THE SILVER MOON SAGA

The champagne tower collapsed the moment Allison saw Roger's hand on Victoria's waist. She would realize later that she'd knocked it over herself—her elbow catching the serving table as she turned, her body moving before her mind had finished processing the betrayal. Crystal flutes cascaded in a glittering waterfall. The string quartet faltered, their Vivaldi dissolving into discordant silence. Two hundred guests turned as one, their collective gasp echoing off the Rainbow Room's art deco walls. And Allison stood at the epicenter, staring at her fiancé's hand resting on her cousin's hip with an intimacy that spoke of months, not moments. The engagement party had been her father's idea. Arthur Keene believed in celebration the way other men believed in religion—as a bulwark against the darkness of an uncertain world. He'd spared no expense. The Rainbow Room, sixty-five floors above Rockefeller Center, had been transformed into a cathedral of roses and crystal. Two hundred guests from the upper echelons of New York society had gathered to toast the union of Keene Energy's heiress and Roger Harrington, the ambitious young attorney whose family connections stretched back to the Mayflower. Allison had never wanted any of it. Not the spectacle, not the guest list packed with her father's business associates, not the twelve-thousand-dollar dress that made her feel like a mannequin. But she'd smiled through all of it because that was what Morrows did. They smiled. They endured. They won. And now she understood exactly what kind of victory she'd been celebrating. "Three months." Victoria's voice cut through the ringing silence, her diamond earrings swaying as she tilted her head. Her hand hadn't moved from Roger's waist. Neither had his from hers. "He said you're like a museum artifact, Allison. Beautiful to look at. Cold to the touch. Untouchable, really." The words hung in the air like smoke. Allison felt two hundred pairs of eyes swiveling between her and the couple—her cousin and her fiancé, standing together like they'd rehearsed this moment. Perhaps they had. Victoria had always loved a stage. Even as children at family gatherings, she'd found ways to position herself at the center of every photograph, every story, every carefully curated moment of attention. Allison had always let her. The spotlight had never interested her the way it interested Victoria. She'd preferred the quiet work of building things—companies, strategies, a life that made sense. But Victoria hadn't just taken the spotlight this time. She'd taken everything. Allison's nails bit into her palms. The pain was grounding, a sharp anchor in a world that had suddenly tilted on its axis. She could feel the delicate skin breaking, the warm wetness of blood welling up between her fingers. Good. The pain gave her something to focus on besides the roaring in her ears, the way the chandeliers seemed to sway overhead, the impossible reality of what she was seeing. But beneath the pain, something else was stirring. The wolf-tooth pendant between her collarbones—her mother's only legacy, worn every day for fifteen years despite her father's gentle suggestions that perhaps it was time to let it go—was heating against her skin. Not warm. Hot. As if someone had lit a flame inside the ancient tooth, as if fifteen years of dormancy had ended in an instant of white-hot awakening. She'd felt it flicker before, this impossible heat. On the anniversary of her mother's death, when she'd stood alone in the rain at the cemetery, watching droplets trace paths down the granite headstone. During thunderstorms that reminded her too much of that night—the night of the blackout, the night the substation exploded, the night her mother died. In moments of intense emotion that she'd learned to suppress because CEOs didn't cry in boardrooms and heiresses didn't show weakness at society galas. But it had never burned like this. Never blazed with such urgent, demanding heat that it felt like a second heartbeat pulsing against her sternum, insistent and alive. Not now, she thought desperately. Whatever this is, not now. But the pendant didn't care about timing. It had waited fifteen years. It would not wait another moment. She inhaled slowly, deliberately, the way her father had taught her before every difficult board meeting. Control your breathing, Allison. Control your breathing, and you control the room. The air tasted like champagne and roses and the copper-salt tang of blood from where her nails had broken skin. She held the breath for a count of four, then released it. Then she was moving. Twelve-centimeter Jimmy Choos clicked across marble as she mounted the stage. The band conductor, a nervous man with a thin mustache who had been warned about the Keene family's exacting standards, fled at her approach. Smart man. She snatched the microphone from its stand with a feedback screech that made the front row wince. "Thank you all for witnessing this farce." Her voice rang out, clean and sharp as a chambered round. She was surprised to find it steady. Inside, she was screaming—a