Chapter 4 - The Bronze Corner of the Display CaseBy 1:15 AM, the third-floor master corridor was bathed in eerie, shadowed silence.
Two armed sentries in dark tactical coats stood outside Camilla Sterling's bedroom door, their suppressed carbines resting at the low ready.
When Damon approached, the guards snapped to attention, stepping aside.
Damon didn't knock.
He took a heavy brass master key from his pocket, turned the lock with a sharp, heavy click, and kicked the double mahogany doors wide open.
Inside, the master suite was warm, smelling of tuberose perfume, expensive French face creams, and dry champagne.
Camilla lay in the center of the emperor-sized four-poster bed, wearing a sheer ivory lace nightgown, her blonde hair spilled across silk pillows. She had been kept awake by the sentries tapping the doorframes every fifteen minutes, her eyes bloodshot, her face pale and taut with mounting terror.
When she saw Damon step into the room, flanked by me in his cashmere overcoat, she scrambled backward against the carved headboard, pulling the duvet up to her throat.
"Damon! What is the meaning of this barbarism? You put armed thugs outside my door!"
Damon walked across the Persian rug with slow, measured steps, stopping at the foot of the bed.
He reached into his jacket, pulled out the emergency custody petition, and dropped the paper onto the silk duvet.
Camilla looked at the legal seal.
Every drop of blood drained from her porcelain face, leaving her the color of sour cream.
"Damon... darling... listen to me," she stammered, her voice cracking into shrill desperation. "It isn't what it looks like! My father... my father told me we needed a financial buffer! He said your enemies in Detroit were looking for an excuse to strike!"
"My enemies in Detroit don't touch my children, Camilla," Damon said, his voice dropping into that chilling, quiet register that made the hair on the back of my neck stand up. "You do."
He walked to the antique armoire, pulling open the double mirrored doors.
Inside hung sixty thousand dollars of couture gowns, fur stoles, and diamond-embroidered wraps.
Damon grabbed an armful of the silk dresses, ripped them from their wooden hangers, and tossed them onto the floorboards.
Behind the hanging garments, mounted in the back wall of the armoire, was a small electronic wall safe.
Damon turned to Camilla.
"Open it."
"Damon, please! My personal jewelry is in there—"
"Open it," he repeated, not raising his voice by a single decibel. "Or Frank will cut this safe out of the wall with an industrial torch while you watch from the floor."
Sobbing hysterically, her hands shaking so violently she could barely stand, Camilla slid out of the bed, her bare feet hitting the cold floorboards. She knelt before the safe, her trembling fingers punching in an eight-digit combination.
The electronic bolt disengaged with a dull beep.
Damon pulled the heavy steel door open.
Inside lay an unmailed leather dossier containing Mia's Canadian ward transfer forms, two million dollars in untraceable European bearer bonds, and a velvet jewel box.
Damon opened the jewel box.
Resting inside was Donna Maria Vance's antique platinum engagement ring—a five-carat emerald-cut diamond surrounded by two delicate olive branches carved from white gold—an heirloom Camilla had taken from Damon's family vault two weeks earlier under the pretext of having it sized.
Damon picked up the ring, turning the platinum band between his calloused fingers.
He looked down at his sobbing fiancée, shivering on her knees in her lace nightgown.
"You told the dining room that Clara dropped a wine crate, Camilla," Damon whispered.
Camilla wept, clawing at his trousers. "I panicked, Damon! I knew she saw the attorney! I didn't want you to cancel the wedding!"
"You threw a woman into a bronze display case because she caught you trying to sell my seven-year-old daughter to an orphanage in Montreal," Damon said, his slate-gray eyes turning to black ice.
He looked at Frank standing in the doorway.
"Strip her of the family's jewelry. Pack her in a holding vehicle. She sits in the sub-basement holding cells beneath Pier 14 until her father arrives to answer for Detroit's debt."
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"Damon! No! You can't do this!" Camilla shrieked, thrashing as two female security officers hauled her to her feet, dragging her backward out of the suite while her tears soaked into the carpet. "My father controls the maritime terminals! You need the Sterling name!"
Her screams faded down the long marble corridor until the heavy iron fire doors clicked shut forever.
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