Chương 1
"""The wineglass shattered before Emma could push the study door all the way open.
Crystal burst across the gray marble, dark red wine spreading through the pieces, and Alejandro Moretti struck the floor beside his desk with enough force to rattle the silver trophies on the shelves. His open black shirt twisted beneath one shoulder. One tattooed hand clawed at his throat while the other slid uselessly through the wine.
Emma stopped in the doorway.
Her pink rabbit backpack hung from both shoulders. The mint-green bow in her high ponytail trembled when she took a breath.
Alejandro’s lips were turning purple.
“Mr. Moretti?”
The words came out as a whisper, but he heard them. His eyes moved toward her without focusing. A broken rasp escaped his throat. He tried to drag himself closer to the desk, where one drawer stood open, and managed only to push a shard of glass through the wine.
Emma knew that sound.
Three months earlier, beneath the bright plastic slide at her preschool, her own throat had made it. The teachers had looked enormous above her, all frightened mouths and hands. Her mother had dropped to her knees with a blue-and-orange injector and said, Count with me, baby. Stay here. Stay with me.
Alejandro’s chest barely moved.
Emma slipped the backpack from one shoulder. Her fingers shook so badly that she missed the zipper twice.
Inside, beneath a folded coloring page and a package of crackers she was not allowed to share, lay her last EpiPen.
Her mother had placed it there that morning.
Don’t take it out unless a grown-up says so.
Emma stared at it for one small, painful beat.
Then Alejandro’s heel scraped against the marble.
She grabbed the injector and ran.
Two men rushed into the study before she reached him.
Dominic Velez came through first, broad enough to fill the doorway in his fitted black suit. His white collar had pulled loose beneath his earpiece. Victor Hale followed, one hand near the shoulder holster hidden beneath his jacket.
Dominic saw Alejandro on the floor, then Emma with the injector.
“Get away from him!”
Emma dropped beside Alejandro’s legs.
“He needs this!”
Dominic caught her upper arm. His grip was controlled, but his panic was not. She smelled coffee on his breath and the cold outdoor air trapped in his suit.
“You don’t know what you’re doing.”
“I do.”
“Give it to me.”
“No.”
She pulled back. The injector struck his wrist, and for an instant both of them looked at it as though it might break.
Dominic lowered his voice. “Touch him, and your mother loses her job.”
Emma stopped struggling.
The threat reached places in her that his grip had not. Her mother’s job was their apartment, the yellow bus pass in the kitchen drawer, the grocery list with things crossed out before they were purchased. It was the reason Emma sat quietly in the laundry room on Saturdays when preschool was closed. It was the reason her mother said they were lucky even on nights when she ate toast over the sink and claimed not to be hungry.
Tears gathered along Emma’s lower lashes. She looked at Dominic, then at Alejandro.
The man on the floor made no sound now.
Emma tightened her jaw.
“Then fire her.”
She twisted the way her mother had taught her to twist away from a stranger’s hand. Dominic had not expected it. His fingers slipped.
Emma fell to her knees beside Alejandro, pulled off the blue safety cap, and pressed the orange tip against the outside of his thigh through his black trousers.
Victor took one step forward.
“Stop her!”
The injector clicked.
The sound snapped through the study like a gunshot.
Nobody moved.
Emma held it in place, her small hand locked around the plastic tube. The fireplace crackled behind her. Wine dripped from the desk edge. A loose shard shifted beneath Alejandro’s sleeve.
“One,” Emma whispered.
Alejandro’s fingers moved across the floor.
“Two.”
His hand found her wrist.
“Three.”
He pulled in one deeper breath.
It was not a good breath. It rattled and broke halfway through, but it was deeper than the others. His eyes opened slowly and began to settle on Emma’s face.
Victor turned toward the shelves.
Between two leather-bound books, just beneath a framed photograph of Alejandro with a dark-haired woman, a tiny red light glowed.
Victor’s face emptied of color.
Dominic followed his stare.
Neither man said anything.
The camera continued recording.
Emma did not know what the red light meant. She knew only that Alejandro’s fingers had tightened weakly around her wrist and that the injector was empty.
The next sound was her mother screaming her name from the hallway.
Elena Ruiz came into the study with a ring of brass keys still looped around one finger. She wore the gray housekeeper’s uniform she had ironed at five that morning, and her brown hair had begun to slip from its bun. When she saw Emma kneeling in spilled wine beside Alejandro, she stopped so suddenly that another housemaid collided with her from behind.
“Emma.”
“I helped him.”
Elena crossed the room without seeming to touch the floor. She pulled Emma against her chest, checked her face, her arms, her hands, then saw the used injector.
“You used yours?”
“He couldn’t breathe.”
“Oh, baby.”
Dominic spoke into his radio, calling for the medical team stationed at the estate gate. Victor remained near the bookshelves. He had not taken his eyes from the hidden camera.
Alejandro’s hand slipped from Emma’s wrist.
Elena looked down at him. Whatever she thought of the man who employed her, whatever stories she had heard in kitchens and service corridors, training took over. She knelt, pushed the broken glass away with the folded edge of a rug, and checked that his airway remained open.
“Turn him slightly,” she told Dominic.
Dominic stared at her.
“Now.”
He obeyed.
Victor reached toward the books.
Alejandro’s eyes moved.
May you like
“No.”
The word was hardly more than air.
