CHAPTER 1: THE BOY AT THE PALACE DOOR
The little boy stumbled through the golden doors of Wexford Palace covered in blood.
A string quartet stopped in the middle of a song.
Champagne glasses froze halfway to painted lips.
More than four hundred guests—politicians, billionaires, ambassadors, and members of Europe’s oldest royal families—turned toward the child running across the marble ballroom.
He could not have been older than eight.
His pale face was streaked with dirt. His torn gray jacket hung from one shoulder, and dark blood soaked the sleeve beneath it.
“Stop him!” a security officer shouted.
The boy flinched but kept running.
He pushed between silk gowns and black tuxedos, breathing in short, desperate gasps.
Behind him, a woman appeared in the doorway.
She wore a fitted black evening gown. Her dark hair was pinned into a perfect bun, but her calm expression did not match the panic in her eyes.
“There he is!” she cried. “That child attacked me!”
Two guards moved toward the boy.
He looked over his shoulder.
Terror flashed across his face.
Then he saw someone near the grand staircase.
Lady Evelyn Ashbourne stood beside her father, the Duke of Wexford, wearing an emerald gown and a diamond necklace that had belonged to three queens.
For seven years, Evelyn had carried a grief no jewel could hide.
Her son, Oliver, had disappeared when he was eighteen months old.
The police had searched for years.
A body had never been found.
Everyone eventually told her the same thing.
She had to let him go.
But Evelyn never had.
The bloodied boy stared at her.
His lips trembled.
Then he ran straight into her arms.
“Mom…”
The word was barely louder than a breath.
But it silenced the entire palace.
Evelyn caught him instinctively.
The boy buried his face against her chest and began to shake.
She looked down at his messy light brown hair.
At the small scar above his right eyebrow.
At the crescent-shaped birthmark behind his ear.
Her knees nearly gave way.
“No,” she whispered. “It can’t be.”
The woman in black stopped several feet away.
Her face turned white.
The boy lifted one trembling hand and pointed directly at her.
“She took me,” he said.
Every person in the ballroom turned toward the woman.
Evelyn tightened her arms around the child she had mourned for seven years.
“What did you just say?” she asked.
The boy looked at the woman in black.
“She told me you were dead.”
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The woman slowly stepped backward.
Then every palace door locked at once.
