Chapter 1 - THE MAN FERN KNEW
Fern had been screaming for forty minutes when Stellan Cross stepped into the marble hallway.
My sitter had canceled. My landlord had taped a final notice to my door. Fern had four doses of heart medicine left. So I brought my eleven-month-old daughter to work hidden under a cream blanket and prayed she would sleep.
She did not.
Stellan came around the corner in a black suit, gray eyes hard as winter, a scar cutting down one side of his face. Fresh blood darkened the knuckles of his right hand.
“You,” he said.
My knees nearly failed. “Mr. Cross, I’m sorry. I can leave. I’ll work late. Please, I can’t lose this job.”
“Stop talking.”
Fern cried harder.
His eyes moved to her. “How old?”
“Eleven months. She was premature. She doesn’t like strangers.”
He held out his hand.
“Please. She’ll scream worse.”
“Give her to me.”
Then Fern went quiet.
Her wet blue eyes locked on his scarred face. She smiled.
She had never smiled at a stranger.
Fern reached for him with both hands.
Stellan took her carefully. Her arms wrapped around his neck, her cheek settled against his black suit, and she sighed like she had come home.
His bloody hand hovered above her back, trembling.
“She’s never done that,” I whispered.
Stellan did not look at me. “Follow me.”
His office looked like a place where families were ruined quietly: black desk, locked cabinets, floor-to-ceiling windows, weapons behind glass.
Fern slept against his chest.
“Where is her father?” he asked.
“Gone.”
“That is not an answer.”
“It’s the only one I have.”
His jaw tightened. “Who was he?”
I remembered a charity gala, a masked stranger who pulled me away from a man trying to drug my drink, a storm, a kiss, and a note the next morning: Forgive me. I had to disappear before they found you.
I stood. “I should go.”
Stellan’s voice dropped.
“You really don’t remember me?”
The room tilted.
The scar. The gray eyes. The voice beneath all that control.
The man from that night had called himself Adrian.
May you like
Stellan leaned forward, my daughter asleep against his heart.
“I remember you, Selene,” he said. “And I think your daughter is mine.”
