Their mother, Genevieve, had died two years earlier in a highway collision, and I had spent those years making our estate more secure, adding gates, cameras, guards, reinforced windows, and every protection money could purchase against dangers I understood.
None of those walls could stop what was happening inside my children’s blood, and that realization was still crushing me when my security chief, Prescott Hale, entered my office that afternoon and announced that a strange woman had been standing outside our gates for three hours.
Prescott said her name was Elena Ward, she claimed she wanted the vacant caregiver position, and she refused to leave because she somehow knew Jonah and Blythe were dying, information known only to family, physicians, and my most trusted employees.
I ordered my guards to bring her inside, and minutes later a thin woman barely thirty entered my office wearing soaked shoes and a faded coat, looking more exhausted than dangerous until she reached beneath her sweater and every guard immediately tensed.
What Elena removed was a silver necklace with a tiny blue stone, and the sight of it emptied the air from my lungs because I had given that necklace to Genevieve on our first wedding anniversary, and I had watched it placed around her neck before burial.
