“I’ll send my mother to look in on you tonight.” And the heavy doors swung shut behind them, and the room went quiet.

I looked down at the sleeping girl on my chest, and I felt the shock in me cool and harden into something with a clean edge.

Roderick believed he had just stripped me down to nothing.

He had forgotten one thing about the empire he was so sure was his.

The entire legal skeleton of the Pembroke Group — the whole two-billion-dollar structure — rested on a trust I had designed, myself, three years earlier.

I was not merely a beneficiary of it.