Brandon looked back at her, and what he felt, to his own surprise, was not triumph. It was something closer to pity.

“No, Demi,” he said. “You lost everything the moment you decided a man’s life was worth less than a house on the beach.”

The court upheld Roderick’s trust in full. And under the slayer rule — the old, simple principle that no one may profit from a killing they caused — Demi Benedict was barred, permanently and completely, from receiving a single dollar of the estate she had murdered a man to inherit.

Chapter 12 — The Surgery

Six months after the trial ended, once the trust had cleared probate and the legal machinery had ground to its conclusion, Brandon formally took over stewardship of everything Roderick Benedict had left him.

He did not celebrate. He didn’t buy a car or a suit or a bottle of anything. The first check he authorized, before he did another single thing with the money, was to St. Jude Memorial Hospital, for the full cost of Sierra’s heart reconstruction.

The surgery was scheduled for six hours. It ran nearly nine.