Blood kept dripping across the white marble floor. .

Odalys recovered first. “Priya broke a vase and became hysterical when I asked her to take responsibility.”

“She threw it,” Priya said.

Weston crossed the hall. Odalys stepped into his path.

“Darling, the guests are waiting. Bram can handle this.”

Weston walked around her. He knelt beside Priya, removed the napkin, and went very still. “How long ago?”

“About twenty minutes.”

His eyes lifted to Bram.

“I called for the car,” the manager said. “Ms. Vane canceled it.”

Odalys folded her arms. “It is a cut, Weston, not a tragedy.”

He pulled off his tie and wrapped it firmly around Priya’s palm. Blood darkened the silk almost at once.

“A doctor is meeting us at Newport Hospital,” he said to Bram. “Bring the car to the front.”

“There are forty guests in the garden,” Odalys protested.

“Then forty people can wait.”

Wren Castellan had not moved from the doorway. She was studying the floor, not Priya.

“Weston,” she said quietly.

The blood and water had entered narrow grooves between the marble slabs. Four straight lines met at right angles, outlining a square almost four feet wide.

Priya followed Wren’s stare. “That seam wasn’t visible before.”

Weston touched one edge. “This slab is hollow.”

Odalys’s face lost its color. It was slight, a change most people might have missed. Priya had spent years noticing what wealthy guests assumed staff did not see.

“You knew it was there,” she said.

“Don’t be absurd.”

Weston stood. “Bram, postpone the rehearsal. Call Dr. Kade and ask him to come here instead. Priya is not leaving until I know why my fiancée tried to force her to remove something neither of us knew existed.”

“I did not know,” Odalys said.

“Then you won’t object to us opening it.”

She reached for him. “This is our wedding weekend. Are you truly going to humiliate me over a line in the floor?”

“No. I’m going to find out what you are afraid of.”

Bram brought two maintenance workers with suction grips and pry bars. They found a recessed brass catch beneath the library threshold. When Weston pressed it, the marble lifted with a mechanical groan. Together, the men raised the panel.

A shallow steel compartment waited beneath it. Inside lay the cedar box Priya had moved, three rolled canvases wrapped in linen, and a black leather ledger sealed in clear plastic.

Wren made a sound that was almost a gasp. “Silas built this.”

Weston looked at his mother. “Father?”

“He installed private compartments when he restored the house. He said old homes needed places for old truths.”

Odalys backed toward the garden doors.

Priya saw it and said, “Don’t let her leave.”

Weston unrolled the first canvas. A stormy harbor emerged beneath his hands, the paint cracked with age. It was the original Winslow-style seascape Odalys claimed was undergoing restoration. The other two missing paintings were beneath it.

Weston turned to Odalys. “Why were these under my floor?”

“How would I know? Priya clearly put them there.”

Priya almost laughed. “I didn’t know the compartment existed.”

“You found it conveniently.”

“With the blood you ordered me to scrub away.”

Weston opened the black ledger. Its pages contained dates, inventory numbers, appraisals, and transfers from Castellan family trusts to companies registered in Delaware and Nevada. Beside the three paintings were the initials O.V. Shipping labels matched the photographs on Priya’s phone.

Then Weston reached the most recent page. *PROJECT WIDOW — FINAL DISBURSEMENT: $2,000,000.*

Under it were four names: Weston Castellan, Silas Castellan Jr., Wren Castellan, and Marcus Osei.

Priya stopped breathing. Marcus was her older brother.