Chapter 1

The air in the hospital room was thin and smelled of antiseptic, a clean scent that couldn't cover the smell of death. My mother' s hand was a collection of bones under my own, her skin like paper. Her last breath was a promise she forced from a man on the other end of a phone, a man whose name was a myth in our small, worn-out apartment.

Mr. Sterling. My father.

"He will take you," she had whispered, her eyes already seeing something I couldn't. "He promised."

Now, a week later, I stood in the middle of my empty room. Everything I owned fit into a single, scuffed suitcase. My mother' s things were already gone, packed into boxes and taken by a charity. The room felt bigger, hollowed out by her absence.

A sleek black car, the kind you only see in movies, was parked outside my building. It looked like a spaceship that had landed in the wrong universe. The driver, a woman in a severe gray suit, didn't get out. She just waited.

I took one last look around the apartment that held my entire life. The faded spot on the wall where my mother' s favorite picture used to hang. The crack in the kitchen linoleum I' d traced with my finger a thousand times as a child. It was all I had, and I was leaving it behind.

My hand trembled as I closed the apartment door for the last time. The click of the lock sounded final.

I walked down the three flights of stairs, my suitcase bumping against each step. The woman in the car finally opened her door as I reached the sidewalk. She didn't offer to help with the bag.

"Chloe?" she asked. Her voice was as starched as her suit.

I nodded.

"I am Ms. Davis, Mr. Sterling's personal assistant," she said, her eyes scanning my worn jeans and faded t-shirt. I could feel her disapproval. "Put your luggage in the trunk."

I did as I was told, the heavy trunk lid closing with a quiet, expensive thud. The inside of the car smelled like new leather and money. It was spotless. I felt like dirt in a sterile operating room.

Ms. Davis drove without a word. We moved from the cracked pavement and graffiti-covered walls of my neighborhood to smooth, wide roads lined with manicured trees. The buildings grew taller, shinier. It was like driving from black and white into color.

I stared out the window, watching my old life disappear. I thought about my mother. She worked two jobs, her hands always rough, her body always tired. She did it all for me, for the scholarship to a good school, for a chance to escape. This, I guess, was the escape she had found for me in the end. It didn't feel like freedom. It felt like a cage.

The car turned into a long, winding driveway, hidden from the main road by a massive stone wall. At the end of it was not a house, but a mansion. It was a palace of glass and white stone, so big it seemed to block out the sun. Gardens that looked like they were trimmed with scissors surrounded it.

This was the Sterling mansion. My new home.

Ms. Davis stopped the car in front of a giant set of double doors. She still didn't speak. She just looked at me in the rearview mirror, her expression cold and unreadable.

"Get out," she said.

The doors opened before I could touch them. A man in a butler's uniform stood there. He looked at me with the same polite disinterest as Ms. Davis.

The challenge had begun. I didn't even know the rules.