Chapter 1 — Twelve Oh Four

At 12:04 in the morning, Daniel Whitmore woke to the violent crash of a mirror shattering somewhere in the house.

For several seconds he lay perfectly still, staring at the ceiling of his bedroom.

The Beverly Hills mansion had thirty-eight rooms, two sweeping marble staircases, and walls so thick that almost no sound ever traveled through them.

The property, worth more than forty million dollars, had been built by his father as a monument to the family empire — a fortress of stone and silence in which a man could go days without hearing another human being unless he chose to.

For a sound to reach him, here, in the deepest hour of the night, something had to have gone very wrong.

Then he heard a scream.

And it was not Vanessa’s voice.

He knew his fiancee’s voice; this was not it.

This was someone else, someone in his house, screaming in the dark.

Daniel got out of bed, pulled on a robe, and opened his bedroom door, and stepped out into a night that would, before the sun rose, take everything he believed about his life and break it against the marble floor — and, in the breaking, hand him back the only things that had ever actually mattered.

He did not know that yet.

He only knew that a mirror had shattered, and a stranger had screamed, and that the silence his father had built into these walls had, for once, failed to hold.

He would think, much later, about the strangeness of that — that the catastrophe which saved his life announced itself as a broken mirror in the night, an omen so old and obvious that he would have laughed at it in a story.

The shattered mirror, the traditional harbinger of bad luck, the seven years of it.

And in a way the superstition was right, and in a way it was exactly backward.

The mirror that broke that night did bring an end to things: to his engagement, to his belief in the woman he loved, to the comfortable story he had told himself about his life, to the peace of a house he had thought was whole.

But everything the breaking destroyed had been false.