Chapter 2 - The Last Morning
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Four days earlier, police officers had knocked on the heavy oak doors of our mansion at midnight. The flashing red and blue lights of their cruisers painted the foyer walls in a frantic, terrifying rhythm. I remember standing at the top of the stairs, clutching my robe, asking whether Lucian was injured before they even spoke. Some desperate, bargaining part of my mind believed that death could still be negotiated if I just asked the right question first.
“There was an accident on the Pacific Coast Highway,” the older officer had said, removing his hat.
His car had gone over a cliff after a late, impromptu meeting in Santa Barbara. Brake failure, they said. Rain, speed, bad luck, tragic timing. Those were the sterile words people used when they needed horror to sound like an administrative error. I listened, placing one trembling hand on my stomach, while the world quietly and violently opened beneath me, swallowing my future whole.
Lucian’s last words to me had come that very same morning. He was standing in our sunlit bedroom, tying his watch—the rose-gold one I had given him on our first anniversary—though his mind seemed somewhere far beyond the mirror. There were deep, purple shadows under his eyes. For weeks, he had been working late into the night, speaking in coded fragments to his attorney, and locking thick folders of documents in his private home office. I had assumed it was another stressful corporate acquisition crisis. Lucian had always carried his stress in total silence because he believed worry was a heavy gift he should never give to the people he loved.
He had kissed my forehead softly and whispered:
“I secured the fortress, Isabel. If anything happens to me, trust Marcus Reed completely.”
I had laughed uneasily, brushing the lapel of his suit.
“That sounds terribly dramatic, Lucian.”
His smile did not reach his eyes. It was tight, forced.
May you like
“I need you to remember it.”
Now, standing beside his coffin while his mother watched me from across the aisle like a creditor waiting for collection, I understood only one thing: whatever fortress Lucian had secured, I was currently standing outside its iron gates, and the wolves were fast approaching.
