Page 24 of Cruel Hearts

She pours me a cup of coffee, and I sit at the island on the same barstool where Stella sat the night I met her. Maybe I should update the kitchen. Lucille could tell the interior decorator what she wants.

The TV hums low, and for once, I’m not featured. I haven’t done anything newsworthy except double my father’s net worth.

After Stella left and Zarah checked out, work was all I had. Nigel, like I brought him in to do, helped me steer Maddox Industries to the next level. Not in the way my father would have done it, but I didn’t care about anything or anyone.

But please, Zane, don’t hurt me.

I’ll never be able to outrun the sound of her sad, scared voice.

Did Stella make it through the night? Did Ash find her? I wonder what he did to her if he did. What he’s capable of makes my stomach churn, and I almost throw up again. I swallow down the bitter coffee and inhale deep breaths through my nose. “Lucille, why do you think Stella left?”

The older woman finishes washing her hands and turns to me while she dries them with a towel. “I can’t say.”

“Do you think she wanted the crown and fame like everyone said?”

Lucille drops the dishcloth and opens a drawer in the desk she uses to keep track of bills, supplies, and groceries. She pulls a photo from the bottom of a sheaf of statements and invoices,slides the picture across the marble counter, and gives me time to absorb what I’m looking at.

It’s a shot of us at the pumpkin patch. I’m wandering around, searching for the perfect pumpkin, and she’s laughing, pointing, trying to direct me without getting up off the hay bale. Looking at the photo, I can feel the sun on my back, smell the popcorn in the air, hear the children laughing and screaming. I imagine Stella’s kisses, her gentle embraces.

It had been a good day, that day.

“That was six months after your parents passed, God rest their souls, and it was the first time I’d seen you smile. Stella, she didn’t know about money or social class, about crowns and royalty. She brought you to a fall festival and bought you pellets to feed goats. You think that’s the type of woman who cares about being a princess?”

“Then why did she leave me?” I ask, my throat constricting, trying to hold back my anguish.

Lucille taps her finger under my chin, asking me to look at her. The housekeeper has been part of my family since I was born. I thought I didn’t have anyone to ask for advice, but I need to listen to Lucille. She loves me, and she knows things. Things she would never volunteer because it’s her job to be seen and not heard.

Tears fill her kind brown eyes. “Did you think maybe she had to?”

I push her hand away. “Shehad torun off with Cardello? You’ve seen the pictures, Lucille. The news reports. She ran off to Italy, and I never heard from her again.”

Lucille shakes her head, but I don’t know what she means by it. “Do you have any news about the plane crash?” she asks.

“No. The case is still open, but no one is working on it anymore. They stopped looking.”

When the FBI told me they were going to stop investigating, that had been a heavy blow. The other passengers were all dead ends, and without the plane’s black box, there wasn’t anything more they could do. The private investigator Clayton advised me to hire spent a lot of money and came up with less than what the FBI offered me. Five and a half years now. I’ll never know why my parents died.

“Why?” I ask, raising my mug to my lips. “What does my parents’ deaths have to do with Stella?”

Lucille shrugs and starts pulling ingredients out of the fridge to cook breakfast. “Probably nothing, but I find it strange your parents were killed in a crash that can’t be explained, and she disappears the night you announce you’re taking over your father’s company.”

I don’t see how there’s a connection. Stella may have been the instigator, making me realize I couldn’t grieve indefinitely, but she hadn’t been involved once I’d made the decision to take my father’s place.

Wait. Yes, she was. I promoted her.

Something niggles in the back of my mind. Stella was snooping in Richard Denton’s personal email.

Did she find something?

Denton was meeting Clayton behind my back. Did Denton do something to Stella to keep his secrets?

No.

There are still the pictures of Stella and Cardello in Italy. The gossip sites gleefully splashed around proof they’d been living together, almost like the rags were taunting me, trying to provoke me into lashing out. The photos showed them very much in love, and no one from Cardello’s camp denied the allegations he stole her from me.

There was no room for doubt.

Especially since I saw for myself how Cardello couldn’t take his eyes off her at the party.

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