She was not moving.

Standing over her, still dressed in the elegant black gown she had worn to a charity gala that evening, was Vanessa Hart.

And Vanessa was gripping Maria by the wrists, dragging her, limp and bleeding, across the floor.

“What are you doing?” Daniel asked.

It was the only sentence his mind could produce, faced with an image so far outside anything he had prepared for — his fiancee, in her gown, hauling an unconscious, injured woman across the marble in the middle of the night.

He would replay that image many times in the days that followed, and each time he would notice something new in it, some further detail of wrongness.