Page 180 of Bound By Crimson
She barely registered it.
Her hands shook as she rifled through the drawers, yanking them open and slamming them shut.
Bills.
Contracts.
Deeds.
Endless documents that meant nothing.
Then—
A letterhead caught her eye.
Eddison Ashford.
She froze.
The name burned itself into her brain.
The study blurred around her as a memory broke loose:
Her mother barefoot in the kitchen, laughing.
Waving a letter like a prize.
“Lyric, can you believe this? A trip!”
Her father’s skeptical grumble:
“Hon, we don’t even know what you inherited yet… we might be wasting our time going all the way to Europe.”
Then Lyric snatched the envelope and read the name:
“Eddison Ashford… I heard you’re not supposed to trust a man with two last names.”
The same name.
The same man.
Not the same letter—but it might as well have been. It came from the same place. Seeing that name stirred the same cold dread.
And now it was here.
In this house.
Her heart kicked painfully against her ribs.
The paper trembled in her hands.
She crushed it instinctively to her stomach, shielding it—shielding herself—like the walls might have eyes.
The Thornwicks had known.
She didn’t know how.
She didn’t know why.
