Chapter 3 - The Vultures Gather
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Victoria Ashcroft sat in the front pew, draped in a black couture veil pinned securely with antique diamonds. She was beautiful in the severe, unforgiving way old oil portraits are beautiful—cold lines, pale skin, expensive bones, and eyes trained from birth to reveal absolutely nothing except calculated contempt. She had never forgiven Lucian for marrying me.
To Victoria, I was never a wife. I was a hostile invasion. I was a public school teacher with no pedigree, a woman who preferred buying vintage dresses instead of haute couture, at least until Lucian insisted I let him spoil me. I was a woman whose parents still lived in a modest brick house in Queens and said a humble grace before eating dinner. She had spent the entirety of our marriage smiling for the cameras in public and systematically cutting me down in private.
“How charming,” she would say, her voice dripping with venom, whenever I mispronounced the name of a Swiss chalet.
“How earnest,” she would sneer, when I spoke a little too passionately about education reform at a dinner party.
“How lucky,” she would whisper, when influential people praised the way Lucian looked at me across a crowded room.
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Beside her sat Lucian’s younger sister, Celine. She had dark sunglasses perched on top of her head despite being in a dimly lit church, her grief performed mostly through irritated sighs and frequent checks of her watch. Celine had always firmly believed that Lucian’s massive wealth was a communal family resource, one that had been unfairly interrupted by his sudden marriage. She borrowed, demanded, wasted, gambled, and then aggressively accused me of brainwashing him when he finally put his foot down and said no more.
If Victoria was cold, calculating ice, Celine was volatile, reckless gasoline. Together, they had spent years trying to find a wedge to drive between Lucian and me. And now, with Lucian lying in a wooden box, they believed their moment of triumph had finally arrived. They were not here to mourn a son and a brother. They were here to reclaim an empire.
