Chapter 1 | The Night I Burned Down My Family Name (1)

The chandelier in the Sterling drawing room had 3,204 crystals. Luna knew because she'd counted them at eleven, when her mother made her stand under it for an hour as a lesson in posture. Every crystal was polished to reflect hypocrisy.

Tonight it was lit for her twenty-first birthday, and sixty-seven guests stood under it holding champagne they didn't like, smiling smiles they didn't mean. Luna watched them from the top of the staircase and thought, very calmly: I am the most expensive thing in this room, and I'm about to be sold.

Outside on the landing, the florist was still tucking white roses into the sign-in table. Waiters threaded through the crowd with trays. The string quartet was playing the Chopin waltz her mother had taught her to walk to at seven — glide, spine straight, eyes ahead, as if the whole room were a runway and she the product. She'd been practicing the walk for fourteen years. She'd become very good at it.

"Luna, come down." Her mother's voice floated up, silk over steel. "Don't keep the guests waiting."

She didn't move. The gown cost eighty thousand dollars. The waist was cut so tight she could feel her own ribs counting. She looked like an exhibit — which, she supposed, was exactly the point. The Sterlings didn't raise daughters. They curated inventory.

One. Two. Three.

"Luna." Her father's voice dropped three degrees, and the air in the room dropped with it. William Sterling could make a boardroom go silent from two floors away.

Fine. The stage was set. The audience had arrived.

She walked down the stairs like a queen walking to her own execution, and the crowd parted for her like water. Whispers came at her from both sides — that's the rebellious one, she turned down three Ivy Leagues, her grades are just donations in human form. She ignored all of it.

Out of the corner of her eye she saw the society columnist raising his phone, angling for a shot, unable to keep the grin off his face. He knew what tonight was going to buy him. She gave him the angle on purpose — chin up, shoulders back, the perfect product walking to the auction block. Let him take the picture. He had no idea what she was about to do to it.

Her eyes were on the red velvet table at the center of the room, and the gold-embossed document on top of it.

THE MARRIAGE CONTRACT.

The groom-to-be: Senator Aldric Vance. Fifty-five. Two divorces. Three children. He'd thrown his second wife out last month for "lacking dignity."

"Dad. Mom." Her voice wasn't loud, but the room went quiet anyway. "Today I turn twenty-one."

"We know." Sylvia smiled, gliding over with champagne. "That's why we picked this gift for you, sweetheart. The whole family chose it together."

"Gift." Luna tasted the word like it was a moldy cake. "A contract to sell your daughter. You call that a gift."

The room gasped. Somewhere, a champagne flute clinked like a slap.

"Luna!" William's face went dark. "Watch your mouth. Senator Vance is—"

"Fifty-five, divorced twice, three kids." She cut him off, unhurried. "And I'm twenty-one, single, and healthy — except for being too clear-eyed, which, I'm told, is untreatable."

Somewhere in the back, someone laughed and was violently shushed.

She found him across the room. Senator Aldric Vance had been standing there the whole time, a glass in his hand, watching her performance with the mild interest of a man inspecting a horse he was about to bid on.

"Senator." She turned to him. The whole room followed her. "You look well for fifty-five. How's the search going? Or is your type less 'wife' and more 'accessory that doesn't talk back.'"

Vance's smile thinned to paper. "Miss Sterling. Your family and I have a mutually beneficial arrangement."

"Then my family and I have an arrangement of my own." She tilted her head. "Watch how this one ends."

Vance took a sip. He didn't answer, but his eyes did something cold and appraising, and Luna thought: There it is. The man who thinks my age makes me his.

Sylvia set her glass down. Her smile stayed, but her eyes went flat and cold, and she stepped in close, voice dropping to a blade: "Luna. Sign the paper. There's a ten-billion-dollar deal in that signature. Do it in front of all these people, or I swear—"

"So I'm the paper?" Luna looked at her mother — really looked, for maybe the first time in years. "Mom. When you had me, did you ever think you'd spend twenty-one years polishing me just so you could stamp a price on my back?"

"This is what a daughter of this family owes." Sylvia said it like it was arithmetic.