Lemon Faulkner was only six years old, but she was a child who had grown up in the shadow of hospital corridors and the hushed, pitying whispers of the working class. She understood more than she should, and now, the one thing she feared most had been given a name and a face by the man standing over her.
"No... please..." she sobbed, the sound muffled by the thin hospital sheets.
Death was no longer a vague concept in a storybook; it was the cold, clinical reality Simon Ashford had just laid bare. Every child has an instinctive terror of the dark, but for Lemon, the dark was now inside her—in her blood, in her marrow, in the very Panda blood that made her "one in a million" in the worst way possible.
The weight of Simon’s presence—the suffocating aura of a spoiled heir who had never kno
