"Leonora!"
Leonora's eyes lit up. "Phineas? Where's Sid?"
It was Phineas Joyce, Sid Dickerson's assistant, and Leonora's own brother, Percival Matthews, climbed out of the second van right behind him.
Phineas hurried to explain. "The bosses are locked in a big deal today, but the second they heard you'd been wronged, they all dropped everything to head back!"
A few more people filed out of the other vans, suits crisp, each from a different company.
Clearly the advance teams the four moguls had each sent ahead.
Leonora jerked her chin at me.
"Weren't you the one screaming to see Connor Harding?"
"Well, they're here. So? Figured out how you're going to beg yet?"
Percival caught sight of me and muttered under his breath without thinking. "She looks way too much like my sister…"
I gave him a glance. Didn't know him.
My voice came out cold. "You're not good enough. Have Connor come himself."
Percival's face flipped on the spot.
He grabbed a bottle of water from the security guard beside him, twisted off the cap, and dumped the whole thing in my face.
Ice water ran down through my hair, stinging my eyes raw.
"Who the hell do you think you are? You've got the nerve to say Mr. Harding's name to his face?"
"At the very least I'm the signed talent director at Dickerson Studio! Trash like you isn't even fit to carry my bag!"
I squinted through the water blurring my eyes, and marked down another tally against Connor and the rest of them, hard.
How wonderful.
Not only had they gotten full of themselves, the ones they'd raised under them were each more out of control than the last.
Leonora chimed in beside him, dripping with mockery.
"Oh, this is nothing yet."
"A minute ago she stood there in front of everyone and said Connor and the others have to call her big sister."
"Said she's the one who came up with all their nicknames, too. Tch. Careful the wind doesn't blow that tongue right out of your head."
Percival went off instantly.
He seized a fistful of my hair and slammed my head down.
"Apologize, you bitch!"
"Say it to the camera. Say you're a fake riding their coattails, looking for a payout. Say it a hundred times!"
He pulled out his phone and started recording, his other hand forcing my head toward the ground.
My forehead cracked against the floor tile.
Once.
Then again.
By the third time, my temples were ringing and the edges of my vision went dark.
Something rolled out of my coat pocket.
A doll charm, old and gone yellow with age.
The stitches crooked, cotton nearly spilling out of its belly, obviously handsewn, clumsy as anything.
Look closer and you'd see four names scrawled across it in marker, lopsided.
Connor Harding.
Sid Dickerson.
Asher Perry.
Duane Lambert.
Four little brats had stayed up the whole night before I left the country to sew that for me.
Pricked their fingers bloody and still wouldn't stop.
Connor had written his own name the biggest, said that way, whenever I missed them, his would be the first I saw.
Leonora bent down and picked it up.
Turned it over in her hands for a few seconds, and her face changed at once.
"You—!"
She hurled the doll to the ground.
"Still going to tell me you weren't trying to seduce my brothers?! You'd actually make something this disgusting?!"
She lifted her stiletto and stomped down on it, hard.
The four-inch heel punched straight through the doll's belly, cotton squeezing out of the torn hole.
It still wasn't enough for her. She ground it under her heel a few more times, then kicked it away with the last stomp.
On instinct I lunged to grab it.
But Percival just stamped down on my hand.
Twisted his sole into it.
Pain shot straight through me.
"A scammer like you, fit to touch my brothers' things?"
And right then.
Among the people who'd come with Phineas, a man in a gray suit suddenly went white as a sheet.
