My stepmother handed me a trash bag of my clothes and said, “Your father is d;ea;d, and the house is mine. Get out.” She slammed the door in my face while her kids laughed from the window. I was eighteen, broke, and alone. She thought that was the end of the story. She didn’t know my father had left a separate, secret will in a safety deposit box that only I had the key to. Ten years later, I bought the company she worked for. Today, I’m going to walk into her office and ask her the same question she asked me: “How does it feel to lose everything?”

Chapter 1: The Day the World Froze

“How does it feel to lose everything?” I asked, my voice echoing in the silence of the executive suite. It was the same question my eyes had screamed ten years ago, standing on the curb with a trash bag. The only difference was that this time, I was the one holding the keys to the castle.

But to understand the end, you have to witness the beginning.

The rain was relentless that day, a cold, gray curtain that washed the color out of the world. My father, Robert Vance, had been in the ground for exactly three hours. The scent of wet earth and expensive lilies still clung to my suit—the only suit I owned, bought for my high school graduation a month prior.

I walked into the foyer of the Vance Estate, shaking my umbrella. The house was filled with the low hum of polite conversation. “Mourners,” they called themselves, though most were socialites and business rivals here to drink my father’s scotch and assess the power vacuum his death had created.

I was looking for comfort. Instead, I found Victoria.

My stepmother stood at the base of the grand staircase. She wasn’t wearing the somber black she had donned for the cameras at the cemetery. She was wearing a bright red silk blouse, the color of a fresh wound, as if she were celebrating a victory.

At her feet sat a bulging, black Hefty bag.

“What’s this?” I asked, my voice hoarse from crying.