THE DIAMOND BRACELET BELONGED TO A GHOST NO ONE DARED TO SPEAK OF

The air in room 404 grew suffocatingly thin, charged with a desperate, volatile energy. Julianne Vance stood frozen between the desk and the doorway, her manicured fingers clutching the heavy brass paperweight so tightly her knuckles turned bone-white. Her eyes darted frantically between Eleanor Copley in her wheelchair and Rene standing protectively beside the glowing laptop.

“You’re an old woman in a rolling chair,” Julianne hissed, her voice trembling with a mixture of rage and mounting terror. “You can’t stop me. No one can. The board already signed off on the liquidation last month. All I have to do is hit enter, and this entire hotel—every brick, every penny, every memory—vanishes into my accounts.”

“The board signed nothing, Julianne,” a new voice echoed from the hallway, deep and breathless.

Arthur Sterling stumbled through the shattered doorway, leaning heavily against the doorframe for support. His suit jacket was torn, and his face was slick with sweat. He looked older, broken down by the harsh reality of the police cruisers waiting downstairs.

Julianne whipped her head around, her eyes wide with betrayal. “Arthur! You coward! What did you tell them?”

“I told them everything,” Arthur said quietly, avoiding her gaze. He stepped into the room, shielding Eleanor’s wheelchair with his body. “The police are already securing the lower lobby. They’re running the financial audits right now. It’s over, Julianne. The forgery, the offshore accounts, the cover-up of the fire twenty-five years ago—it’s all out in the open.”

Julianne let out a sound that was half-sob, half-roar of absolute fury. Her face contorted into an ugly, desperate mask. “If I go down, I’m taking every single one of you with me!”

With a wild, blind shriek, Julianne lunged past Arthur, not toward Eleanor or Rene, but directly at the open wall outlet where the laptop’s power cord was plugged in.

Rene anticipated the move a fraction of a second before it happened. Pushing off the edge of the mahogany desk, Rene hurled herself across the dusty floorboards, tackling Julianne around the waist just as the socialite’s manicured hand reached for the electrical plug.

The two women collided heavily with a stack of rotting wooden crates, sending a shower of yellowed ledgers and brittle paper flying through the air like autumn leaves. Julianne thrashed wildly, screaming obscenities, her nails clawing at Rene’s uniform, tearing the fabric of the black dress and ripping the 'Rene' name tag clean off her chest.

Arthur scrambled forward, dropping to his knees to pin Julianne’s thrashing arms against the dusty floor, while Eleanor sat silently in her wheelchair, watching the violent struggle with an expression of profound, unshakable sorrow.