The Woman in the Green Dress
Chapter 02 - The Woman in the Green Dress
Emma connected her phone to the ballroom’s presentation monitor. Vanessa insisted the recording had been edited, but Adrian ordered the staff to play it without interruption.
The video showed Emma arranging glasses on the service cart. In the background, Vanessa stepped behind the flowers, opened the silver packet, and poured a pale powder into Adrian’s champagne. She stirred it with one finger, wiped the rim, and smiled as she carried the glass toward him.
A wave of shocked voices moved through the room.
Vanessa recovered quickly. She claimed the packet contained a harmless supplement Adrian took for anxiety. Adrian looked at her as if he no longer recognized the woman he planned to marry.
“I have never taken anything like that,” he said.
Security collected the broken glass and the wet napkins from the floor. Emma warned them not to touch the liquid with bare hands. Her hospital training told her that whatever Vanessa had used could be dangerous, but she refused to guess before testing.
Then Vanessa turned the accusation back on Emma. She announced that a diamond bracelet had disappeared from the bridal suite and suggested the server had created the scene to distract everyone.
Security searched Emma’s bag.
Inside they found the missing bracelet.
Emma’s knees nearly gave way. She had never entered the bridal suite. Vanessa smiled as though the video no longer mattered.
“Now everyone can see what she is,” Vanessa said.
But Daniel Ortiz, a hotel security supervisor, noticed that Emma’s employee bag had been stored in a monitored locker room all evening. He pulled up the hallway footage. Twenty minutes before the toast, Vanessa’s personal assistant had entered using a borrowed master key and placed something inside Emma’s locker.
The assistant tried to leave the ballroom, but officers stationed at the hotel entrance stopped her. Faced with two recordings, she admitted Vanessa had ordered her to frame Emma if anything went wrong.
Adrian’s father, Charles Blake, quietly told security to shut down the screens. He feared the scandal would destroy the family company’s upcoming merger.
Adrian refused.
“This is no longer about a wedding,” he said. “Someone wanted me silenced.”
Vanessa’s confident expression finally cracked.
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Emma looked at the silver packet still lying near the flowers and realized the truth was larger than one poisoned glass.
On its label was the logo of a private clinic owned by Charles Blake.
