Chapter 3 - The Micro-Cassette in the Cedar BaseLorelei pressed her back against the buffet table, her diamond tiara askew, her eyes wild with animal panic.
“Cassian! I didn't know about the tape! I swear on my mother’s grave, I had no idea my father did that twenty years ago! I was only seven years old!”
“You didn't know about the tape,” Cassian said, stopping inches from her face. “Then why did you threaten to evict Nora’s mother if she brought this box into my presence?”
Lorelei swallowed hard, her painted lips parting, her chest heaving against her silver gown.
“I... I thought it was common junk! A tacky toy from an old tradesman!”
“Albert Vance’s name was on my mother’s private guest list for our engagement dinner,” Cassian said softly. His voice was lower than a whisper, yet it made the crystal pendants overhead vibrate faintly. “A list I handed to you personally three weeks ago.”
He reached out with his left hand, his thumb catching the edge of the diamond tiara resting in her blonde hair.
With a slow, effortless motion, he lifted the platinum band from her brow.
“You ran a background check on Albert Vance two weeks ago, Lorelei,” Cassian said. “My security director found the query in your private encrypted cloud logs thirty minutes ago. You saw that he was the master craftsman who built my mother’s jewelry. You knew he had visited her forty-eight hours before the explosion.”
Lorelei’s breath hitched in her throat.
“Cassian... please...”
“You didn't want the box thrown out because it was old, Lorelei,” he whispered, his gray eyes turning to black ice. “You wanted it destroyed because your father told you that Donna Elena left an unsealed will before she boarded that yacht.”
He dropped the three-hundred-thousand-dollar tiara onto the marble floor.
His polished dress shoe came down onto the platinum band, pressing down until the diamonds popped from their prongs with sharp, crystalline snaps, splintering into dust beneath his heel.
Lorelei screamed in horror, clutching her face.
Cassian turned his gaze back to me.
I was standing beside Albert, my hands still gripping the silver serving tray, my uniform wrinkled from the long shift.
“Nora,” Cassian murmured.
“Yes, Mr. Vance?” I whispered, my heart slamming against my ribs like a trapped bird.
“Did Lorelei threaten your mother tonight?”
I looked at Lorelei’s pale, tear-streaked face. I thought of my mother lying in her room at St. Jude’s, breathing through an oxygen concentrator, depending on my bi-weekly paycheck to keep the nurses at her bedside.
Then I looked at eighty-year-old Albert Vance, whose hands were still shaking from six hours on an unheated bus.
“Yes, sir,” I answered, my voice steady and clear across the grand hall. “She told me that if you saw the walnut box, she would have my mother evicted into the rain before midnight.”
A dark, terrifying muscle ticked along Cassian’s jawline.
He turned to Victor.
“Call St. Jude’s Assisted Living in Queens. Inform the executive director that Helen Hayes is transferred immediately to the private pavilion at Mount Sinai in Manhattan. Full neurological and respiratory suite, private nursing team, covered under the Vance Family Trust in perpetuity.”
Tears of pure, overwhelming relief burned behind my eyelids, spilling over my lashes before I could stop them.
“Mr. Vance... please... that care costs thousands of dollars a day—”
“You protected my mother’s voice tonight, Nora,” Cassian said, stepping toward me with unhurried, gentle grace.
He took the heavy silver tray from my trembling hands and set it onto the nearest table.
He looked down into my eyes with an intensity that took the breath straight out of my chest.
“In this house, courage is paid in gold, and loyalty is answered with life. You will never clean a suite on this estate again.”
He turned back to Lorelei.
“Victor.”
“Yes, Don Cassian.”
“Escort Miss Sterling to the boiler room. The very room she selected for my uncle.”
Lorelei shrieked, thrashing against the guards as they seized her arms.
“No! You can’t! My father has twenty cargo ships docking in Brooklyn tomorrow morning! Charles Sterling will wipe this family off the map!”
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Cassian didn't even look back at her as she was dragged through the service archway.
“Tell Charles Sterling,” Cassian whispered into the silence of the room, “that his ships belong to Brooklyn now.”
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