Chapter 1

The champagne was cold against Julian's silk shoe, and the marble was wet, and the music was playing something soft and stupid that he couldn't hear anymore. He had Elena's wrist in his grip, her thin bones grinding under his fingers, and he was dragging her across the floor like she was a piece of luggage that had overstayed its welcome.

"Let go of me," she said, her voice low and steady, the way it always was. That voice had been annoying him for three hours. "Julian. Let go."

He didn't let go. He pulled harder, and her free hand caught the edge of the banquet table, and a tower of crystal champagne glasses—forty of them, maybe fifty, stacked in a glittering pyramid that had taken the caterers an hour to build—went over with a sound like a thousand tiny bells falling into a blender.

The shards hit the marble and skittered. The music cut. Every guest turned.

Fifteen wealthy faces, some familiar to him from childhood, some merely expensive, all of them staring at the woman he was dragging and the mess she'd made. Julian felt the heat of their attention like a spotlight and he liked it. He liked it very much.

"Give me back my mother's file," Elena said.

She wasn't crying. That was the thing. Her dark chestnut hair had come loose from its braid, falling in waves around her face, and her deep purple satin dress was rumpled where he'd grabbed her, and her forearm was already bruising where his thumb was digging in, but she wasn't crying. She was looking at him like she was taking notes.

"No file," Julian said, savoring each word. "No inheritance. Nothing. You're a fraud, Elena. Little miss nobody, and your mother was a liar, and I'm going to prove it to everyone in this room."

His mother's voice cut across the ballroom, cold and clear as glass: "Leave her. It's her own doing."