The Woman They Tried To Kill

CHAPTER 1 - THE FALL

"Ah!"

The scream split the air so sharply that everyone in the Ashcroft house turned too late.

Eliza Harrow's pale fingers slipped from the cold white marble banister. For one second, she hung between the second-floor corridor and the polished hall below, her eyes wide, her blond hair loose against her face.

Then she fell.

In the foyer, Marta, the housekeeper, clapped both hands over her mouth.

"Oh my God!"

Nathan Ashcroft was already moving.

He hit the final steps so fast he nearly lost his footing, then dropped to his knees and slid across the inlaid marble floor, arms open.

Eliza landed in them with a heavy force that knocked the breath from both of them.

For a moment, no one spoke.

She lay trembling in his arms, chest rising in quick, painful breaths. Tears gathered in her eyes as she stared up at him, as if she still couldn't believe she was alive.

"You... saved me."

Nathan held her tighter. Relief crossed his face first. Then something darker replaced it.

He lifted his head toward the second-floor railing.

"Who pushed her?"

Above them stood three people: his mother, Vivian Ashcroft, one hand pressed to her pearls; his younger brother, Daniel, pale and frozen; and Marta, who had somehow reached the stairs again, shaking so badly she had to grip the black-and-gold iron rail.

"No one pushed her," Vivian said too quickly. "She must have tripped."

Eliza opened her mouth, but no words came.

Nathan's jaw tightened. "She didn't trip."

Then Marta made a broken sound from the stairs.

"I saw a hand," she whispered.

Every face turned toward her.

And from the second-floor corridor, a man's voice none of them expected said, "Then perhaps you should tell them whose hand it was."

Nathan went still.

The speaker was Charles Harrow, Eliza's estranged father, a man the family had been told was dead for twelve years.

"She didn't trip."