primal, wordless howl that seemed to rise from somewhere deeper than her chest, somewhere connected to that burning tooth at her throat. Outside, she was ice. She had been forged in boardroom battles and hostile takeovers, in the quiet wars of corporate America where weapons were words and casualties were measured in stock prices. This was just another battlefield. She knew how to fight on battlefields. "Now please enjoy the special entertainment—Adulterers: An Improvised Performance." The spotlight operator, whether from shock or instinct, swung the beam across the room. It caught Roger mid-flinch, his hand finally—finally—dropping from Victoria's waist. Victoria's leg was still hooked around his thigh, her dress riding up in a way that would have been scandalous even without the context. The collective gasp from two hundred guests sounded like a punctured lung. Allison raised her champagne flute to the chandelier. The crystal caught the light, scattering prismatic fragments across the frozen tableau below—her father's stricken face, Victoria's mother pressing a handkerchief to her mouth, the Harrington family looking like they'd swallowed acid. "To my beloved cousin." She let her voice carry, let every syllable drop like a stone into still water. "The only woman I know who recycles trash faster than my father acquires bankrupt companies. Your efficiency is genuinely admirable, Victoria. I'm sure Roger will find you... consistently available." She let the glass fall. It exploded against the stage in a starburst of crystal and champagne. The room erupted. Victoria's shriek vanished under the clicking of phone cameras—two hundred guests documenting the scandal of the season, their sympathy for the betrayed heiress warring with their hunger for drama. Allison turned, her gown's train sweeping through shattered glass, and walked toward the exit with her spine straight and her head high. She did not look back. She did not acknowledge her father's call, or Victoria's mother's hysterics, or the Harrington matriarch's attempts to block her path. She walked like a queen retreating from a battlefield she had already won, and the crowd parted before her like water before a blade. She was a Morrow. She smiled. She endured. She won. But first, she needed to get out of this dress. The elevator ride lasted an eternity. Allison stood in the mirrored box, watching her reflection fracture into a dozen versions of herself. The woman in the mirror looked composed. Regal, even, in the white silk gown with its delicate beadwork and cathedral train. Her dark hair was still pinned in its elaborate updo, the work of a stylist who had spent three hours creating what she'd called "a masterpiece of understated elegance." Her makeup was still flawless, despite the tears she could feel threatening behind her eyes—tears she refused to shed, tears she had been refusing to shed for fifteen years. She hadn't cried when they'd told her about the accident. She hadn't cried at the funeral, standing beside her father in a black dress that was too big for her five-year-old frame, holding his hand while strangers murmured condolences she didn't understand. She hadn't cried through boarding school or business school or the slow, grinding years of proving herself in a world that wanted her to fail. She had learned early that tears were a currency she couldn't afford to spend. Never let anyone see you cry, her father had told her, not unkindly, as they'd driven home from the cemetery. They'll think you're weak. And you're not weak, Allison. You're a Morrow. She was a Morrow. Morrows didn't cry. But the pendant was still burning against her chest, and for the first time in fifteen years, she was afraid. She pressed her hand to it through the silk of her gown. The heat was almost unbearable now, a small sun nestled between her collarbones, pulsing with its own quiet rhythm. She'd worn this tooth every day since her father had fastened it around her neck in the wreckage of a Long Island substation. She'd been five years old. She hadn't understood what had happened—only that her mother was gone, and this tooth was all that remained, and her father's hands had been shaking as he worked the clasp. Never let anyone see it glow. Her mother's voice, surfacing from fifteen years of buried memory. Celeste Morrow had whispered those words during a thunderstorm, when Allison was four years old and afraid of the lightning. She'd cupped Allison's face in her hands—her mother's hands, she remembered, had always been warm, even in winter—and spoken with an intensity that had frightened her more than the storm. Never let anyone see it glow. Promise me, Allison. Promise me. She'd promised. She'd kept that promise for fifteen years, through everything. The tooth had never glowed. It had never done anything except sit cold and inert against her skin, a piece of the past she couldn't let go, a question she'd stopped asking because she'd learned that some questions didn't have answers. Until tonight. The elevator doors opened onto the parking garage, and cold air hit her face like a slap.