chapter 6
The city outside was wrapped in summer heat, the air thick and bright, headlights blurring in the early evening. The second I got into the car, my knees started shaking so hard I had to clasp my hands together to stop them.
My mother noticed first. “Nora, sweetheart?”
“I’m fine.”
It was a lie. I wasn’t fine. My skin was still remembering another life. His basement. The damp concrete. The sound of his footsteps on the stairs. The way terror had a smell—cold iron, stale liquor, and blood turning brown in the dark.
But fear, I had learned, was only useful if you put it to work.
By the time we got home, I had made three decisions.
First, Whitfield Industries would never be handed to an outsider again. Not through marriage, not through trust, not through my father’s need to see alliances where there should have been caution.
Second, I would find out what really happened to Rose.
And third, if Ethan Shaw tried to drag my family into ruin again, I would break his hand before I let him touch the first domino.
That night I went into my father’s study and closed the door behind me.
He was standing by the bar cart, loosening his tie, still more bewildered than angry. “You embarrassed the Shaws today.”
“I saved us.”