Chapter 1 - THE MASK COMES OFF
The silver mask struck the marble with a sound like a gunshot. Grace Mercer barely had time to watch it skid beneath a golden chair before Vivienne Blackwood raised her handbag again.
“You don't belong here!” the billionaire shouted. Her diamonds flashed beneath the chandeliers, and her rigid black handbag crashed against Grace's temple as Grace bent to retrieve the mask.
Grace dropped onto one knee. Pain burst behind her eye, but her first movement was toward her seven-month pregnant belly, shielding the baby with both hands.
For one impossible second, the entire ballroom stopped breathing. Music faltered. Champagne hung in tilted glasses. Two hundred masked guests stared at the woman kneeling in a pale-blue gown.
Vivienne stood above her, splendid in dark red, her blonde hair pinned into a perfect crown. Nothing about her face suggested regret. She looked almost relieved to have finally struck.
Grace tasted fear, sharp as copper, and fought to keep her breathing even. She could hear her obstetrician's voice: Protect yourself from falling. Never let panic steal your balance.
“I came because I was invited,” Grace whispered. She refused to beg, although her cheek burned and the baby had gone strangely still beneath her palms.
“That invitation was a mistake.” Vivienne lowered her voice until only Grace could hear. “And mistakes have a way of disappearing in this house.”
Grace looked past the billionaire toward the champagne pyramid near the bar. Its crystal tiers glittered above a broad, velvet-skirted pedestal, exactly where an anonymous message had told her to look.
Three days earlier, a cream envelope had arrived at Grace's apartment. Inside lay a silver masquerade mask and six typed words: Come alone. Look beneath the crystal tower.
She had ignored the instruction to come alone. Her older brother, Owen, had followed in a separate car, promising to wait outside unless she called. Grace had never been so grateful for disobedience.
The ballroom doors opened with a violent bang. Owen Mercer crossed the threshold, his black tuxedo jacket flying behind him, and saw his pregnant sister struggling to rise from the floor.
“Don't you touch my sister!” His voice cut through the room before anyone could move to stop him. He reached Vivienne in three long strides.
Owen struck once. Vivienne stumbled backward, stunned, and her handbag slipped from her fingers. He kicked it beneath a distant banquet table, then planted himself between her and Grace.
The punch shocked Owen almost as much as it shocked the crowd. He had spent years learning to control anger, but seeing Grace hurt had shattered the distance between thought and action.
“Can you stand?” he asked without looking away from Vivienne. His left hand reached behind him, searching for Grace's shoulder while his eyes watched the billionaire.
“I'm trying,” Grace breathed. The room tilted around her. “Owen, the baby—” She stopped because she could not bear to finish the sentence.
Vivienne touched her mouth and stared at her fingers as though they belonged to someone else. Then humiliation hardened into a fury too fierce for words.
“You think you can walk into my home and assault me?” she hissed. Her eyes swept the watching guests, demanding agreement. No one offered it.
At the bar, a gold-framed chair stood beside the champagne display. Vivienne seized it by the backrest, dragged its legs across the marble, and lifted it toward Owen.
“I'll destroy you!” she screamed. The chair swung forward. Owen stepped sideways, keeping his injured sister behind him, and the heavy metal frame missed his shoulder by inches.
Grace scrambled away on one hand, protecting her abdomen with the other. She noticed, absurdly, that a thin blue light glowed beneath the velvet edging of the crystal pedestal.
Vivienne lunged again. Owen blocked the chair with his forearm and shoved her back to keep the metal legs away from Grace. The billionaire lost her footing on spilled champagne.
Her body slammed into the display. Crystal glasses spilled like bright rain. The top tiers fell into the lower tiers, and the entire glittering structure collapsed across the polished floor.
Guests screamed and scattered. The heavy pedestal lurched sideways, its hidden wheels squealing under the impact. A narrow wooden panel beneath the velvet skirt sprang open.
Owen turned at the unfamiliar sound. He expected broken machinery, perhaps an electrical compartment. Instead, from within the hollow pedestal, two frightened eyes stared into the light.
A little girl sat behind a protective wooden partition. She wore a white party dress, and her shoulder-length brown hair clung to her cheeks with tears.
She was small enough to curl her knees to her chest. No glass had reached her, but the darkness and narrow walls had left her trembling so hard the partition rattled.
Grace forgot her own pain. “Owen,” she said, pointing beneath the wreckage. “There's a child in there.” Her brother dropped to his knees immediately.
“Sweetheart, I'm not going to hurt you.” Owen kept his hands visible and his voice low. “Tell me whether you can move your legs.”
The child nodded once, then clutched something closer to her chest. It was a cream invitation, bent at the corners and damp with the sweat of her hands.
Owen eased the broken panel wider, careful not to pull the pedestal toward her. “You're safe with us,” he said. “Just look at me.”
Vivienne had stopped struggling. She stood among the fallen glasses with champagne staining her gown, staring at the girl as though a ghost had climbed out of the floor.
“No,” she whispered, staring directly at the child. The word vanished beneath the cries of the crowd. “You weren't supposed to be found.”
Grace heard it. So did Owen. He glanced up, but the billionaire had already recovered enough to demand that her security guards remove the trespassers.
The little girl finally reached through the opening. Instead of taking Owen's offered hand, she pressed the invitation into his palm and held on to one corner.
“Please don't give it to her,” she begged. “She said she'd tear it up. She said nobody was ever going to believe me.”
Owen lifted the invitation into the chandelier light. Across the heavy cream paper, in elegant black lettering, appeared a name that drained the color from Vivienne's face.
The invitation carried only two words, printed in capitals large enough for everyone close to the ruined tower to see: EVELYN BLACKWOOD.
Grace knew the name. Every Blackwood Foundation employee did. Evelyn was Vivienne's younger sister, the idealistic philanthropist whose disappearance seven years earlier had supposedly broken the family.
An entire wing of the Blackwood Children's Hospital bore Evelyn's name. Every year, Vivienne gave speeches about grief beneath a framed portrait of her missing sister.
Yet this invitation was fresh. Grace recognized the security embossing from the gala's guest list, a gold crescent impressed beside the date of tonight's celebration.
“Where did you get this?” Owen asked the girl. His voice softened, but his fingers tightened around the paper. “Did someone give it to you?”
The girl looked from him to Grace, then toward Vivienne. Her small throat moved as she swallowed fear that no child should have learned to carry.
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“She told me to hide,” the girl whispered, still clutching the paper as though it were a lifeline. “But my mommy said she would come.”
Behind them, Vivienne Blackwood took one silent step toward the broken compartment, and Grace understood that the worst danger in the ballroom had not ended with the falling crystal.
