Page 2 of Stealing Cinder

"A girl needs a woman's influence in her life," he liked to say, leaning back in his study chair with a crossword balanced on his knee. He’d look at me with warm eyes that creased at the corners with a love so steady it made me feel invincible.

"I have books," I told him.

He didn't like that answer. He shook his head with that gentle, stubborn smile of his and went back to his crossword. Subject closed. Not because he was cruel. No, my father was kind and I fear that is what got him killed.

My mother, Violet, died when I was young. Hit-and-run. They never caught who did it. She was kind, fierce and mine, and the world took her from me before I had the chance to learn all she had to teach me. What I have left are fragments of memory. The scent of her shampoo. The sound of her humming in the kitchen. The way my father's eyes went soft when they would share and look across the room.

That kind of love is rare.

After she died, Francesca swooped in. My mother's "best friend." A title that gave her full access to a grieving widower with deep pockets and an even bigger heart. She brought casseroles and kind words and two little girls who called my father "Uncle Vinny" and clung to his legs.

He ate it up. He needed to be needed, and Francesca served herself on a platter of manufactured necessity.

Edgar came next. My father's longtime "friend" who stuck around for easy access to the bank accounts and the business deals and the name that opened doors across Chicago. My father believed friends were rare and precious. He refused to see the predators eating at his table and sleeping in his bed.

Twelve years. Twelve years of Francesca and her two daughters circling, waiting, performing love for an audience of one. And now that audience is dead.

"Ms. Ashford."

My gaze snaps to the lawyer. He adjusts his glasses, clears his throat, shuffles papers without looking at me.

"As outlined in the final testament, the entirety of the Ashford estate, including all real property holdings, financial assets, business interests, and personal effects, is to be distributed in equal thirds to Mrs. Francesca Ashford, Ms. Bianca Ashford, and Ms. Gianna Ashford."

Equal thirds. Meaning they take everything my father spent his entire adulthood building.

My jaw locks. Every muscle in my face goes rigid, and I hold the expression blank by force of will alone. Across the table, Gianna shifts in her chair, a smirk tugging at the corner of her lips. Bianca crosses her legs and inspects her manicure with bored satisfaction. But behind that aloof expression I know she’s counting all the ways she’s going to spend my father’s billions.

Francesca produces a single tear. It slides down her cheek. Edgar squeezes her hand and shakes his head with rehearsed solemnity.

The burn behind my eyes is savage, and I crush it before it can become tears. I will not cry in front of these people. I will bleed from the mouth before I give them a single drop of weakness to feed on.

This will is a forgery. My father would never have cut me out. Not the man who left handwritten notes in my school lunches until I was sixteen. Not the man who drove forty-five minutes across Chicago in a snowstorm because I called him crying when a bad date left me stranded. My father loved me with every breath in his body, and the document in that lawyer's hands is a lie.

But I sit perfectly still, jaw locked, spine straight, and give the four vultures sitting across from me absolutely nothing to feast on.

I don't care about the money. I never have. My father didn't raise me to worship wealth. He raised me to value people, loyalty, love that builds a home out of open doors and honest conversations. He walked every street in this city, shook every hand. The doormen, the waitresses, the men and women in every corner of Chicago who knew his name and smiled when they said it. People loved him. Respected him. A good man who believed the world rewarded goodness.

But that is where he was wrong.

A random mugging, the police and detectives called it. He was simply on the wrong side of town and at the wrong time. He took a bullet in his heart, and yet his wallet was still in his pocket. His wedding ring was still on his finger when they found him. Nothing was taken except his life. Someone murdered him in a neighborhood he'd walked a thousand times and not a single witness came forward.

That screams dirty cops, blackmail and intimidation. All three of my stepmother’s doing.

The only person who stood to gain from his death sits at the head of his dining table dabbing crocodile tears while the man beside her holds her hand.

The lawyer's mouth is still moving when I push back from the table. The legs scrape against the hardwood and every head turns. Good. Let them watch me leave.

My heels crack against the hardwood and I don't slow down until the dining room is behind me and the doorframe cuts off Francesca's line of sight.

The hallway is cooler than the dining room and I immediately draw in a deep breath. I press my back to the wall and close my eyes. The wallpaper is rough against my shoulder blades through the thin fabric of my dress. My father's house wraps around me, and for one traitorous second, it smells the way it used to. Old wood. Furniture polish. The ghost of bread baking in the kitchen because he never could resist a fresh loaf and never once measured a single ingredient.

"Look at Princess Cinder."

My eyes fly open. Bianca leans against the opposite wall, arms folded across a flat chest, her smile as sharp as a blade. Gianna flanks her, a matching set of polished malice in designer black. They look like twin hyenas circling a kill.

Fuck them both.

"Not so high and mighty with daddy dead, are you?" Bianca's voice carries through the hallway, loud and careless. Now that my father isn’t here, she no longer has to pretend. She pushes off the wall and takes a step closer, close enough that her perfume, a cheaper imitation of her mother's, hits my nostrils.