Five minutes after Vanessa’s heel missed my face, I was standing in a pantry with a security guard named Reed blocking the door. The man from the corridor had vanished.
“Your phone,” Reed said.
“Why?”
“Guests’ privacy.”
“That policy didn’t bother the thirty people filming me.”
He reached for my apron. I stepped back.
“Touch me and your next conversation is with my lawyer.”
“You have a lawyer?”
“Not yet. But I have a phone.”
A kitchen door opened. Adrian entered without the roomful of admirers he’d carried downstairs.
“Reed. Outside.”
“Sir, Ms. Sterling said—”
“I said outside.”
The guard left reluctantly. Adrian waited for the door to close.
“Are you injured?”
“No. Is that the question you came to ask?”
He winced. “I’m sorry about my sister.”
“She’s not an unexpected rainstorm, Mr. Sterling. She made three choices in front of witnesses.”
“Two kicks,” he said.
“The third was going to land.”
He looked at my service shoes. “You trained?”
“My father taught me to keep my balance.”
That answer changed his face. “Your father?”
“Daniel Bennett. He maintained the security systems here for eleven years.”
Adrian leaned against the counter. “I knew Daniel.”
“Then you know he died in an accident after reporting a missing foundation account.”
“The investigation found no—”
“The investigation never opened his laptop.”
Through the pantry wall, someone announced that the charity auction would resume. People applauded. Upstairs, a guard was probably explaining to Vanessa why the cameras were suddenly useless.
“I wasn’t hired by accident,” I told Adrian. “Your gala manager called me personally. She said my father’s old supervisor had requested me.”
“Who?”
“Elliot Price.”
Adrian went still. Price was the foundation’s chief operating officer, a man photographed beside the Sterling family at every hospital ribbon cutting for twenty years.
“Elliot isn’t here tonight,” Adrian said.
“He was. I saw him behind the camera.”
Adrian opened the service door and called for his head of security. Nobody answered. Then his phone vibrated.
He read the message, and his skin lost color.
“What is it?” I asked.
He turned the screen toward me. A photograph showed my younger brother Noah outside his college dorm. Under it were seven words.
TELL THE WAITRESS TO LEAVE BEFORE MIDNIGHT.
Chapter 3 – The Cost of Staying
I called Noah twice. Straight to voicemail.
Adrian wanted me to stay inside Sterling House while he sent a car to campus. I wanted my brother alive, which made obedience tempting.
“Who’s driving?” I asked.
“My security team.”
“The team whose camera stopped recording when your sister attacked me?”
He put the phone down. “You’re right. I’ll call campus police directly.”
I watched him make the call and repeat the threat without softening a word. He asked the dispatcher to send officers to Noah’s dorm, then gave her his own number.
My hands shook after he hung up. I hated that he noticed.
“You can go,” he said. “I’ll handle the rest.”
“My father went to his boss with evidence and ended up dead. Handling the rest is exactly what people like your family always promise.”
He absorbed that without defending himself.
My best friend Tessa called from the catering van. “Maya, the boss says you’re fired. Vanessa told him you broke her ribs.”
“Her ribs were fine when she demanded an arrest.”
“I know. I was there.”
“Did you record anything?”
A pause. “I recorded the first kick. I didn’t want to say it over the radio.”
My knees nearly gave out. “Keep the original. Don’t send it to anyone except me.”
“Already backed it up. Twice.”
Adrian heard enough to understand. “I can protect her job.”
“Don’t. Protect her name.”
His phone rang again. The campus officer had found Noah. Alive, irritated, and unaware anyone had photographed him. I breathed for the first time in minutes.
“Where do we go from here?” Adrian asked.
I reached into the lining of my apron and removed a brass locker key. My father had sewn it into the hem of his old work jacket. Four days earlier, an anonymous letter had told me to bring it to the gala.
Adrian read the number stamped in the metal: 417.
“What’s in the locker?”
“I came here to find out.”
He stared at the key. “There aren’t any lockers numbered that high in this house.”
“There used to be. In the basement security archive.”
A knock sounded at the pantry door.
“Mr. Sterling?” Reed said. “Your sister wants the waitress brought to the main stage. She’s showing the guests something.”
From the ballroom came Vanessa’s amplified voice.
“Before the auction continues, I’d like everyone to meet the woman who assaulted me.”
