Chapter 2: The Ambush
“Ashes to ashes, dust to dust…” Father Thomas’s voice trembled slightly with age, the timeless words carrying over the rustling, dying leaves of the estate.
He had barely uttered the final syllable when Beatrice lunged forward, utterly obliterating the sacred, mournful silence of the cemetery. The sudden, violent motion was so jarring that several front-row guests physically recoiled. From the depths of her crocodile-skin designer clutch, she extracted a thick, heavy stack of glossy photographs. With a guttural sound of pure, unadulterated malice, she hurled them violently through the frigid air.
They rained down onto the polished wood of Marcus’s casket, slipping off the curved mahogany and scattering across the wet cobblestones like toxic, diseased leaves. I stared down at them, my grief-addled brain struggling to process the imagery. There were dozens of them. High-resolution, digitally doctored images depicting my face, perfectly grafted onto the bodies of women wrapped in the arms of various, faceless men in seedy motel rooms and dimly lit dive bars. The manipulation was flawless from a distance, engineered for maximum, immediate shock value.
A collective, synchronized gasp erupted from the crowd of one hundred and fifty guests. The polite murmurs instantly swelled into a chaotic, buzzing hum of scandalized whispers.
“Get lost, you filthy tramp!” Beatrice screeched. Her voice had entirely lost its cultured, transatlantic lilt, melting into something demonic and raw. She pointed a trembling, manicured finger directly at my face. “You honestly thought you could breed your way into the Hawthorne empire? You thought you could pass off some random bastard child as my son’s legitimate heir?”
“Beatrice, please, I beg of you, this is a house of God—” Father Thomas started, raising his frail hands in a desperate plea for peace.
But Camilla brutally shoved past the old man, nearly knocking him into the floral arrangements.
“Shut up, old man,” Camilla hissed, her dark eyes locking onto me with venomous, unchecked delight. “We know the absolute truth. Marcus knew the truth before he died. He was meeting with his attorneys to divorce you.”
“That’s a lie,” I choked out, my voice barely a breathless whisper. The sheer audacity of the shock was actively paralyzing my vocal cords. “Marcus and I… we loved each other. Those photos are completely fake. You know they’re fake!”
“His estate belongs to his real family!” Beatrice roared over my defense, playing masterfully to the audience of horrified elites. “Not to a gold-digging whore who couldn’t even keep her legs shut while her husband was busy building a global legacy!”
Before I could even attempt to formulate a defense against the absurdity of the fabricated evidence, Camilla flanked me. Her signature perfume, a sickeningly sweet floral scent, aggressively invaded my senses.
“You don’t deserve to wear these,” Camilla spat, her face hovering mere inches from mine.
Her hand shot out like a striking viper, her sharp, manicured claws digging painfully into my collarbone. With a vicious, unhesitating yank, Camilla grabbed the heirloom Hawthorne South Sea pearl necklace resting at my throat. It was an antique piece Marcus had tenderly clasped around my neck on the morning of our wedding—a symbol of my permanent acceptance into the family. Or so I had naively thought.
The antique silk thread snapped with a sickening, audible pop.
The heavy, iridescent pearls tore aggressively against my sensitive skin, leaving a burning, bright red welt slashed across my neck. I cried out in genuine physical pain, stumbling backward from the sheer force of the assault. My kitten heel caught viciously on the uneven edge of the wet cobblestone. For a terrifying, suspended second, the entire world tilted on its axis. The open, six-foot-deep grave loomed directly behind my heels. I flailed wildly, desperately clutching my pregnant stomach with both arms, throwing my entire body weight forward to keep from tumbling backward into the muddy abyss.
I hit the wet dirt hard on my knees, jarring my lower spine. I gasped for air as the loose pearls cascaded around me in a chaotic shower, bouncing hollowly off the casket and rolling into the open earth. A sharp, localized pain flared deep in my lower abdomen, causing me to bite down on my lower lip so hard I instantly tasted the metallic tang of copper.
I knelt there in the freezing mud, utterly humiliated, physically assaulted, and entirely broken. I looked up, foolishly expecting someone—anyone—to step forward and offer a hand to a pregnant woman. But the crowd simply stared down at me, their faces hardened masks of morbid, voyeuristic fascination.
And then, I looked up at Beatrice. She was standing at the very edge of the velvet rope, a triumphant, euphoric smirk painted across her meticulously preserved face. She raised her hand to casually push a stray lock of blonde hair behind her ear. As the heavy mink sleeve fell back, the grey autumn light caught the face of the heavy metal strapped to her left wrist.
My breath hitched, catching painfully in the back of my throat. It was a Rolex Daytona, cast in solid platinum, featuring a highly customized, brilliant blue dial. There was only one exactly like it in the world. I knew this as an undeniable fact, because I had personally commissioned the engraving on the back of the casing for Marcus on our first wedding anniversary. It was pristine. Unscratched. Unburnt.
It was the exact, undeniable watch the police explicitly told me Marcus was supposedly wearing when his body was reduced to ash in a two-thousand-degree inferno.
