.
Harlan’s face blanched. “No one deleted anything.”
Royce stood.
He was tall already, but anger made him seem larger. “Interesting. I didn’t say footage had been deleted. I said it had to be preserved.”
My stomach clenched again.
I bent over it instinctively, one arm wrapping around myself. A thin sound escaped me before I could stop it.
Royce turned back immediately and knelt again, his hand hovering near my shoulder without touching me. “Della. Look at me.”
I did.
“When did the pain start?”
“When she hit my head. Then worse when I fell.”
“Is the baby moving?”
I shut my eyes and waited.
Nothing.
Fear opened under me like black water.
“I don’t know.”
He exhaled once through his nose and looked toward the medic. “Get me an ambulance update.”
The medic stepped aside to make the call.
Harlan tried once more. “Mr. Calloway, please. I know how this looks.”
Royce gave a short, mirthless laugh. “It looks like your fiancée assaulted a pregnant employee inside one of your hotels.”
The word fiancée lodged in my head.
So Cordelia and Harlan weren’t just business partners circling the Vance Grand like sharks. They were tying themselves legally together too.
That explained the united front.
It did not explain why Cordelia had gone feral the second she saw what was in my hand.
Because that was how it had started.
Not with an insult.
Not with me “forgetting what I was.”
With the old key card and folded paper I had picked up from the service console at the end of the staff corridor—a paper Cordelia had snatched away just before she grabbed my hair.
Royce must have seen the thought cross my face.
“What happened before she attacked you?”
Cordelia spoke first. “She was snooping.”
“I asked Della,” Royce said.
My pulse kicked painfully at my neck. “I was bringing champagne to the west ballroom. The tray station was blocked, so I cut through the staff corridor. There was a key card on the console. And a folded paper. I thought someone had dropped it.” I looked at Cordelia. “She came around the corner, saw it in my hand, and told me to give it to her.”
Harlan’s jaw tightened.
“What kind of paper?” Royce asked.
“Ledger page, maybe. Numbers. Names.” I frowned, trying to pull it back through the haze in my head. “There was a line highlighted in yellow.”
Cordelia took one step toward me. “She could barely see straight then. She has no idea what she’s saying.”
The security manager hurried down the corridor then, breathless, sweating through his collar. “Mr. Calloway—”
Royce turned.
The man swallowed visibly. “The east hall camera feed is gone.”
No one moved.
Royce’s eyes shifted slowly to Harlan.
Then to Cordelia.
Gone.
Not damaged.
Not unclear.
Gone.
And suddenly my scalp, my belly, the shattered mirror, even Cordelia’s hands in my hair rearranged themselves into a shape far uglier than simple rage.
She hadn’t attacked me because she hated me.
She had attacked me because I had seen something.
The ambulance siren rose outside the hotel.
May you like
Royce looked down at me again, but this time the shock in his face had hardened into purpose.
“Della,” he said, voice low, “did anyone ever tell you what really happened in that fire that gave you this scar?”
