Chapter 1 - The Button in Lily’s Hand
Hannah Reed, a thirty-year-old maid at Dominic DeLuca’s Lake Forest estate, has learned to survive by keeping her head down—especially around Dominic’s wealthy, sharp-tongued fiancée, Cassandra Vale.
Everything changes during Dominic and Cassandra’s engagement dinner when seven-year-old Lily DeLuca disappears.
Cassandra claims Lily went upstairs with her nanny.
Hannah knows that is a lie because the nanny is standing in the kitchen.
Following faint tapping beneath the butler’s pantry, Hannah discovers Lily locked inside the old wine cellar. She breaks through the door, injuring herself, and carries the terrified child upstairs—only for Cassandra to publicly accuse Hannah of locking Lily inside.
Dominic does not shout.
He notices.
He sees Hannah’s bleeding arm, Lily’s fear, Cassandra’s panic—and the black button with a silver wolf clenched in his daughter’s hand.
The button belongs to DeLuca security.
Security footage reveals the cellar camera was manually disabled with a security credential. Hannah then admits she had already found another identical button and a brass key marked 317 beneath Lily’s bed. Cassandra had tried to buy the key from her, and someone later searched Hannah’s bedroom and left a threatening photograph of Lily.
Dominic recognizes 317.
It leads to Room 317 of the abandoned Palmer Hotel, where his mother Margaret mysteriously disappeared for forty-eight hours when Dominic was fifteen.
Inside the room, Hannah and Dominic find surveillance photographs and a recent picture of Cassandra meeting Samuel Cross—Dominic’s father’s former security chief, officially dead for eleven years.
Then a recording of Margaret DeLuca warns that Cassandra was never the real target.
Hannah was.
Samuel tells Dominic to ask why Hannah’s mother changed their last name immediately after Margaret’s disappearance.
May you like
And as an elevator climbs toward Room 317, Hannah realizes her family may have been connected to the DeLucas long before she ever entered their mansion.
---
