“How does it feel to lose everything?” I asked, my voice echoing in the silence of the executive suite. It was the same question my eyes had screamed ten years ago, standing on the curb with a trash bag. The only difference was that this time, I was the one holding the keys to the castle.

But to understand the end, you have to witness the beginning.

The rain was relentless that day, a cold, gray curtain that washed the color out of the world. My father, Robert Vance, had been in the ground for exactly three hours. The scent of wet earth and expensive lilies still clung to my suit—the only suit I owned, bought for my high school graduation a month prior.

I walked into the foyer of the Vance Estate, shaking my umbrella. The house was filled with the low hum of polite conversation. “Mourners,” they called themselves, though most were socialites and business rivals here to drink my father’s scotch and assess the power vacuum his death had created.

I was looking for comfort. Instead, I found Victoria.

My stepmother stood at the base of the grand staircase. She wasn’t wearing the somber black she had donned for the cameras at the cemetery. She was wearing a bright red silk blouse, the color of a fresh wound, as if she were celebrating a victory.

At her feet sat a bulging, black Hefty bag.

“What’s this?” I asked, my voice hoarse from crying.

Victoria kicked the bag toward me with the toe of her stiletto. It slid across the marble floor with a plastic rustle that sounded like an insult.

“Your inheritance,” she sneered. Her voice wasn’t the sweet, syrupy tone she used when my father was in the room. It was sharp, jagged glass. “Your father is dead, Julian, and the house is mine. The prenup expired last week. You have zero claim to the estate.”

She stepped closer, her perfume—a heavy, cloying scent of gardenias—suffocating me.