Before the family recognition banquet, Patricia Radcliffe, the fake heiress, volunteered to do my hair and makeup. Then, snip! Her scissors sliced straight through my waist-length locks. "Whoops, sorry! My hand slipped, Emma," she trilled, clutching the chunk of severed hair between her fingers, her grin oozing with smug satisfaction. "But I guess that butchered haircut suits a backwoods' girl like you." Everyone in Los Angeles's elite circle knew that the real eldest daughter of the Radcliffe family was soft-spoken and elegant, with her long, cascading hair as her signature look. Patricia was clearly trying to make me a laughingstock at the banquet. I stared at my choppy, uneven hair in the mirror and said nothing. Instead, I simply took the scissors from her hand and decisively chopped the remaining messy locks into a sharp, ultra-short textured cut. Patricia thought I'd given up and resigned myself to looking awful, so she snickered even harder. That was, until the matriarch of Los Angeles's elite circle, a woman whose brutal, iron-fisted tactics even the Radcliffe family patriarch feared, pushed open the banquet hall doors with a low, heavy creak. The entire room gasped in unison, and Patricia froze in place, her jaw hanging open. As it turned out, my look at that moment, with my cropped hair and crisp black suit, bore an uncanny resemblance to that ruthless powerhouse in her prime, when she'd charged at her rivals with a blade in hand and single-handedly taken down their entire crew.