Chapter 1 - THE KNOT THAT WASN’T MINE
My three-year-old daughter, Lily, was feeding Vincent Moretti’s screaming nine-month-old son while I lay unconscious on the kitchen floor.
When Vincent unexpectedly returned home early, he found Lily sitting beside Enzo’s crib, carefully holding a bottle through the rails while the baby drank desperately. The nanny, Norah Wickham, had disappeared. Mrs. Hargrove, the longtime housekeeper, was trying to take the bottle away. Vincent’s fiancée, Cassandra Vale, arrived moments later wearing her spotless white dress and satin gloves.
But Vincent noticed something none of them expected him to notice.
A red strip of cloth had been tied around the bottle.
And the knot had been retied.
I knew because I had created the system myself.
Every bottle I personally checked received the same loose double-loop knot. That bottle carried a tight single knot instead.
Someone had opened it after I prepared it.
Someone had tried to make it look untouched.
And just before I had collapsed in the kitchen, I had realized exactly the same thing.
Vincent looked from the bottle to my daughter and then toward the adults standing around his son.
His face became frighteningly calm.
“No one takes anything from her,” he ordered when Mrs. Hargrove reached toward Lily.
Then Cassandra stepped forward.
“Vincent.”
The way she said his name made every instinct inside me scream.
Because Cassandra did not look at the crying baby first.
She looked at the bottle.
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And for the first time since I had begun working inside the Moretti house, I understood that the most dangerous person in the room might not be the man everyone feared.
It might be the woman he trusted enough to marry.
