The Price Mansion's dining hall could seat sixty people without breaking a sweat.
This morning, it seated twelve — and even that felt like way too many warm bodies trapped in a room this ice-cold and silent.
The long mahogany table stretched endlessly like a dark river of judgment, absolutely groaning under a breakfast spread that could feed a small village: silver platters loaded with eggs prepared four different ways, smoked salmon flown in fresh from Norway that very morning, bread still warm from ovens lit at four a.m., and crystal pitchers of juice squeezed from fruit that had been hanging on trees in the Price family's private orchards just twelve hours earlier.
At the far end — separated by deliberate distance, by architecture, and by the invisible but ironclad hierarchy that ruled every inch of this mansion — sat the Immediates. Cousins. Second sons of second sons.
