Chapter 1 - THE WOMAN IN GRAY
Vanessa Sterling smiled for the cameras as she aimed her heel at the maid's stomach.
She expected a gasp. A stumble. An apology from the woman she had just hurt.
Instead, Naomi Reyes caught her leg.
Three hundred guests fell silent. Vanessa balanced on one glittering shoe, her champagne-colored dress trembling around her knees. Naomi stood in her gray uniform, holding Vanessa's ankle with the steady hands of someone who had stopped far worse.
“Let go of me.”
“Put your hands down first.”
Vanessa had raised one hand to strike her. Slowly, she lowered it.
“Please don't make me take this any further,” Naomi said.
Near the ballroom doors, Ethan Whitmore stopped moving. Behind him, his family's attorney reached for his phone.
Naomi noticed both.
She also noticed the security chief stepping away from the wall.
Three weeks earlier, she had arrived at Whitmore House with one suitcase and a reference from a woman who knew when not to ask questions.
“The position includes a room,” Ruth Bell, the house manager, told her. “Meals, decent pay, and too many stairs.”
“I like stairs.”
“Then you'll be employee of the month.”
Naomi almost smiled.
The estate stood outside Boston behind iron gates and trees. Inside, everything shone. Naomi liked the work because it ended. A dirty floor became clean. Towels could be folded. A broken glass stayed broken, but nobody asked her to bring it back.
At night, she slept with the lamp on.
Sometimes a dropped pan sent her back to Philadelphia: rain on pavement, a shattered windshield, Daniel's voice cutting off in her earpiece.
She would count five things she could see until the room became a room again.
On her fourth evening, she carried fresh towels past the front staircase and heard Vanessa speaking to a young server.
“If I wanted excuses, Eli, I'd have hired someone interesting.”
His hands shook around an empty tray.
Naomi took it from him. “Ruth needs you in the kitchen.”
Vanessa looked her over. “And you are?”
“Naomi.”
“That wasn't an invitation to join the conversation.”
“No, ma'am.”
Naomi moved on. Surviving had taught her the difference between a fight and a trap.
At the service door, a man in a dark suit blocked her path.
She recognized the crooked little finger before she recognized his face.
Graham Cole. Former operations director at the protection firm she had left after Philadelphia.
Now he wore a Whitmore security badge.
May you like
He stared at her uniform.
“Reyes,” he said. “I thought you were gone for good.”
