Chapter 2
The sheer weight of the silence in the dining room was suffocating. Lucy knelt on the hardwood floor, her slender frame shaking in her fitted black maid dress. She held the custom-cut diamond between her thumb and forefinger, her inner brows lifting helplessly as she looked up into the icy, perceptive eyes of the most dangerous man she had ever known.
"Someone pushed it through," Lucy answered, her voice incredibly thin and frightened, barely more than a terrified breath. She kept her eyes locked on Ethan, too intimidated to look anywhere else.
Ethan slowly lowered his powerful frame, crouching beside Lucy on the edge of the decorative rug. By doing so, he placed his broad, tailored shoulders directly between the frightened housemaid and his fiancé. The refined tattoos on his hands flexed slightly as he rested his forearm on his knee, his gaze fixed intensely on the dark gaps of the brass floor vent.
Vanessa watched his face with mounting panic. Her sculpted satin evening gown rustled as she took a half-step forward. She forced a small, dismissive smile onto her painted lips, though her eyes were wide and frantic.
"She left it when she ran," Vanessa said, her voice carefully light, desperately trying to project a casual confidence that she did not feel. "You know she did, darling. The staff must have swept it under the rug months ago and just now disturbed it."
Before Ethan could even process the transparent desperation in Vanessa’s lie, a sound drifted up from the darkness beneath the floorboards. It was faint, hoarse, and broken by exhaustion, yet it carried with an undeniable, piercing clarity in the dead silent room.
The warm golden light from the cascading crystal chandeliers filtered down through the brass bars, illuminating a pair of tear-filled, desperate eyes hidden in the subterranean gloom of the cellar. It was Claire Blackwell. She wore a simple, worn dress, her hair loosely gathered and matted with dampness.
"I never left you, Ethan," Claire’s voice broke softly on his name, drifting up through the vent like a ghost haunting the mansion.
Ethan’s breathing stopped. His cold eyes remained fixed on the sliver of Claire’s face visible between the brass bars for a brief, agonizing moment. The muscles in his sharply defined jaw tightened almost imperceptibly, the only outward sign of the violent storm erupting inside him.
"Did she leave it, Vanessa?" Ethan asked, his voice dropping to a terrifying, quiet rumble.
He slowly rose to his full height, his head turning to follow Vanessa’s frozen form. The luxurious interior of the room faded into the background as he held her gaze in complete, deafening silence. His stare was cold, unwavering, and promised absolute ruin.
"Ethan, please," Vanessa stammered, the diamond earrings trembling against her neck as the blood drained entirely from her face. "It's a trick. It's some kind of cruel trick."
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"Is that my wife’s voice echoing from beneath my own dining room floor?" Ethan asked, taking a single, deliberate step toward the woman wearing his engagement ring.
Vanessa stepped backward, colliding with the polished walnut table. The white roses in the silver candelabras seemed to mock her suddenly pale complexion. She was trapped in the crosshairs of a predator.
