Chapter 3: The Silver Coin
I crouched down slightly so I was at eye level with Clara, keeping my movements deliberate and slow. The tension in her shoulders remained, but the frantic panic in her gaze had subsided into a hollow wariness.
"Clara," I said softly, pointing a finger toward her chest. "That necklace. Where did it come from?"
She instinctively covered the small silver disc with her palm, as if guarding a last piece of clothing against a winter wind. Her fingers curled around the metal ball chain, pressing it hard against her sternum.
"It was my mother's," she said defensively, her chin lifting just a fraction. "She gave it to me right before she died. She said it was the only thing of value we had left, but she told me never to sell it. Not ever."
"What was your mother's name?" I asked, my heart doing a strange, heavy stutter in my chest.
"Elena. Elena Abbott."
The name hit the quiet room like a falling beam. Elena. Twenty-two years ago, before the Vance family name was buried under bankruptcy papers and quiet scandals, before I built my own empire out of legal gray areas and cold calculations, there was an Elena. A young woman who worked in our old summer house before the fire took everything—including the people I loved most.
"May I see it?" I asked, holding out my hand, palm up. My tattoos—dark, geometric ink winding up my wrists—reminded her of the threat I posed, but I kept my fingers completely still.
Clara hesitated. She looked from my outstretched hand up to my eyes, searching for the cruelty she was so accustomed to finding in people of my class. Finding nothing there, she slowly unclasped the ball chain behind her neck. The metal clicked softly as she laid the small disc into my palm.
The coin was heavy, worn smooth at the edges from decades of handling. I turned it over in my hand. On the face was the stamped profile of an oak tree with deep roots—the private crest of my grandfather's estate, minted in very limited batches for the staff who managed the private holdings. Only five of these coins were ever made. My father’s had been lost in the fire. My mother’s disappeared the night she left.
And here it was, hanging around the neck of a terrified twenty-year-old maid in Victoria Sterling's employ.
"Where did your mother get this?" I asked, my voice barely above a whisper.
"She never talked much about before," Clara said, leaning forward slightly, her curiosity finally piercing through her fear. "She worked in big houses her whole life. Mostly upstate, before we moved to the coast. She always said she found it in a drawer after a terrible night she couldn't talk about. Why? Do you know what it is?"
May you like
I closed my fist around the small silver disc, feeling the sharp edges bite into my palm. The coincidence was too precise to be an accident. Victoria Sterling had married into old money, but her family fortune was built on acquisitions—buying up distressed properties, absorbing bankrupt estates, and cleaning out houses whose owners had vanished under mysterious circumstances two decades ago.
"I know whose crest this is," I said, looking back into Clara's eyes. "And if that crest is in this house, it means Victoria didn't just inherit her wealth. She inherited stolen ground."
