Chapter 2

In the car on the way home, Preston pulled me into his arms.

Carefully, he slid a diamond ring onto my ring finger.

It was the limited-edition wedding ring I'd told him last week that I wanted, the one the store had been out of.

"I went to their headquarters and paid twenty million more, so they'd release one extra limited piece."

The old me would have cried, moved to tears.

But now, nothing stirred in me at all.

"Be good. Once Silvia and I are done with the wedding, I'll take you to the Maldives to unwind. Call it our honeymoon."

I gave a cold laugh.

At the door of that room, the one only I knew the code to.

Preston tapped the armrest with his fingertip, his voice dropping low. "Stop dragging your feet. Thirty million still isn't enough to have her wear the gown your mother made?"

I didn't know when Preston had started measuring everything in money.

When money was the one thing I had never lacked.

He'd become the richest man in New York, and at the start he'd leaned on my family's resources and my father's connections.

Step by step, he'd climbed to where he stood today.

"My mother said that gown was mine and no one else's. It was her finest work. It can never fall into an outsider's hands!"

The tenderness drained from his face. He made a call.

Moments later the butler rang. "Miss, something terrible has happened! The officers are about to take Mr. Walter away!"

Preston lifted a brow. "Your father took plenty for himself. I'm the only one who can help him now. Think it through."

"Impossible! My father has lived his whole life honest and clean. How could he be anything like what you're describing?!"

The butler spoke again. "Miss! The Danforth family handed the officers proof that they bribed Mr. Walter. You have to do something!"

I lowered the phone, tears welling in my eyes.

"Preston, I'm begging you. Have you really forgotten how my father lifted you up to where you are now?"

Preston lowered his eyes. "You have five more minutes to think. Once your father's inside, there's nothing I'll be able to do."

"Miss! They're really taking Mr. Walter away!"

"Fine! I agree."

My whole body went limp, and I braced myself against the door handle as I sank down slowly.

Preston tipped my chin up with the pad of his thumb and smiled at me, satisfied.

"See? If you'd just agreed sooner, none of this would've happened."

Five minutes later, my father was released without charge.

The gown was delivered to Silvia's room.

She sent all the servants away. "Dora, I want you to put the gown on me yourself."

Preston allowed it.

Everyone but me left the room.

Silvia dropped the act, her slender hand stroking the gown my mother had made.

"Dora Walter, do you know how much I hate you?"

"Back then, if it hadn't been to save you, my parents would never have died!"

"You know why I'm so cold, so distant? Because I have no family anymore, and no one will ever stand up for me."

"I'm not like you. You get to show your feelings however you please, because your father's always there to catch you. I'm just an orphan."

"Every time I watched you demand this and that from the people around you, without a second thought, fate wrapped around me like vines, choking the breath out of me, reminding me that all of this should have been mine!"

"So the more you had, the more you cared about something, the more I fought for it, the more I took it."

"It isn't the way you think!"

I rushed to defend myself.

She lifted an eerie smile, and the candle lamp in her hand dropped onto the gown.

The next second, Silvia glanced past me, then her eyes went wide.

She stared at me in disbelief. "Dora? Why would you do this to me? I only borrowed Auntie's gown, and you want me dead!"

"Silvia!!"

Someone slammed into me hard, and I fell against the sharp corner of the table, blood spreading fast.

And Preston snatched up the watering bucket for the flowers and flung it over Silvia.