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Dead of Night
Lexy Timms
People are capable of anything—especially when they’re desperate.
Jane Westen comes from a broken home, with demons from her past she can’t escape. Between her painful secret and her dead-end job, she isn’t supposed to want things. Not love. Not money. Not the fairytale castle she discovers she’s in line to inherit. Owning the castle would change her life, but one obstacle stands in Jane’s way: the darkly handsome lawyer determined to take the castle away from her.
When murder happens at the castle, suddenly everyone looks like a suspect and no one is safe.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved. This book contains material protected under International and Federal Copyright Laws and Treaties. Any unauthorized reprint or use of this material is prohibited. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without express written permission from the author/publisher.
1
A wolf howled in the darkness.
Jane Westen trudged through the snow, her legs stiff and numb from the cold. Another howl. Low and mournful. Maybe it wasn’t a wolf. It sounded too much like a man groaning for it to be an animal. There had been some detail about wolves being hunted to extinction in this part of Germany, but leisurely scrolling through travel websites felt like a lifetime away.
A chilly blast of wind slapped at her, nearly tearing her small suitcase from her grasp. Only the vise-like grip of her frozen hand kept the suitcase secure. That was the cause of the howling. The wind was suddenly picking up, and if she didn’t make it to the castle soon she’d freeze to death out here. With the light fading fast, it would be dark soon. Too dark to see her way up the hill.
Against the sting of the wind on her face, Jane chanced a look up at the hilltop. She must have started her climb up the hill twenty minutes ago, but the castle seemed no closer. It appeared to float over the world, the conical roofs of its towers and turrets almost disappearing behind clouds as they reached heavenward. It was like something out of a fairytale, this castle overlooking a thickening blanket of silver snow. And it could all be hers if she just reached its front gate.
No, she would have to do a lot more than that if Wintergarten was going to be hers. Especially since she couldn’t afford a lawyer to help her win her inheritance case. That was the whole point of this trip. It was why she had taken the vacation days from her crummy job answering the phone at the motel. Why she had gotten on a plane for the first time in her life, using frequent flyer miles to pay for the trip to Germany.
Just four months ago, she never would have believed that she would have gotten a phone call in the middle of the night from a lawyer in Germany. The lawyer had called to notify her that her distant relative, Friedrich von Westen, had died with no living heirs. Friedrich’s will had requested that the castle be handed down to his closest surviving relative. That left Jane, her father, and a Wall Street banker she had never met. But her father was in an insane asylum and in no mental state to inherit anything, so it was down to Jane and the banker.
She shivered. Not from the cold wind, but from thoughts of her father. He had abandoned her mother when Jane was just four years old. And thank goodness for that, because her father had ended up becoming one of the most notorious mass killers in New York State history. He had chopped up a dozen innocent people with an ax by the time Jane was ten years old, and she would never be able to get the horror of the crime scene photos out of her mind.