Chapter 1 THE HOUSEKEEPER THAT WASN'T

IVY'S POV

Every woman who married Dominic Ashford ended up dead and buried, and I was about to ask him for a job

I stood at the foot of his black iron gates with a borrowed suitcase, a forged résumé and a recorder the size of a lipstick stitched into my coat, and I gave myself one rule. Get the proof. Take the boys. Do not, under any circumstances, feel a single thing for the man you came to destroy.

But first I had to get through the gate.

Nine days before she died, my cousin Camille called me at midnight, and I almost let it ring out. I was six thousand miles from home that night, living under somebody else's name in a rented room, three weeks away from putting a smuggler behind bars. I answered because it was Cam.

"Birdie." She was the only person alive who called me that, and her voice was so small I sat up in bed. "Something in this house isn't right. Doors I lock are open in the morning and the boys keep talking about a lady."

"Cam, you married a billionaire. What isn't right, the thread count?"

She laughed, and the laugh cracked down the middle. "Just come visit. Please. I'll explain when you get here."

I told her next month.

But there was no next month. There was a staircase, a broken neck, and a police report with the word accident typed across it like a verdict nobody was allowed to appeal. By the time my plane landed, my cousin had been in the ground for three weeks, and I never even made it to her funeral. I have spent fourteen months learning exactly how late I was.

So I did what I do for a living. I looked.

The county coroner, Dr. Wendell Moss, signed Camille's death certificate in under a day, with no autopsy and second opinion. Eight years ago he had signed the first wife's, Seraphina, who drove off a cliff in a storm and into the river. Six weeks ago he signed the third's. Lena had been the nanny who loved those boys so much she married their father, and her case closed in two days.

Three wives, three accidents, and nobody in Ashford's Landing had asked a single question.

I tried the proper way first. Twice I sat across from a state police detective who explained, very kindly, that a death can only be reopened on a complaint from next of kin, and Camille's next of kin was her husband. You can't ask the fox to inspect the henhouse.

So I built Ivy Calloway instead.

It took three months. A new surname, a fake agency that would vouch for me if anyone phoned, and a résumé of small hotels and forgettable bosses, with a birth year three years late so nobody would wonder why a woman of twenty-seven wanted to scrub other people's floors. I chose housekeeper on purpose. Nobody looks twice at the woman holding the mop, and a housekeeper carries keys to every door.

My lawyer had filed for custody of Camille's two little boys, and she'd been blunt about the odds. The hearing was in thirty days. Without proof, a judge would hand those children back to a billionaire, because a rich man's name outweighs a cousin's grief every single time.

Thirty days, then. A stolen name, a hidden recorder, and a house that killed women.

Murderer, I told myself, and pressed the intercom before I could change my mind.

A voice as dry as old paper crackled through. "State your business."

"Ivy Calloway. I am here about the housekeeper position."

"We stopped advertising weeks ago."

"Your agency said you were still struggling to fill it."

A pause, long enough that I heard my own pulse. Then a buzz, a heavy clunk, and the gates swung inward with a groan, as if they were tired of letting people in.

The drive curved through a tunnel of old oaks. A camera sat bolted to one trunk and I felt its small black eye turn with me as I walked. At the end of the tunnel the manor waited, grey stone and too many windows and ivy strangling the east side, beautiful the way a funeral lily is beautiful.

A woman in a grey cardigan opened the front door before I could knock. Seventy, I'd have guessed, though she held herself like someone much younger, with a mouth pulled so tight it looked stitched. Her badge said MRS. PELL.

"You are younger than your résumé suggests."

"I have been told I look young for thirty."

"Hm." She looked at my shoes, my coat, my face. "Wipe your feet. Mr. Ashford doesn't like mud in the hall."

The foyer swallowed sound. Marble floor, a chandelier the size of a small car, and a staircase that curved up to the second floor like a question. I knew that staircase from police photographs I wasn't supposed to have. Seventeen steps, dark wood, a brass rail polished so bright I could see my own face warped in it.

My knees almost went. I locked them and kept my eyes on Mrs. Pell's cardigan until the floor stopped tilting.

"Thirty-one years I have worked in this house," she said, walking ahead of me. "I retire at the end of the month, and God willing I will leave before anything else happens. You understand what I'm telling you?"

"That the job is hard?"

She turned, and for a moment something flickered behind her eyes that looked a lot like pity. "The job isn't the dangerous part."

Before I could answer, a door opened at the end of the hall.

I had seen Dominic Ashford on magazine covers, at charity galas, at three separate funerals wearing the same stone face. I thought I was ready for him, and then I saw how tired he looked. Tall, dark shirt, no tie, the top button open like he'd fought it and lost. A sharp jaw, shadows under his eyes, hair going grey at the temples far too early for a man of thirty-eight. He moved like someone who had stopped expecting good news..

Murderer, I reminded myself, but my heart didn't get the message and went on doing something stupid and fast.

"Who is this?" he asked.

"The applicant, sir. For the housekeeper position."

"I didn't schedule an interview."

"No, sir. She came anyway."

His eyes moved to me and he went still, completely and unnaturally still. The color left his face so quickly I thought he might fall, and one hand shot out to grip the doorframe.

"Your name.".

"Ivy Calloway."

"Say it again."

"Ivy Calloway, sir."

He stared at me as though a ghost had walked in wearing my coat, and I understood why. Camille's eyes. Everyone in our family had always said I had Camille's eyes, the same hazel, the same slope, the same way of looking at a person like we already knew their secrets.

Idiot, I thought. You should have worn glasses.

He crossed the hall in four slow steps, close enough that I could smell cedar and cold coffee. He didn't touch me. He only looked, and up close he gave off heat like a furnace in a cold house, and some treacherous part of me noticed the line of his throat above that open collar before the rest of me remembered to be afraid. The air between us grew thick enough to choke on.

"The last woman who stood in my hall with that eyes," he said quietly, "is lying in the churchyard."

Either he knew exactly who I was, or I was about to find out what this man did to women who looked like her.

My recorder was running against my ribs. My heart was louder.

"So tell me, Miss Calloway." His eyes narrowed, dark and unreadable. "Why did you really come here?"