Renna Rose Lancaster never searched for love.
She stumbled into it long before she was old enough to know what to call it.
It lived inside flower crowns that barely survived a minute on his head. Pebbles he slipped into her pockets because every tre...
“I want to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees.”
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My bed looked like a girl’s daydream exploded and decided to never leave.
There was tulle tossed like confetti. Champagne satin spilling off hangers. Gloss tubes glinting under the light like little love potions. My comforter had enough bobby pins stabbed into it to look like a crime scene. Glitter-stained tissues were everywhere—evidence of my repeated crimes of sparkle, wiped and reapplied a dozen times over.
And in the middle of it all?
Me.
Or maybe… a version of me I’d never dared show anyone before. The one I only played with behind locked doors, behind chapel curtains, behind the life Daddy curated like a museum. Not the docile legacy doll everyone bowed to and whispered about at galas.
This version?
She wasn’t quiet.
She wasn’t safe.
She was fatal.
And she knew it.
I stood before the full-length mirror, the room warm with gold light. My legs looked insane—bare, smooth, freshly waxed and moisturized. My back arched just enough, the way I’d seen in one of the L'Officiel magazines. My collarbones shimmered, kissed by a dusting of body oil that twinkled under the lights like I’d been carved from stars.
I tilted my chin and watched the neckline dip lower—not vulgar, but honest. Honest in the way that whispered: I’m not your little girl anymore.
God, this feels wicked.
“Okay, baby—let’s Cinderella this moment, yeah?” Mama’s voice sing-songed as she crouched down beside me, a shoe in each hand. “Foot up.”
I obeyed, balancing delicately as she crouched down with those glass stilettos—the ones she bought on a last-minute stuart weitzman spree.
One swipe of her card and suddenly I was two inches taller and ten times bolder.
“Don’t scrunch your toes, Renna,” she scolded, her ringed fingers adjusting the strap over my heel. “Relax, Confidence starts at the toes. And stop fiddling with that neckline—it’s not going any lower, and frankly, it shouldn’t.”
“I don’t want it to go lower,” I replied, dragging the satin just a smidge lower. “I want it to misbehave.”
Mama’s head whipped up. “Well, well, well. Listen to her now.”
