The golden-haired girl in the garden was Alicia, a woman whose beauty felt like a physical assault on Malcolm’s senses. She was the second wife of his father, a girl barely older than a child herself, yet she carried the very essence of the portrait he kept locked in his desk. For weeks, Malcolm watched her from the shadows of the veranda and the high, arched windows of the library. He watched the way the wind caught her skirts and the way she laughed—a sound that felt dangerously out of place in the suffocating silence of Foxworth Hall.
To Malcolm, she was not his father’s wife. She was a biological miracle, a vessel sent by fate to correct the errors of his lineage.
Inside the library, the air was thick with the scent of old leather and the sharp, metallic tang of the secret key Malcolm turned over and over in his fingers. He had begun to ignore the ledgers of his vast shipping empire. The numbers, once his only source of pride, now felt hollow. The only ledger that mattered was the one he was writing in his mind—a tally of how to move a soul from the garden to the attic.
"You are staring again, Malcolm," Olivia said, her voice cutting through the gloom. She was standing by the fireplace, her silhouette as sharp and unforgiving as a blade. "She is your father’s wife. To look at her with such... hunger... is a sin that even this house might not be able to hide."
Malcolm didn’t turn around. "Hunger is for those who lack, Olivia. I am simply observing a masterpiece. My father has always had a knack for finding things he doesn't deserve and then ruining them with his touch."
"She is a person, not a statue for your collection," Olivia snapped, her composure finally beginning to fray at the edges. "The servants are whispering. They...