Blood soaked through the bandages wrapped around my shattered legs as Victoria’s red Louboutin heel crushed my fresh stitches. I bit my tongue until I tasted iron, because screaming would have given her too much pleasure.

“Sign over the trust to my son, Clara,” she hissed, pressing a blood-smeared pen into my shaking hand, “or I’ll finish what that truck didn’t.”

Behind her, my stepbrother Mason leaned against the marble fireplace, smiling like a prince at his coronation.

He had our family lawyer on speakerphone. He had two private nurses bribed into silence. He had my father’s house, my father’s wine, my father’s portrait staring down from the wall like even death could not interfere.

And I had a wheelchair.

That was what they saw.

Poor Clara. Broken Clara. The orphaned heiress with metal rods in her legs and grief in her throat.

Victoria bent closer, perfume sharp enough to choke me.

“Your father should have left everything to people who knew how to use it.”

“My father left it to me,” I whispered.

Mason laughed. “And look how well that worked out.”

The memory came fast: headlights swerving into my lane, the roar of a truck engine, my driver shouting my name, glass exploding like stars. I had survived because my driver, Paul, threw the car toward a ditch at the last second. Paul had not survived.

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