After my client threw champagne at my 68-year-old seamstress and threatened us, she accidentally dropped a burner phone detailing her plot to poison the groom at the altar.

The champagne wasn’t even cold. It hit Clara’s face in a warm, stinging arc of vintage brut, dripping from the silver curls at her temples down to the floral bib of her work apron.

Clara was sixty-eight years old. Her hands were bent from forty years of stitching corsets for the wealthiest women on the Eastern Seaboard, and she had never, in all her decades, raised her voice to a customer.

"You incompetent old hag!" Vanessa Sterling shrieked. Her face was flushed beneath a layer of foundation, her manicured fingers clawing at the waistline of her custom silk-taffeta gown. "I told you half an inch higher on the hip! Look at this bunching! You’ve ruined my wedding week! You’ve ruined *me*!"

"Miss Sterling, please," Clara whispered, blinking back tears as the sparkling wine stung her eyes. She reached for a lint-free cloth, her voice trembling. "The basting stitches are only temporary. If you'll just step off the pedestal—"

"Don’t you dare tell me where to step!"

Vanessa lunged forward, her diamond tennis bracelets rattling like dry bones. With both hands, she shoved violently against the rolling brass rack between them. It held six hand-beaded couture gowns, representing eight hundred hours of collective labor.

I moved purely on reflex.

I crossed the hardwood floor in two strides, throwing my shoulder against the heavy brass frame before the four-hundred-pound rack could crash down onto Clara’s frail frame. The metal shuddered against my collarbone with a dull, bruising thud. Hangers clattered like frantic chimes.

"Get your hands off that rack, Vanessa," I said. My voice was dangerously quiet, vibrating with the kind of ice that usually made even the most arrogant debutantes freeze.

Vanessa sneered, tossing her platinum extensions over her shoulder. "Or what, Avery? You’re a glorified seamstress with a lease on Fifth Avenue. My fiancé is Julian Vance. He could buy this entire building just to bulldoze it and turn it into a parking space for his golf cart."

"Julian Vance may have an eight-figure trust fund, but you are standing in *my* atelier," I replied, stepping between her and Clara. I pulled Clara gently behind me, feeling the poor woman’s shoulders shaking against my side. "And your appointment is over. Take off the gown."

"I paid fifty thousand dollars for this dress!"

"No, Julian Vance’s business account wired the deposit," I corrected coldly. "And right now, I am exercising the clause on page four of your client contract. Disrespect, endangerment, or abusive conduct toward my staff results in immediate termination of services. No refund. No dress."

Vanessa’s jaw dropped. For a second, her mask slipped, revealing the raw, ugly panic of a bully who had finally run into a brick wall. "You wouldn't dare. The wedding is in four days! Three hundred guests! The press—"

"You have ten minutes to change in the dressing room, or I will cut that zipper off your back myself," I said, pointing toward the velvet curtain.

Vanessa gave an ear-piercing scream of pure fury. She whipped around, grabbing her alligator-skin Birkin bag from the antique side table with such violence that the zipper tore open. She slung it onto her shoulder, stormed into the changing suite, and slammed the heavy oak door so hard the crystal sconces rattled on the walls.

"Oh, Avery... child, you shouldn't have," Clara wept softly, dabbing her face with a fresh towel. "Her family... they are ruthless."

"Let them try me," I whispered, holding Clara’s cold hands in mine. "Nobody treats you like that under my roof. Nobody."

Then, I looked down.

When Vanessa had snatched her purse, she hadn't realized that the inner contents had jostled loose. Lying on the dark navy rug, half-tucked beneath the pedestal, was a sleek, matte-black smartphone. It wasn't the gold iPhone 15 Pro she had been waving around all afternoon taking vanity selfies.

It was a burner phone. Cheap, unbranded, and encased in rubber.

Just as I bent down to pick it up, the screen lit up with a silent vibration that buzzed like an angry wasp against the floorboards.

A preview notification popped up against the stark black lock screen. No contact name. Just a string of encrypted digits.

The message read:

**"The poison is in the groom's flask. It looks like a standard heart attack. Julian won’t survive the toast, and the foreign shell company is already registered under your maiden name. Don't choke now, Mrs. Vance."**

My heart plummeted straight into my stomach. The air in the room vanished.

Clara looked at me, her tear-stained eyes widening. "Avery? What is that?"