Chapter 2 - The Reception Turned Into a Crime Scene
The music stopped first.
Then the talking.
Then even the waitstaff froze.
Every guest in that estate reception hall understood something terrible had just happened, even if they didn’t know what.
I went straight to Sadie.
She was trembling in the wheelchair, orange juice dripping from her flower-girl sleeves onto her lap blanket. Daphne, though her cheek was already swelling from the slap, knelt beside her and helped wipe Sadie’s face with a linen napkin.
Sadie looked at me with huge terrified eyes and reached both arms toward me.
I crouched beside her and took her hands.
“It’s okay,” I told her, though my own voice felt hollow. “I’m here.”
Behind me, the bodyguards kept Corinne pinned in place by their presence alone. She was still against the drinks counter, stunned, breathing hard, unable to regain the smug expression she wore so easily around other people.
I rose slowly and turned back to the room.
“The reception is over,” I said.
No one argued.
No one dared.
Daphne wheeled Sadie toward the private sitting room off the main hall while I ordered one guard to lock down the estate gates and the other to call my attorney and a private investigator I hadn’t spoken to in over a year.
Corinne finally found her voice.
“Alistair, you’re overreacting.”
I stared at her.
“You just threatened my child,” I said. “And you mentioned the woman you told me you barely even knew.”
Her eyes flickered.
That was the first real crack.
The woman who had spent two years carefully playing the gracious future wife had slipped because she saw Daphne defend Sadie—and because cruelty was always her real language when she lost control.
When I stepped closer, Corinne tried one last time to recover.
“She’s emotional,” she said, nodding toward Sadie’s direction. “And Daphne has been turning her against me.”
That lie might have worked on me months earlier.
Not now.
Not after the words: like her mother did.
That sentence changed everything.
Because Sadie’s mother had not died in front of me.
She had vanished.
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And only someone who knew the truth would say it like a threat.
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