Chapter 2 - The Envelope on the Doormat
Three days later, the rain was still hammering against Darra’s cracked windowpane. She was sitting at her tiny laminate kitchen table, staring at a stack of past-due utility notices, when a sharp rap echoed at her apartment door.
Knock. Knock. Knock.
Darra frowned. She didn't get visitors. Her landlord knew better than to come by before the first of the month. She walked slowly to the door, peering through the rusted peephole.
No one was standing in the dim, narrow hallway. Just an empty concrete floor and flickering overhead fluorescent lights.
She cracked the door open cautiously. Nothing. But as she started to close it, her bare foot brushed against a heavy, textured envelope resting right on her welcome mat. There was no stamp, no postal mark, and no return address. Just her name handwritten in striking, sharp calligraphy: Darra Whitmore.
Her heart spiked. She snatched the envelope off the floor, locked the deadbolt, and carried it back to the kitchen like it might detonate.
Using a butter knife, she sliced open the thick paper flap. Inside slid a pristine, matte-black card embossed with silver lettering, along with a cashier's check.
Darra’s eyes locked onto the numbers on the check.
$50,000.
Fifty thousand dollars. More money than she had earned in three years of scrubbing bathtubs and stripping king-sized beds at the Grand Horizon. Her breath hitched. She pulled out the black card. Embossed in the center was a single name: Aiden Ashworth. Below it, a handwritten note:
You saved my daughter, Chloe. Fifty thousand is for your silence and your relocation. Do not look for us. Do not speak of this. Consider our debt settled.
Darra stared at the slip of paper, a hot surge of bitter anger rising in her throat. Silence? Relocation? Like she was some kind of stain he wanted scrubbed off his immaculate pavement. He thought he could buy her off with pocket change, treat her like an inconvenience, and vanish back into his gilded fortress.
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"Keep your blood money, Mr. Ashworth," Darra whispered fiercely to the empty room.
She didn't know it yet, but tearing that check wasn't an option she could afford—and Aiden Ashworth’s world was about to collide with hers in a way neither of them could survive.
