On the morning of the 24th, I sat in my new office, looking out over the Hudson River. On my desk lay the stack of invitations I had prepared.
I signaled to my assistant. “Send them. Let’s see if they’re as brave in my house as they were in the courthouse.”
The invitations arrived at the Sterling family office at 11:00 AM. They weren’t the cheap, digital cards they expected. They were heavy, gold-pressed vellum cards delivered by a private courier in a suit that cost more than Mark’s monthly salary.
“The Obsidian Gates?” Beatrice’s voice was audible from the hallway as she stormed into Mark’s office, waving the card like a weapon. “That’s the most exclusive zip code in the country, Mark. You can’t even get a delivery truck past that gatehouse without a biometric scan. How on earth did that little waitress get an invitation to use a rental space there?”
Mark looked at the card, his brow furrowed in genuine confusion. The name “Vance” was embossed at the bottom, but he didn’t make the connection. To him, Elena was just Elena. He had never even asked about my family history or my business ventures. He had been too busy talking about himself.
“Maybe she’s dating one of the staff members?” Mark suggested, his ego refusing to entertain any other possibility. “Or maybe she’s working as a temporary caterer and thinks she can fool us by having us come to the service entrance to ‘see her success’?”
“Exactly,” Beatrice replied, her eyes gleaming with a familiar, predatory malice. “We’ll go. And we’ll bring the whole family. Aunt Margaret, the cousins from London, everyone. We’ll show the entire clan what happens when a commoner tries to play Queen in a palace that isn’t hers. We’ll make her ‘birthday’ a night she’ll never forget—for all the wrong reasons. We’ll humiliate her so thoroughly she’ll never show her face in this city again.”
The Sterling caravan—five black SUVs filled with thirty relatives dressed in their finest, most “ancestral” jewelry—pulled up to the massive iron gates of The Obsidian Gates at 8:00 PM sharp. Beatrice was already rehearsing her opening insult, her lips curled in a permanent sneer of anticipation.
“I’ll start by asking her if the ‘landlord’ knows she’s playing dress-up in the guest house,” she whispered to Mark as the SUV window rolled down.
A guard in a tactical suit, with an earpiece and a posture that screamed elite military training, approached the car. He didn’t look impressed by the Sterling name.
