.
One of them was dead.
Or had been declared so.
The man looked around the kitchen as though inspecting a stage after the actors had left.
“I was told my daughter had become formidable,” he said. “I wanted to see it for myself.”
Arden’s fingers curled against the counter.
Her father, Edmund Fairchild, had died nine years ago in a private plane crash off the coast of Belize.
His body had never been recovered.
His fortune had passed to Arden through trusts so complex that even Blake, hungry as he was, had never smelled the gold beneath the floorboards.
Now Edmund Fairchild stood in her kitchen at dawn, smiling like a secret that had grown tired of being buried.
“You’re dead,” Arden said.
“Legally, yes.”
Halden’s face had gone hard as stone.
Arden’s father took a step closer.
“And now that you have finally stopped pretending to be weak,” he said, “we can discuss the real reason I let Blake Winslow marry you.”
Outside, beyond the tall windows, the first light of morning touched the gates of the mansion Arden had just reclaimed.
Inside, the future she thought she had seized shifted beneath her feet.
