Chapter 1 - Don’t Touch My Brother
Nathaniel Crowe came home during the storm and found his seven-year-old daughter crawling across the marble floor like she was trying to escape a war.
The front door blew open behind him.
Rain swept into the mansion hallway, cold and violent, scattering drops across the polished stone.
His leather travel bag slipped from his hand and hit the floor with a heavy thud.
For one second, he could not breathe.
His daughter was on the marble.
Torn pale floral pajamas.
Tangled wet brown hair.
Scraped palms.
Scraped knees.
A bruise darkening along one side of her terrified face.
Behind her, wrapped tightly in a thick white blanket, lay her infant brother, whimpering softly beneath the blue storm light coming through the tall rain-covered windows.
A loose dark leather belt lay across the floor between them.
Nathaniel stared at it.
Then at his daughter.
Then at the baby.
The little girl saw him and threw herself backward over her brother, spreading her small body across the infant as if her own bones could become a door.
“Don’t touch my brother!”
Nathaniel dropped to one knee several feet away, both palms open, rain dripping from his charcoal overcoat onto the marble.
“Sweetheart,” he whispered. “It’s me.”
She did not relax.
That frightened him more than the blood on her hands.
His daughter had always run to him.
Even after nightmares.
Even after fevers.
Even when she was angry.
Now she looked at him like love itself had become uncertain.
Nathaniel kept his voice low.
“Who put you on this floor?”
Her lower lip shook violently.
For one broken second, recognition flickered through her eyes.
Then she looked past him.
Toward the darkness at the far end of the hall.
“She said we’d be gone before you came back.”
Nathaniel felt something inside him go still.
Not calm.
Worse.
The kind of stillness that arrives when rage finds a purpose.
He slowly removed his soaked overcoat and wrapped it around both children, careful not to move the infant too fast. His daughter clutched the sleeve with both hands as if the fabric proved he was real.
Then an interior door at the far end of the hallway opened.
A thin strip of warm light cut across the marble.
Marianne Vale stepped halfway into it.
Dark hair.
Black robe.
One hand gripping the brass handle.
Her face was pale, but her posture was still trying to remember how to be elegant.
“You weren’t supposed to come home.”
Nathaniel did not answer at first.
He looked down and saw his daughter’s eyes widen with raw terror.
Only then did he reach for the loose belt on the floor.
He picked it up slowly.
Not as a weapon.
As evidence.
Marianne’s eyes dropped to it.
Her composure cracked.
Nathaniel rose, placing his body between her and the children.
Behind him, his daughter pulled the baby closer beneath the coat.
The storm hammered the windows.
The mansion, which had once felt like an inheritance, now felt like a crime scene.
May you like
Nathaniel looked at Marianne.
“What did you do?”
