Chapter 1
“Please don’t let them take my mommy.”
The tiny voice came from behind the trash cans at the edge of my family’s mansion.
I had walked into the garden to escape a meeting about the woman I was expected to marry.
Instead, I found a four-year-old girl crouching against a stone wall with tears running down her face.
Her name was Lily Mercer.
Her mother, Hannah, was one of my maids.
Lily clutched a filthy white rabbit with one missing eye and an ear hanging by loose stitches.
Before I could approach her, Atlas moved first.
My Doberman had made armed men back away without being told.
Yet he walked directly to Lily, sat beside her, and placed his massive head against her knee.
That was when I knew the child was not hiding from the dog.
She was hiding from someone inside my house.
“They said Mommy stole the blue necklace,” Lily whispered.
The necklace had belonged to my dead mother.
It was worth more than a million dollars.
Ten minutes later, I entered the main hall with Lily holding my hand.
Hannah stood in the center of the marble floor, surrounded by security guards and two detectives.
My mother’s sapphire locket had been found inside her coat.
Every servant was watching.
Evelyn Crane, the housekeeper who had controlled my mansion for thirty-seven years, held Hannah’s dismissal papers.
“The evidence is clear,” Evelyn told me.
But Lily suddenly pulled away from her mother.
“The bird lady put it there,” she said.
The room went still.
I asked what bird lady she meant.
Lily reached into her pocket and placed a tiny silver feather in my palm.
A green stone formed its eye.
I recognized it instantly.
It was part of the Sinclair family crest.
The same crest worn by Audrey Sinclair, the wealthy red-haired woman my father had promised I would marry.
There was only one problem.
Audrey claimed she had not entered the mansion until after the necklace was discovered.
I ordered every gate locked.
Then I pulled the security footage.
What appeared on the screen should have ended the mystery.
Instead, it made everything worse.
At 6:27 that morning, Evelyn entered the gallery.
She removed my mother’s necklace herself.
Seven minutes later, she hid it inside Hannah’s coat.
When I confronted her, Evelyn did not deny it.
She only rolled up her sleeve.
A dark bruise circled her wrist.
“They have my son,” she said.
Then she looked directly at the camera above us and whispered something that turned my blood cold.
“They are listening right now.”
My security chief ripped a hidden transmitter from beneath the desk.
Someone had placed it there weeks earlier.
Someone knew Hannah would be framed.
Someone knew Lily had witnessed it.
And whoever planned this did not actually care about the necklace.
They wanted Hannah removed from the mansion before nightfall.
I found her in the library packing her daughter’s clothes.
She told me her husband, Daniel, had died two years earlier in a warehouse fire owned by my family.
Before the fire, he had been investigating our financial records.
The night before he disappeared, he gave Lily the broken rabbit.
He told Hannah never to throw it away.
Then Lily said something neither of us expected.
“Daddy said Button remembers what people forget.”
Hannah slowly turned the rabbit over.
A strange seam ran along its back.
It had not been sewn with thread.
It had been closed with nearly invisible fishing line.
Something hard shifted beneath the stuffing.
Hannah reached for a knife.
But before she cut the seam, my phone rang.
The caller used a blocked number.
A woman’s distorted voice spoke only one sentence.
“Open that rabbit, Grant, and the maid’s dead husband will die a second time.”
Then the line went silent.
Hannah stared at me.
Her husband had supposedly been dead for two years.
But someone had just threatened to kill him again.
We looked down at the rabbit.
May you like
And from inside its torn body, a tiny red light began blinking.
The continuation is in the comments, because what we found inside the rabbit did not merely prove Daniel might be alive.
