Chapter 5

Ella's POV

He replied with a single line. "Don't worry, ma'am. You'll never see me again."

Once I'd wiped every record, another notice pinged onto the screen—an invoice for Blake's spending aboard some other yacht, a long string of numbers, absurd enough to be laughable.

I settled it for him without a thought. Then I quietly shifted a large sum out of the trust and into my own private account. With Grandfather bedridden, the quarterly signing authority had fallen to me, and the family—too busy carving up their own plans—hadn't yet thought to revoke it. Better still, every dollar was booked as Blake's extravagance, so the ledgers showed nothing but a doting bride indulging her fiancé. Nothing anyone would think to trace back to me.

My fiancé was nothing more than a tool for moving money around. The more reckless he was, the better it suited me.

This way, everyone would take me for a lovesick fool, bleeding the Hartford family fortune into my fiancé's hands dollar by dollar.

Grandfather was gravely ill, and I had no one left to stand behind me. The family had already laid their plans—wrap me up like a gift, marry me off, and call it a business alliance.

So I picked Blake Shaw myself. His family ranked the lowest, and he was the dumbest of the lot—arrogant, overbearing, but for that very reason, the easiest to control.

I lit another cigarette and looked at myself in the mirror.

Slim waist, long legs, the silk nightgown clinging to every curve, making them even more tempting—like a ripe peach hanging low, waiting for the hand that would finally take it.

Maybe it was time to buy a few plainer, more innocent outfits.

I watched the woman in the glass and pressed the upturned corners of my mouth down, bit by bit. In no time the mirror held a different face—harmless, touched with an innocent, girlish softness. Even the sharpness in my eyes turned clean and clear, like some girl who understood nothing at all about the world.

Two tears slid down from the corners of my eyes, right on cue.

I looked at the woman in the mirror and said softly, "Uncle Cole, you like this Ella, don't you?"

Cole's POV

The car was quiet on the way back.

I dragged my thumb across the knuckle of my index finger, once, then again. An old habit, the thing my hands did when I was thinking. I'd never managed to break it.

"Did the Shaw family send me an invitation before this?" I said abruptly.

Ryan answered almost without pausing. "Yes. Twice. You declined both. This time they sent a third—three days from now, for the Shaw matriarch's birthday." He hesitated, keeping his voice level and professional. "The head of their household made a point of mentioning something. He said they'd gathered some old photographs of you from back when you left the family for your time on the battlefield. He'd like to return them to you in person."

Old photographs.

I knew exactly what that meant. They were fishing, using the one stretch of my past I least wanted dredged up as bait.

Two weeks ago, I would have turned it down without so much as blinking.

But now.

I thought again of that face bowed low to the floor, wet lashes lifting as she called me Uncle Cole. James's daughter. Married into a house like that.

"The dinner in three days," I said. "I'll go."

Ryan visibly paused. But he asked nothing further, only lowered his head and noted the change to my schedule.

Good. The people I keep never ask what they shouldn't.

Ella's POV

Three days later, the Shaw dinner blazed with light,

I'd worn a plain, understated gown, my makeup soft, my hair pinned up neat and obedient. As Hartford's perfect heir—and Blake Shaw's fiancée in name only—these social affairs with their painted-on smiles were something I couldn't skip.

I carried a glass of champagne I had no intention of drinking and drifted through the garden, bored out of my mind. The second the clock hit my exit, I was gone. I didn't want to spend a minute more here than I had to.

Then I rounded a corner and saw Zoey.

She was tucked into a corner, voice pressed low, murmuring orders to a few of her family's hulking bodyguards. She was talking fast, one finger jabbing again and again in my direction.

I raised an eyebrow.

Interesting.

Did she really think I couldn't guess what she was scheming?

I kept walking, glass in hand, and instead of turning away I strolled unhurriedly toward that secluded greenhouse. I'd scoped out that corner the last time I was here—the cameras didn't reach it.

I was going to give her the chance.

I hadn't been inside the greenhouse long before the footsteps caught up. Four bodyguards filed in, closing around me on both sides, sealing off the door.

I set my glass down gently. My shoulders began to tremble, and I let my voice go small.

"What… what happened?"

The one in front bared his teeth in a grin. "Sorry about this, Miss Hartford. You won't be leaving this greenhouse today."

I backed away, step by step, retreating into the corner, into that dead zone the cameras couldn't see. Right on cue, my eyes brimmed with tears.

"So… what are you going to do to me?"

He rolled his neck, knuckles cracking as he flexed them, and closed in. The other three fanned out around me, palms opening and clenching. Ready to move.

The instant his hand reached out for my shoulder—

The panic dropped off my face.

My eyes went cold.

I twisted aside, dodging that hand, and drove my elbow clean into his throat. He let out a strangled grunt, dropping to his knees clutching his neck before he could get a single word out.

The second one lunged as he caught up. I seized his wrist and wrenched it, using the momentum to kick out the back of his knee. He folded instantly, face slamming into the flower rack.

Start to finish, under ten seconds. All four of them flat on the ground.

I bent down, pried the comm device out of one of their hands, and crushed it under my heel. Then I went through them one by one, making sure not a single one was still conscious.

I rolled my shoulders, a little disappointed. It really had been too long since I'd had a chance to move.

If the crowd from the underground fights ever found out—that "E," ranked top three in the country, the only heavyweight female champion on the entire East Coast, had taken three whole seconds to drop a few ordinary rent-a-cops—they'd never let me hear the end of it.

I straightened up, shook out my skirt, and slid the harmless little wide-eyed expression back onto my face.

But before I could quite wipe the sharpness from my eyes—

I heard footsteps.

Zoey came around the corner on her heels, chin high, no doubt here to "inspect the results."

She'd probably run it through her head a hundred times already—me cornered, cowering, begging for mercy.

But the moment she took in what the greenhouse actually held, that smugness on her face froze over inch by inch, draining to a sickly white.

Four bodyguards—her own—sprawled every which way across the floor.

And me, standing in the middle of it, my skirt spotless, not a single wrinkle out of place, head bowed as I unhurriedly wiped off my fingers.

I lifted my eyes and smiled at her.

There wasn't a trace of panic in that smile. Not a shred of the weakling she'd expected.

Zoey's lips quivered. She staggered back a step, nearly turning her ankle in those heels. She stared at me like she'd seen a ghost, throat working for a long moment before she finally forced out a single cracked, shrieking word—

"Oh my God! Ella! What have you done?!"