Chapter 7

Diana pushed open the heavy, padded double doors of the music room.

The thick velvet carpet absorbed the sound of her footsteps. In the center of the room sat a massive, black Steinway grand piano, gleaming under the recessed lighting. The floor-to-ceiling windows offered a muted, distant view of the Manhattan skyline.

Harriet was standing by the window.

In her hand, she held the small, decorative gift bag Candice had left on the terrace earlier.

Diana stopped walking. The silence in the room was heavy, broken only by the faint, muffled hum of traffic far below.

Harriet turned around. Her dark eyes locked onto Diana with that same unsettling, clinical intensity. She didn't mention the tears in the study or the confrontation in the hallway.

Instead, Harriet tossed the gift bag onto the closed lid of the piano.

"Take out the custom serum your cousin brought you," Harriet said. Her voice was flat, commanding.

Diana frowned, confused. She walked over to the piano, reached into the bag, and pulled out a heavy, frosted glass bottle. It had no label, just a silver pump.

"It's just a custom blend from her salon in Beverly Hills," Diana said, turning the bottle over in her hands. "Why?"

Harriet closed the distance between them. She reached out, her long, pale fingers tapping sharply against the frosted glass.

"Because I've seen something similar at the sketchy clinic I used to clean back in Ohio. The chemical smell is completely wrong for skincare. It's highly corrosive acid. You put that on your face, and your skin melts right off the bone," Harriet sneered.

Diana's breath caught in her throat.

Her modern knowledge kicked in instantly. TCA. At that concentration, it wasn't a chemical peel. It was a corrosive acid. If she put that on her face, it would burn through her epidermis in seconds, leaving her permanently, hideously scarred.

A cold sweat broke out across the back of Diana's neck. Her stomach dropped. She slammed the bottle down on the piano lid as if the glass itself was burning her skin.

If she had followed the original plot, her face would be gone.

Harriet watched the genuine terror wash over Diana's face. A flicker of calculation crossed Harriet's eyes.

"It seems you aren't completely stupid," Harriet said dryly. "You actually know what it is."

Diana forced air into her lungs. She looked up at Harriet, her heart hammering against her ribs. "Why did you warn me?"

Harriet didn't answer. She simply picked the frosted bottle back up and slid it deep into the pocket of her oversized hoodie.

"Because I don't tolerate cheap, dirty tricks in my territory," Harriet said, turning her gaze back to the window.

Suddenly, a faint, almost imperceptible electronic buzz sounded.

Harriet's posture instantly shifted. Her spine stiffened. She raised her hand, her index finger pressing lightly against her left earlobe, right where a micro-communicator was hidden beneath her hair.

She turned back to Diana.

"I'm confiscating this," Harriet said sharply. "Watch your own back from now on."

Without another word, Harriet strode past Diana and walked out of the music room, the heavy doors shutting silently behind her.

Diana stood alone. Her mind was racing.

How did a girl raised in an Ohio trailer park identify high-concentration TCA just by looking at a frosted bottle? And who was she communicating with?

Diana's hands were still shaking from the adrenaline. She needed to calm down.

She walked around to the piano bench and sat down. She lifted the heavy wooden lid, exposing the pristine black and white keys. The ivory felt cool against her trembling fingertips.

She closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and began to play.

Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata.

The notes rose slowly, like fog from a wounded earth-haunting, inevitable, seeping into every corner of the room. Diana did not merely play; she bled into the keys. Each chord carried the marrow of her exhaustion, the cold tremor of her fear, the fragile, stubborn flame of a hope that refused to be extinguished. The music became a living thing-a creature of raw grief and unvarnished power, pressing its weight against the heavy, soundproofed doors as if to test their cruelty. And the doors, for all their thickness, could not keep it in. The air beyond them grew dense, thickened by an invisible sorrow, and even the most frantic heart, racing against its own private terror, found itself slowing-caught, held, and gentled by a grief that was not its own but somehow understood it completely.

As her fingers danced across the keys, the hidden currents of the penthouse began to shift.