Her fingers touched the painted heart.
“Make you happy?”
The question was so simple that it nearly undid me.
“Yes,” I said quietly. “You made me happy.”
Relief brightened her face.
Elena took Lily’s hand, but the little girl looked back twice as they walked away. Buttons remained in my arms until she suddenly remembered him and hurried back.
“No,” she said, pushing the rabbit against my chest. “He stays.”
Then she followed her mother toward the kitchen.
The moment the door closed behind them, Vincent placed a photograph on the table.
My amusement vanished.
The photograph had been taken outside a courthouse. Elena stood near the steps, thinner and younger, holding a newborn baby wrapped in a pale blanket.
Lily.
Beside her stood a man wearing a dark baseball cap.
His face was turned partly away from the camera, but I knew the angle of his jaw. I knew the scar above his left eyebrow. I knew the signet ring on his hand.
I had given him that ring on his eighteenth birthday.
My younger brother.
Matteo.
The air left my lungs.
“That picture was taken three years ago,” Vincent said.
I stared at him.
“That’s impossible.”
“I checked twice.”
“Matteo died five years ago.”
“That’s what we were told.”
My hand tightened around the edge of the table.
Matteo had been twenty-eight when his car exploded on a deserted road outside Milwaukee. The police found burned remains inside. Dental records confirmed his identity. I identified the ring recovered from the wreckage.
I buried an empty coffin because there had been almost nothing left to bury.
For five years, I had carried the weight of failing him.
Now his face stared back at me from a courthouse photograph taken two years after his funeral.
“Where did you get this?” I demanded.
“One of our men recognized Elena when she came through the service entrance last week. He couldn’t place her, so he ran her photograph through an old private database.”
Vincent pulled another document from his coat.
“Elena Morales does not exist before three years ago.”
I looked toward the kitchen.
Faintly, beyond the heavy door, Lily’s laughter floated through the mansion.
“What does exist?” I asked.
“A woman named Elena Sofia Vargas.”
Vincent slid the paper closer.
“She worked as a paralegal for a law firm in Milwaukee. Three years ago, she disappeared. Her apartment was emptied. Her accounts were closed. Two weeks later, Elena Morales began renting a room in Chicago.”
“And the child?”
“No birth certificate under the name Lily Morales.”
My pulse slowed in the way it always did when danger came close.
The world became sharper. Colder.
“What are you saying?”
“I’m saying the woman cleaning your house is living under a false identity.”
Vincent tapped the courthouse photograph.
“And she knew Matteo after he supposedly died.”
I stared at Elena’s face in the picture.
She did not look like a woman posing casually with an acquaintance.
Her body leaned toward Matteo. His arm curved protectively around her. His gaze was fixed on the baby in her arms.
There was tenderness there.
Possession.
Love.
My eyes dropped to the date printed in the corner.
Lily had been born exactly nine months after the last confirmed sighting of Matteo before the explosion.
I felt something dangerous stir beneath my ribs.
“Bring Elena to my study,” I said.
Vincent hesitated.
“You want Lily separated from her?”
“No.”
“Adrian—”
“No one touches the child.”
My voice hardened enough to silence the room.
“Bring Elena alone. Gently.”
Vincent nodded.
As he left, I reached for the photograph again.
Five years.
For five years, I had stood at Matteo’s grave on the anniversary of his death. I had remembered every argument we never resolved, every warning I dismissed, every time he accused me of becoming our father.
Matteo had always been the better one.
