Chapter 1 — The Torn Seam

The first thing Seraphina Ravenel did was smile as she tore the side seam of my dress in front of four hundred guests.

The second was lean close and whisper, “Now everyone can see what kind of woman Kelvin married.”

The music stopped beneath the glass pavilion of the Azure Crown Beach Club.

Beyond the open walls the Atlantic flashed silver under chandeliers that had cost more than the house I grew up in.

Champagne towers glittered.

Politicians and investors and athletes and television faces all turned toward me as the silk fell away from my ribs, and the bullet scar showed — pale and jagged, curving beneath my left arm across three ribs.

I want to tell you what a scar like that means, because Seraphina had gotten it exactly backward, and so had every guest who drew a breath when they saw it.

To her, the scar was evidence of something shameful — proof that I came from a rough place, that I had lived a life her kind of people paid a great deal of money never to touch.

She had built her whole plan on the assumption that a mark like that was something a woman would want to hide, that exposing it would send me running across the sand.

But I had earned that scar in the one moment of my life I was proudest of, and I had stopped being ashamed of it years before I ever walked into her party.

A scar is not a wound.

That is the thing people who have never been hurt do not understand.

A wound is the thing that could have killed you.