The news broke online like a lightning strike.
In the endlessly churning world of the internet, where scandals rose and fell by the hour, one announcement stopped everything cold.
The Leighton family, the most powerful of Solmere City’s four great families, had issued a brief statement.
Their ninth grandson would be married in three days.
Three days.
Within an hour, it was trending everywhere.
Within two, the gossip sites had run out of ways to say who is she?
Because that was the question everyone was asking.
The statement had named the groom and the date and nothing else.
There was no bride’s name, no photograph, and no hint of her family.
The only confirmed fact was that she existed, and that the Leightons were in an enormous hurry to make her one of them.
The speculation ran wild.
She was a foreign princess.
She was a secret heiress.
She was pregnant.
She was a pop star in disguise.
Someone posted a blurry photo of a woman in sunglasses stepping out of a Leighton car, and it was shared forty thousand times before anyone noticed it was Arthur Leighton’s seventy-year-old housekeeper.
Whoever she was, the whole city was desperate to see her, and to see whether she was beautiful enough to deserve all this fuss.
Once the wedding date was fixed, Neve was finally allowed to leave the house again.
The public didn’t know her name yet, but every family that mattered in Solmere’s high society already did.
Word traveled fast in those circles.
By the evening of the matchmaking lunch, half the city’s old money had heard that Margaret Sinclair’s granddaughter was marrying into the Leightons.
And that changed everything.
No matter how badly Richard Ashford wanted the jade pendant, he wouldn’t dare touch Neve now.
Laying a finger on her would be the same as slapping the Leighton family in the face.
The Ashfords ranked fourth among the great families.
The Leightons ranked first.
Richard wasn’t stupid enough to start that war.
Still, Margaret wasn’t about to let her granddaughter wander the city alone.
Instead, the next morning, she bundled Neve into the car and took her straight to the Leighton estate.
“Nana, I want to go shopping for supplies,” Neve said as she slid into the back seat.
Right now, the space was nearly empty.
Aside from the vault treasures and the live chickens and ducks Helen had bought for her, there was almost nothing in it.
Every time Neve looked inside, all that bare soil and silence made her uneasy.
She didn’t feel safe.
Not yet.
“Silly girl.” Margaret patted her hand as the driver pulled away.
“We have hundreds of people working for this family.
If I made you handle every little errand yourself, what would I be paying all of them for?”
“Miss, don’t worry,” said Silas from the passenger seat.
He half turned so she could see him.
“Madam has already set aside twenty billion dollars.
We’re buying supplies from all over the world right now.
The first shipments should start arriving from overseas within two weeks at the latest.”
He gave her a small, steady nod.
“You won’t need to worry about supplies at all.”
“Oh,” Neve said.
She didn’t know what else to say.
In her last life, she’d read plenty of apocalypse novels.
The heroes were always scrambling from warehouse to warehouse, sweating and scheming, working themselves half to death to grab every last can of beans before the world ended.
And here she was, sitting in the back of a car while her grandmother bought up half the planet’s supplies on her behalf.
It seemed that having Nana really was the best thing in the world.
Neve leaned sideways and rested her head on her grandmother’s shoulder.
“Nana, I’m so lucky to have you.”
Margaret put an arm around her at once and drew her close.
“My precious girl.
Having you makes Grandma happy too.
Don’t you worry about anything.
Grandma will take care of all of it.”
The words had barely left her mouth when a cold feeling crept into Margaret’s chest.
She had always raised Neve this way.
She had shielded her, spoiled her, and smoothed every road before her feet could touch it.
And what had come of it?
A sheltered young heiress who knew nothing about how the world really worked.
If the world stayed as it was, that would have been fine.
Margaret’s money and connections would have protected Neve for the rest of her life, and she could have lived happily without ever learning how cruel people could be.
But the world wasn’t going to stay as it was.
And a sheltered girl who didn’t know how to survive would die exactly the way she had died before.
But the words were already said.
Margaret couldn’t take them back.
She tightened her arm around her granddaughter and silently hoped that everything Neve had lived through in her last life had truly changed her.
