Chapter 2

I didn't leave a note.

I simply walked out the front door at 7:15 AM while Damien was still upstairs, probably showering off the scent of my best friend. I climbed into the taxi I had called and gave the driver the address of a private airfield forty minutes outside the city.

My phone buzzed the entire ride.

Not Damien. He wouldn't notice I was gone until he came downstairs expecting breakfast.

It was the lawyer. Harold Kent. He had been my father's right hand for thirty years, and apparently, he had been watching over me from a distance my entire life.

"Elise," he said when I answered. His voice was careful, measured. "I know this is a lot. Your father wanted to tell you himself. He was planning to bring you in next year, when you turned twenty-eight. But the heart attack—"

"I know," I said. My voice sounded foreign to me. Hollow.

"The board doesn't know you exist. Your father kept your identity sealed. The will names you as sole heir, but if you don't appear at the emergency session and present yourself, the vice chairman — Victor Hale — will petition to seize control. He's been circling for years."

"Then I'll be there," I said.

"There's more." Harold paused. "Your father left you a letter. It's in the safe at the penthouse. The code is your mother's birthday."

My mother. She had died when I was three. I barely remembered her face, only the smell of jasmine and the warmth of her hands.

"I'll read it," I whispered.

The jet was a Gulfstream G700, white with a thin gold stripe. It looked like a weapon.

As I climbed the stairs, I caught my reflection in the polished hull. I was wearing jeans, a worn cardigan, and sneakers. My hair was pulled into a messy bun. I looked like what I was — a small-town baker who made sourdough for farmers' markets.

I did not look like the heir to a $40 billion empire.

Good. Let them underestimate me.

The flight was four hours. I spent the first hour staring out the window, watching the clouds swallow the world I knew. The small house Damien and I rented. The bakery I had built with my own hands. The life I had constructed around a man who saw me as furniture.

The second hour, I cried.

Not for Damien. Not for Meredith. For my father. For the man who had loved me enough to hide me, to give me a normal life, and who had died alone in a hospital room while I was kneeling in my garden planting tomatoes, oblivious.

The third hour, I stopped crying.

I washed my face in the small lavatory, looked at myself in the mirror, and made a decision.

Elise Porter was dead. She died this morning, standing in a doorway, watching her husband betray her.

Whoever walked off this jet would be someone new.

When we landed at Teterboro, a black SUV was waiting on the tarmac. Harold was in the backseat, a silver-haired man with kind eyes behind wire-rimmed glasses.

He handed me a folder.

"This is everything," he said. "The Ashford Group. Real estate. Tech. Media. Pharmaceuticals. Your father owned pieces of industries most people don't know exist."

I opened the folder. The numbers were staggering.

"And this," Harold said, pulling out a separate envelope. "Is the list of companies under the Ashford umbrella."

I scanned the names. My eyes stopped on one.

Cross Development LLC.

I looked up at Harold. "That's—"

"Your husband's company," Harold confirmed, his expression grim. "Your father was his silent investor. Damien Cross's entire business runs on Ashford capital. Without it, he's bankrupt within a month."

The taxi turned onto the highway. The Manhattan skyline rose in the distance like a row of teeth.

I closed the folder.

"He doesn't know?" I asked.

"He has no idea who his investor is. The funds come through three shell companies. Your father wanted it that way — to protect you, and to keep an eye on the man who married his daughter."

I stared at the skyline.

My husband's empire was built on my father's money. On my money.

And he had called me furniture.

A cold, sharp smile touched my lips.

"Harold," I said. "How quickly can we freeze the funding to Cross Development?"