Chapter 2 - The Matriarch's Command
I closed my eyes, squeezing my lids tight as I curled into a ball on the blood-stained floor. I waited for the steel tip to tear across my face, prayed that it wouldn't blind me, prayed that I wouldn't lose my job, prayed for Leo.
"Victoria, stop!"
A thunderous, deep voice boomed from the grand entrance of the ballroom.
The massive mahogany doors had burst open. Daniel Hastings strode into the room, his long, powerful frame clad in a dark tuxedo. His hair was slightly wind-blown, his jaw tight with anger. He had just arrived from a emergency board meeting in Manhattan.
His eyes swept the room, instantly catching the horrifying scene: his fiancée holding a bloodied riding crop above a weeping, bleeding server on her knees.
Daniel lunged forward, his expression transforming from authority to absolute horror. "What in God's name are you doing?!"
"Daniel! Stay back!" Victoria demanded, though her voice wobbled slightly as she caught the rage in his dark eyes. "This careless brat ruined my custom gown! She did it on purpose! I’m teaching her a lesson!"
Daniel reached out to grab Victoria’s wrist, but before his fingers could close around her arm, a fragile yet commanding voice silenced the entire ballroom.
"Put that weapon down right now, Victoria!"
The voice came from the head table at the back of the room.
Eleanor Hastings, the eighty-two-year-old matriarch who still controlled seventy percent of the family’s voting shares and the multibillion-dollar empire, was standing. She had pushed herself up from her gilded wheelchair with trembling, frail arms—something she had not done unassisted in three years.
Her knuckles gripped her pearl-handled cane so tightly her skin appeared translucent. Her sharp, pale blue eyes weren't looking at Victoria, nor were they looking at Daniel. They were locked with terrifying intensity onto my left arm.
During my fall, the sleeve of my uniform shirt had torn open along the seam from my wrist to my elbow. My skin was scraped and bleeding, but clearly exposed on the inner side of my left wrist was a distinctive, dark birthmark—a sharp, five-pointed star surrounded by a faint, crescent-shaped ring of pigmented skin.
"Grandma, please sit down, you're going to strain yourself," Victoria said, trying to soften her tone, though her arm remained raised. "She’s nobody! Just a clumsy thief who ruined my night!"
"Silence!"
Eleanor’s voice thundered through the vast ballroom, carrying a raw authority that made even the billionaire executives in the front row flinch.
"She is not nobody!" Eleanor gasped, her chest heaving as she took a slow, agonizing step forward, her cane clicking heavily against the marble. She reached out a trembling hand, pointing a thin finger straight at my bleeding wrist. "Look at her arm! Look at that mark! Look at her skin!"
Victoria sneered, tightening her grip on the silver handle of the crop. "It’s just a dirty mole, Grandma! Security, get in here!"
"Touch her again and I will have you stripped of every title and trust fund associated with this family!" Eleanor shouted, her eyes watering with sudden, overwhelmed emotion.
She looked past Victoria, locking eyes with her grandson, who stood frozen in the middle of the aisle.
"Daniel..." Eleanor whispered, her voice breaking with deep, shattering shock. "Look at her wrist. The star... the crescent... Daniel, the girl bleeding on that floor is your biological sister—the one who disappeared twenty years ago!"
A violent, suffocating hush fell over the three hundred guests.
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Daniel’s head snapped down toward me. He dropped to his knees in the middle of the glass and wine, his large hands reaching out to gently touch my torn sleeve. His breath caught in his throat as his thumb traced the exact contours of the star-shaped mark.
"Lily..." Daniel breathed, his voice cracking with a sudden, devastating grief. "My God... it’s Lily."
