CHAPTER THREE — First Blood (1)

The next morning, Elowen Voss walked into the lobby of Voss Tower wearing the department-store dress and a smile that made the receptionist drop her pen.

"Miss Voss," the receptionist stammered. "I—you don't have an appointment—"

"I don't need one," Elowen said pleasantly. "I need the conference room on the thirty-second floor, a projector, and the HR file for Cassandra Doyle."

"Ma'am, I really can't—"

"You can," Elowen said, and she kept smiling, and the receptionist, who had never seen the quiet eldest Voss daughter smile like that, found herself reaching for the phone before she'd made a conscious decision to do so.

The conference room on the thirty-second floor was empty, which was exactly what Elowen had counted on. The HR file for Cassandra Doyle—Lila's "best friend," the Whitmore student who had filed the anonymous complaint about the term paper—was in her hands within the hour, delivered by a flustered assistant who had clearly decided not to ask questions.

Elowen read it twice. Then she read it a third time, because she wanted to be sure.

Cassandra Doyle was a senior at Whitmore with a 2.9 GPA and a part-time job at a coffee shop that paid her barely enough to cover rent. And yet, according to the bank statements Elowen had requested from a friend who owed her a favor, Cassandra had received three deposits of exactly three hundred dollars over the past month, each one timed to within hours of a public attack on Elowen.

Three hundred dollars. That was the price of Elowen Voss's reputation.

She sat in the conference room for a long time, looking at the numbers, feeling the shape of them click into place. Cassandra Doyle wasn't the enemy. Cassandra Doyle was a student who needed money, and someone had found her, and someone had paid her to be the knife.

The question was who held the handle.

Elowen pulled out her phone and called the only person she knew who could answer that question without making it a problem.

"I need a name," she said, when Dorian answered. "A student named Cassandra Doyle. She filed a false complaint against me. She was paid three hundred dollars, three times, over the past month."

There was a pause on the other end.

"Three hundred dollars," Dorian said slowly. "That's a very specific number."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean your stepsister's tutor—the one who quit last spring—told me something interesting before he left the country. He said the going rate for ruining Elowen Voss was three hundred dollars a job." A pause. "He said it went up to five hundred after your mother's foundation rejected her application."

Elowen's blood went cold.

"My mother's foundation?"

"The Ashworth scholarship fund." Dorian's voice was careful. "It's been running for twenty years, Miss Voss. Quietly. Your mother set it up before she died. It's been paying for orphans' educations ever since." He paused. "Your stepsister applied to it, three years ago, under her dead father's name. The trustees rejected her."

"Because she wasn't an orphan."

"Because she wasn't an orphan, and because the trustees knew who she was." Dorian's voice was dry. "The Ashworths have long memories, Miss Voss. Your mother's trustees are no exception."

Elowen sat in the conference room, the HR file in her hands, and she felt the shape of the war rearrange itself around her.

Her mother hadn't just left her a fortune. Her mother had left her an institution—a living, breathing thing that had been running for twenty years, that knew who Lila was, that had been watching.

"You're telling me," Elowen said slowly, "that my mother's foundation rejected Lila. Three years ago. And Lila has been destroying my life ever since."

"I'm telling you," Dorian said, "that your stepsister's war with you started the day she found out your mother left you something she could never have." A pause. "Three hundred dollars a job, Miss Voss. That's what your reputation was worth to her. I'd take that personally, if I were you."

Elowen looked at the file, at the numbers, at the name of the woman who had been paid to ruin her, and she felt something dangerous and wonderful settle into her bones.

"I do," she said. "I take it very personally."

She thought about the man in the Phantom, who had known all of this already—the amounts, the timing, the names. And she felt the first stirring of something that wasn't quite trust and wasn't quite fear.

It was interest.

The afternoon event was a charity luncheon at the Plaza, hosted by the Voss Foundation, which meant the entire New York social registry would be there, which meant Lila would be there, wearing something expensive and crying about something tragic.

Elowen hadn't been invited.

She went anyway.

The maître d' recognized her, of course—the scandal of the scholarship had made her briefly famous, the way a train wreck is briefly famous—and he started to reach for the seating chart, but Elowen smiled at him the way she'd smiled at the receptionist, and somehow the seating chart became irrelevant.

She took a seat at the back, near the bar, where she could watch.

And watch she did.

Lila was in the center of the room, as always, holding court. The silver gown had been swapped for a champagne-colored Chanel that Elowen's father had almost certainly paid for. Margaret hovered at her elbow like a lady-in-waiting. And the story was being told again—the orphan story, the clawing-up-from-nothing story, the I-just-want-to-be-seen story—to a circle of society matrons who nodded and clutched their pearls and told her how brave she was.

Elowen nursed a glass of water and waited.

It didn't take long. Lila, sensing an audience, launched into the latest installment: how difficult it was to be the new girl, how certain people in her own family had never accepted her, how she'd had to fight so hard for the valedictorian spot because "some people thought I didn't deserve it."

"Some people," Lila said, eyes glistening, "who have never had to work a day in their lives."

And there it was. The cue. The opening Elowen had been waiting for.