That she was stronger now.
That she would never again need someone else to take care of everything.
The car soon pulled up at the Leighton mansion.
The family’s butler was waiting on the steps to show them in.
Arthur was already in the living room, sunk into a deep leather sofa.
He waved his cane at them as they entered.
“Margaret!
Honestly, at your age, you’re still this impatient?
You had to drag everyone out of bed at the crack of dawn?”
The day before, there had been too many people and too little time.
The two of them had never managed to talk privately, and Margaret had never told Arthur the information she’d promised him.
So first thing that morning, she had called and told him she was coming.
“And who am I rushing around for?
Your family, that’s who,” Margaret fired back without missing a beat.
“You never did know how to appreciate a kindness.”
Underneath the bickering, she was deadly serious.
When the world fell apart, the Leightons would need to be ready.
If they weren’t, they might not be able to stand against the Ashfords.
And then they wouldn’t be able to protect Neve either.
“Hello, Grandpa Leighton!” Neve said brightly.
“Ah, at least you have some manners.” Arthur beamed at her.
“Unlike your grandmother, who always has to have the last word.
Come, come, sit!”
He patted the sofa cushion beside him.
“We won’t sit here,” Margaret said.
“Let’s go somewhere we can talk properly.”
She wanted to tell him everything as soon as possible and see what he meant to do about it.
“Heh.
All right, all right.
My study, then.”
Arthur was pushing himself up from the sofa when he spotted someone coming down the staircase.
It was his ninth grandson, in a dark sweater, his hair still slightly damp.
“There you are!
Didn’t I tell you to be down early?” Arthur lifted his cane and gave Zane a sharp smack across the shin.
“What took you so long?
Do you call that behaving like a man?”
Zane didn’t flinch, and he didn’t step out of the way.
“I was in the shower, Grandpa,” he said flatly.
“I thought your beloved grandson should look presentable for his future wife.”
“Hmph.
That’s more like it.” Arthur nodded, satisfied.
“Show her around the house.
And do as she says.
If you upset her, I’ll deal with you according to the family rules.
You understand?”
With that, he took Margaret’s arm and led her off toward his study.
Zane turned to Neve.
“Come on, Miss Sinclair.
I’ll show you around.” His tone was as flat as ever.
“Not that I know this house very well myself.”
He turned and walked off.
He was thirty years old and had almost no experience with women.
Even the women who worked under him treated him with absolute deference and kept a careful distance.
He genuinely had no idea what he was supposed to do to please this one.
It wasn’t that he was afraid of his grandfather.
And it wasn’t that he particularly liked her.
It simply didn’t matter to him one way or the other.
“Hey!” Neve called after him.
“Why are you walking so fast?”
She hadn’t even gotten to her feet before he was halfway across the room.
“Are you sure you’re supposed to be giving me a tour?”
Zane stopped and looked back at her.
She was still standing beside the sofa.
He frowned.
“Are your legs broken?
Can’t you keep up?”
Women were strange.
He’d told her to come along, and then he’d started walking.
What else was she waiting for?
Was the Sinclair girl a little slow?
“That’s not it!” Neve crossed the room toward him, unhurried.
“Mister, you just took off without warning.
I hadn’t even blinked and you were already halfway to the door.”
She stopped in front of him and looked up into those cold dark eyes without flinching.
“What, you don’t like me?
Are you trying to lose me?”
Something in the back of her mind still whispered careful when she met his gaze.
But she had survived three years of the apocalypse in her last life.
She wasn’t going to be frightened off by a scowl.
And ever since she’d seen those ears go pink, she’d suspected he was a lot less terrifying than he looked.
Besides, with Grandpa Leighton watching over him like a hawk, he wouldn’t dare lay a finger on her.
“Are all women this unreasonable?” Zane turned away.
“I told you to follow me when I left.
If you couldn’t keep up, why is that my fault?”
He started walking again.
“Ridiculous.”
He wasn’t going to waste his breath arguing about something so pointless.