See How She Dies Read Free Page B

the past.
    â€œYou recognize me?” Hope lighted those blue eyes.
    â€œThere’s a resemblance. I guessed.”
    â€œOh.” She hesitated, the wind suddenly out of her sails.
    â€œBut that’s why you’re here, isn’t it?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œYou think you’re my long-lost sister.” He couldn’t hide the cynicism in his words.
    Those clear blue orbs clouded and her hand, the one she’d offered and he’d ignored, dropped to her side. “I think so, but I’m not sure. That’s why I’m here.” She seemed to find her confidence again. “For a long time my name’s been Adria.”
    â€œYou’re not sure?” For a minute he could only stare into those wide blue eyes—eyes like another treacherous pair that had seemed to see right through him, but quickly his senses came back to him in a rush. Why did he think for even a second that this woman could be London? Hadn’t he been close enough to elaborate frauds to smell one a mile away? So she looked like his stepmother. Big deal. “My sister’s been dead for almost twenty years,” he said in the flat tone he reserved for liars and cheats.
    â€œHalf-sister.”
    â€œDoesn’t matter.”
    She glanced around the room. “I just wanted to see if I remembered this place—”
    â€œLondon was only four.”
    â€œAlmost five. And even four-year-olds have memories…maybe just impressions, but memories nonetheless…” She looked at one corner near a bank of windows. “The band was over there in that alcove, and there were plants…trees, I think.” Her eyebrows bunched together as if she were trying to catch hold of a fleeting memory. “And there was a huge fountain and an ice sculpture—a…horse, no, not just a horse, a running horse, and—”
    â€œYou’ve done your research.”
    Her lips tightened. “You don’t believe me.”
    â€œI think you’d better leave.” Zachary cocked his head toward the door. “London’s dead. She has been for over twenty years, so take whatever it is you’re peddling and go back home, before I haul you out of here and drop you on the front steps with the rest of the garbage.”
    â€œHow do you know London’s dead?”
    His throat closed and he remembered, with gut-wrenching clarity, the accusations, the fingers thrust in his direction, the suspicious looks cast his way. “I’m serious. You’d better leave.”
    â€œI’m serious, too, Zach.” Ramming her hands into her pockets, she took one last look around the huge room, then faced him again. “You may as well know—I don’t give up easily.”
    â€œYou don’t have a prayer.”
    â€œWho’s in charge?”
    â€œDoesn’t matter.” His voice was hard, his features drawn with brutal resolution. “You can talk to my brothers and sister, my mother, or the attorneys who are acting as the gods of finance in my father’s estate, but no one’s going to give you the time of day. You may as well save your breath and my time. Take my advice and go home.”
    â€œThis could be my home.”
    â€œBull.”
    â€œIt’s too bad Katherine isn’t alive.”
    Zachary’s blood ran cold at the mention of his beautiful and much-too-young stepmother. There was an unmistakable resemblance between the young woman standing so arrogantly before him and his father’s second wife, Katherine—Kat—the woman who’d made his life a living hell for years. “Is it really too bad, or is it just convenient?” he asked, keeping his expression bland.
    She blanched a bit.
    â€œGet out.”
    â€œYou’re afraid of me.”
    â€œAs I said, Get out .”
    She held his gaze for a heart-stopping second, then strode through the ballroom doors and down the stairs. Zachary moved to the windows