1. The Scent of Ambition
The air in the Miller dining room was thick, not with the respectable, somber grief a family ought to feel after a funeral, but with the cold, heavy scent of inherited wealth and raw, undisguised ambition. The formal family dinner, a tradition my father had insisted upon, took place immediately after the reading of his will. The timing was his final act of psychological warfare, forcing us to break bread together while our loyalties were being tested and our futures rewritten. The atmosphere wasn’t just tense; it was toxic, a poisonous vapor rising from the pages of a legal document.
I, Sarah, sat quietly at the long, polished mahogany table, a ghost at my own family’s feast. My sister, Maya, fumed opposite me, her knuckles white where she gripped her wine glass. The inheritance, my father’s final, masterful chess move, was distributed unequally. It was not a simple matter of monetary value, but a complex web of control and sentimental worth. Maya, who had spent the last decade as my father’s loyal, ruthless apprentice in his business empire, had been given a vast fortune in stocks and real estate. But she had been denied the one thing she craved above all else: …