Chapter 1 - THE PHOTO IN THE DOORWAY
My name is Lucia Romero. At twenty-three, I spent my days cleaning the Greenwich mansion of billionaire CEO Adrian Prescott and my nights taking business classes, hoping someday I would never again have to choose between tuition and groceries.
Then one morning, exhaustion made that choice for me.
After studying until nearly two in the morning and arriving at work on nothing but coffee, I carried fresh towels into Adrian’s bedroom.
The room tilted.
Everything went black.
When I opened my eyes, I was lying on Adrian Prescott’s bed in my wrinkled housekeeper uniform while he stood across the room calling the family doctor.
Before I could fully understand what had happened, Adrian’s sister Caroline appeared in the doorway.
Caroline Prescott was the CFO of Prescott Group.
Elegant.
Cold.
Powerful.
And holding up her phone.
“Well,” she said as she photographed me. “That didn’t take long.”
I knew exactly what that picture could become.
No one would call Adrian a billionaire who had taken advantage of his employee.
They would call me the ambitious housekeeper who had climbed into her boss’s bed.
The truth was much simpler.
I had collapsed.
Adrian helped me.
And then he admitted something that complicated everything.
“I care about you, Lucia.”
I told him immediately that nothing could happen between us.
But romance wasn’t the real reason I had planned to resign that morning.
For weeks, while helping organize papers in Adrian’s home office, I had noticed invoices that didn’t make sense. Vendors with different company names shared the same bank information. Payments were divided into smaller transfers just beneath internal review thresholds.
I had quietly copied everything.
Caroline had noticed.
“Stay in your lane, Lucia,” she had warned me.
Now, standing in Adrian’s bedroom with my resignation letter in my hand, I realized the photograph was never about embarrassing me.
Caroline wanted leverage over Adrian.
So when she threatened to show the board, I did the one thing she didn’t expect.
“Send it.”
Then I placed my folder on Adrian’s bed.
Inside were the invoices, transfers, duplicate addresses, and bank details I had collected.
Caroline’s face lost its color.
Adrian turned to the final page.
A handwritten note had been clipped to it.
REMOVE LUCIA BEFORE FRIDAY.
Adrian slowly lifted his eyes toward his sister.
“Why does your handwriting say her name?”
Caroline froze.
Before she could answer, my phone buzzed.
Unknown number.
YOU SHOULD HAVE LEFT WHEN SHE WARNED YOU.
I stared at the message.
Then I looked at Caroline.
She wasn’t watching Adrian.
She was staring at my phone.
May you like
And in that moment, I understood something far more frightening than anything in the folder.
Caroline Prescott wasn’t the only person in that house who knew what I had discovered.
