Lily’s POVLily had learned something useful about fear: it worked best when it looked like fate.The first attempt had been crude in hindsight. Panic, force, a threat in the dark, hands grabbing where they weren’t meant to grab. Emily had slipped the net anyway, stubborn and slippery, protected by luck or something sharper than luck. The second attempt, the whispered warnings, the pressure, the subtle ruin of reputation, had only hardened Emily into that irritating, righteous version of herself, the one who stared straight through people and refused to bend.So Lily adjusted.If you couldn’t break a woman, you distracted her. You redirected her. You gave her a new story to obsess over until she forgot the old one ever existed.Emily didn’t need to die. Emily just needed to disappear.Lily sat in the small sitting room off the mansion’s main hall, legs crossed, phone pressed to her ear. The afternoon light painted the walls gold, and somewhere downstairs the staff moved furniture for
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