. CHAPTER 4 — Blood, Daisies, and a Gold Ring
Pain does strange things to time.
The cemetery seemed to slow around me. A leaf turned in the air. The engine behind Charlotte hummed. My breath came in small broken pulls because if I inhaled too deeply, fear would come with it.
The ring was in the mud.
I stared at it, absurdly focused on the thin gold circle while Charlotte continued speaking. Her words came and went through the ringing in my ears.
“After today, you will sign the resignation letter. You will leave Bellamy House quietly. You will not contact my father. You will not contact the press. You will not mention that photograph, that ring, or any fantasy your mother planted in your head.”
I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand. “You’re afraid.”
Her face tightened.
That was when I knew I had touched the truth.
Charlotte crouched in front of me, careful to keep her coat from brushing the mud. Up close, her perfume was sharp and expensive, cutting through the smell of wet leaves.
“Listen to me carefully,” she said. “My father is months away from becoming vice president. Do you understand what that means? A woman like you cannot walk into our lives carrying old lies and a child nobody can explain.”
“My child has nothing to do with you.”
“Oh, it has everything to do with me if your mother’s bloodline gives you a claim.” She glanced at my belly with naked contempt. “Claims can be challenged. People can disappear. Medical emergencies happen every day.”
I stopped breathing.
She smiled again because she had finally frightened me the way she wanted.
Behind her, one of the men shifted, uncomfortable. He had probably signed up to drive a senator’s daughter, not listen to her threaten a pregnant woman in a cemetery. But power makes cowards out of witnesses.
I reached slowly for the ring.
Charlotte’s heel pressed down on it before my fingers could close.
“No,” she said. “This ends with me.”
The sound came then.
Not thunder. Not wind.
Another engine. Deeper. Heavier. Then another behind it. The quiet road outside the cemetery filled with the low, controlled arrival of vehicles that did not belong to Charlotte.
Her security men turned.
Charlotte looked over her shoulder.
May you like
Through the fog, black cars rolled past the iron gates, one after another.
And walking ahead of them was a man in a long black coat, his face carved with a grief I had only seen once before—in the burned photograph my mother had hidden from the world.
