Chapter 2

The conference room at Maxwell Industries smelled of stale coffee and fear.

Gwendolyn Maxwell slammed her iPad onto the mahogany table. The screen cracked, a spiderweb fracture splitting the image of Hugh's naked, sludge-covered backside.

"Do you have any idea," she hissed, her voice trembling with a rage that made the veins in her neck bulge, "what this has done to us?"

On the wall, the giant monitor displayed the real-time stock ticker. MDI-Maxwell Defense Industries-was in freefall. A red line plunging straight down.

MaxwellMeltdown was the number one trend on Twitter.

"It's a catastrophe," Preston, Hugh's father, moaned. He was wiping sweat from his forehead with a handkerchief. "Just let him marry Floy! She's a Mayo. The contract says a Mayo."

Mr. Sterling, the family's chief legal counsel, pushed his glasses up his nose. He looked like an undertaker who was tired of the bodies.

"The contract specifies a legitimate Mayo heir," Sterling said, his voice dry. "Floy is a product of... an affair. The Trust Committee won't accept her bloodline. The deed to the Appalachian land is in Darcie's name."

"Then find her!" Gwendolyn shrieked. She turned to the head of security. "Where is that hillbilly bitch?"

The security chief, a man who looked like he chewed rocks for breakfast, looked down at his boots. "She's gone, Mrs. Maxwell. She dumped her phone in a trash can on 5th Avenue. No credit card activity. She vanished."

Gwendolyn's phone buzzed. She looked at the caller ID-Senator Valentine-and paled.

"The Senator," she whispered. "If we lose his backing because of this scandal..."

The door burst open.

Hugh stumbled in. He was wearing a bathrobe, and his skin was scrubbed raw, but he still smelled faintly of stagnant water.

Gwendolyn didn't hesitate. She walked over and slapped him.

The sound echoed like a gunshot.

"You idiot!"

"It was Darcie!" Hugh whined, clutching his cheek. "She's crazy! She burned the prenup! She set me up!"

"If we don't have a marriage certificate by midnight," Sterling interrupted, checking his watch, "the bank freezes thirty percent of our liquidity. That's payroll. That's the defense contracts. That's everything."

"Find her," Gwendolyn ordered, her eyes cold and reptilian. "Turn New York upside down. Hire every PI in the city. Drag her back here by her hair if you have to."

While they were scouring the city, Darcie was less than a mile away.

She was sitting in the back of a catering truck, wrapped in a stolen oversized gray jumpsuit that smelled of onions.

She hadn't run away. Running away requires money, and she had none. Running away meant going back to the trailer park, where her stepmother would sell her to the next highest bidder to cover her gambling debts.

No. She needed a solution.

The truck rumbled through the service gates of the Maxwell Estate. The guards waved it through. They were looking for a crying bride in a white dress, not a delivery boy in a cap.

Darcie slipped out near the kitchens and moved through the shadows of the garden. She knew this house. She had spent the last six months here, being groomed, being measured, being ignored.

She knew where the blind spots were.

Darcie shimmied through a loose window into the library. The room was massive, two stories of books that nobody in this family ever read.

She went straight to the antique desk in the corner.

Her heart was hammering against her ribs, a frantic bird in a cage. 'Calm down,' she told herself. 'Do the math. What are the variables?'

She ran her fingers along the underside of the heavy mahogany desktop, searching not for a keyhole, but for a seam. She had seen old Alfred, the butler, access it once, his movements too precise for a simple lock. Her fingertips found it-a nearly invisible biometric panel.

Her breath hitched. They wouldn't make it easy. She pressed her thumb to the scanner. Access Denied. Of course. It was keyed to a Maxwell.

But next to it was a keypad, a failsafe. A twelve-digit code. Her mind raced. Not random numbers. A pattern. It had to be a pattern. She thought of the company's founding date, the stock ticker symbol converted to ASCII, the launch dates of their most famous missile systems. She closed her eyes, visualizing the numbers as constellations. It was a prime number sequence, interwoven with the Fibonacci spiral. A beautiful, elegant equation hidden in plain sight.

Her fingers flew across the keypad. The final digit was pressed.

A soft, electronic click echoed in the silence.

A drawer slid open.

Inside lay a piece of parchment that smelled of dust and history. The 1920 Maxwell-Mayo Alliance Covenant.

Her fingers trembled as she unrolled it. She scanned the calligraphy, looking for the clause she had memorized during her "grooming" lessons.marriage to any direct male heir of the Maxwell bloodline...

Any.

Not just Hugh.

A cold smile touched her lips. She looked up, through the rain-streaked window, toward the East Wing.

The East Wing was a mausoleum. Dark. Silent. It was where they kept him.

Fleet Maxwell.

The legend. The war hero. The man who had built this company into an empire before a helicopter crash turned him into a vegetable. Or so they said.

The library door handle turned.

Darcie dove behind the heavy velvet curtains, holding her breath until her lungs burned.

Alfred shuffled in. He picked up a remote and turned on the TV.

"Breaking News," the anchor announced. Gwendolyn's face filled the screen. She looked devastated. Fake tears shimmered in her eyes.

"We are so worried about Darcie," she sobbed. "She has been under so much stress. We just want her home safe."

Liar. (Darcie thought.)

She dug her fingernails into her palms until the skin broke. The sharp pain grounded her.

Alfred sighed, turned off the lights, and shuffled out.

Darcie stepped out of the darkness.

She wasn't the victim anymore. She wasn't the poor girl from the mountains who should be grateful for scraps.

She looked at the contract in her hand.

She was going to burn their house down. And she was going to use their own laws to do it.