Chapter 2

Aimee POV:

At seven thirty that evening, the Hilton's top-floor ballroom.

The whole hall glittered under crystal chandeliers, champagne towers throwing back cold, brilliant light. Manhattan's elite filed in dressed to the teeth, glasses clinking.

I wore a dark wool suit washed stiff, and sat alone in the furthest corner of the ballroom. Table twenty-four.

It was wedged against the service corridor to the kitchen. Every time the curtain swung open, a gust of greasy noise and cold air came with it. Hank had put me here deliberately: it let the family display its "generosity" in not having thrown the adopted daughter out, while physical distance kept me pressed firmly into the mud.

"Is my sister cold sitting all the way over here?"

The voice was sweet and soft above my head. Breann drifted over to the table holding a glass of pink champagne.

She wore a custom tulle gown worth six figures and the South Sea pearl necklace Hank had personally bid on at auction, like a peacock fed on expensive jewelry.

"It's all my fault." Breann's eyes went pink, and though her words were apologetic, something gloating and pleased ran underneath them. "If I hadn't come back to this family, my sister wouldn't have sunk to sitting in a corner meant for the servants... If it upsets you, I can ask Father to find you a cleaner chair before the program starts."

I did not even lift my eyelids. I just ran my fingers slowly around the cold rim of the glass.

"Save your fake sympathy, Breann. Nobody needs to pity an ingrate like that."

Easton came over holding a glass, immaculate in a tailored suit, his face full of contempt. He looked down at me the way you look at a stray dog that has taken up residence on a wealthy family's doorstep.

Then he pulled something from his pocket: a battered silver harmonica case, paint chipped off the corners.

When I was seven, Easton was hospitalized with an asthma attack. I saved my allowance for six months and combed the secondhand markets of Manhattan to buy it for his birthday. For the next decade he carried it everywhere, showing it off to anyone who would listen, boasting that his little sister had given him this treasure.

Now his long fingers flicked at the tin box with distaste, and the corner of his mouth curled into something cruel.

"Aimee, you always loved bribing me with cheap junk like this, didn't you?"

Easton sneered, and turned his wrist over.

Crack.

The case hit the tile by my foot. The body split with a jagged, discordant note.

Then Easton lifted his polished custom shoe and, in front of several waiters and guests, ground it down into the case.

The squeal of twisting metal echoed absurdly along the edge of the noisy ballroom.

"Breann gave me a Patek Philippe today." Easton looked down at me from his full height, his heel flattening the harmonica — and with it every clumsy piece of childhood affection I had ever poured into it — into scrap. "As for the garbage you give me, it makes me sick to look at. And drop that dead victim's face, Aimee. In this house, you were always worthless except for wagging your tail and begging."

Fragments of broken metal spattered across my shoes.

A faint numbness spread through my chest, like a nerve soaked in cold water. Not the sharp pain I had expected. Just an empty kind of detachment.

"The program starts in ten minutes. What are you staring at?"

Clint had appeared at the table without my noticing. He did not even glance at the crushed harmonica on the floor. He only frowned and slapped a thick stack of printed pages onto my table.

"These are your remarks for tonight," Clint said, his voice low and heavy with pressure. "When the emcee calls your name, you walk up to the main stage and read every word of that, in front of every camera in this room."

I glanced down at the page.

It was packed with self-abasement.

[I, Aimee, acknowledge my own worthlessness and thank the Whitfield family for eighteen years of charity... I hereby voluntarily renounce my engagement and my inheritance, and kneel to the true pearl, Breann, in apology...]

"When you finish, bow to Breann and apologize on your own initiative." Clint adjusted his diamond cufflinks, his eyes freezing cold. "Put away that pathetic self-respect of yours. If anything goes wrong tonight, I will make sure you spend the rest of your life paying back the twelve million four hundred thousand you owe this family."

The three of them stood together: one draped in jewelry worth a fortune, one standing over eighteen years of my belongings ground into the floor, one personally handing me the rope to hang my own dignity with.

I looked at them, folded the humiliating script away, and said one word.

"Fine."