Chapter 1
The most feared man in Chicago took my screaming baby from my arms, looked at her like he had seen a ghost, and whispered, "How old is she?"
Then my eleven-month-old daughter smiled at him.
Fern never smiled at strangers.
Not nurses. Not neighbors. Not the woman who watched her while I scrubbed marble floors inside Stellan Cross's mansion.
But that night, with fresh blood across his knuckles and half his security team watching from the hallway, Fern reached for the mafia boss as if she already knew him.
I should have run.
Instead, I handed him my whole world.
Stellan froze when her tiny arms wrapped around his neck.
His bloody hand hovered over her cream blanket, suddenly afraid to touch her.
"She's never done that," I whispered.
He didn't answer.
He carried Fern into his private office and ordered me to follow.
Mrs. Thornbury had warned every employee about that room.
Never enter unless summoned.
Never touch the locked cabinets.
Never look at the photographs on Stellan Cross's desk.
I broke all three rules in less than five minutes.
Fern fell asleep against his chest while I sat across from him explaining why I had brought her to work: my sitter had canceled, my rent was three months behind, and Fern's medicine had four doses left.
Stellan listened without interrupting.
Then he asked, "Where is her father?"
My fingers went cold.
"Gone."
"Name."
"I don't know his real one."
That made him look at me.
I told him about the charity gala almost two years earlier. Someone had slipped something into my drink. A masked stranger noticed before I did and got me out through a service corridor.
He called himself Adrian.
There had been a storm, one desperate night, and a tenderness I had spent months trying to forget.
By morning, Adrian was gone.
All he left was a note.
Forgive me. I had to disappear before they found you.
Stellan's face went completely still.
I stood.
"I need to take Fern home."
He held her closer.
"Selene."
My heart stopped.
Nobody in that house called me by my first name.
Then he asked, "You really don't remember me?"
The scar was new.
The coldness was new.
But the gray eyes weren't.
Neither was the low voice I'd heard once in a dark hotel hallway telling me to stay awake because someone had drugged my champagne.
"Adrian?"
Stellan Cross closed his eyes for half a second.
That was answer enough.
I backed toward the door.
"You knew who I was this whole time?"
"Yes."
The humiliation hit harder than fear.
I had cleaned his floors while choosing between groceries and Fern's prescriptions.
I had apologized for arriving ten minutes late after spending the night in an emergency room.
And the man who might have been Fern's father had watched me do it.
"How long?"
Before he could answer, the office door opened.
Three armed men entered.
Mrs. Thornbury stood behind them, pale.
One guard placed a black phone on Stellan's desk.
"North gate camera," he said. "Same vehicle again."
Stellan's entire body changed.
The softness disappeared.
"Lock the estate."
My stomach dropped. "What vehicle?"
Nobody answered me.
Stellan pressed a button beneath his desk.
One of the locked cabinets clicked open.
Inside were guns, cash, passports and a thick gray folder with my name printed on the tab.
SELENE MARROW.
I couldn't breathe.
"What is that?"
Stellan didn't reach for a weapon.
He reached for my folder.
Inside were photographs.
Me leaving my old apartment while pregnant.
Me entering Fern's neonatal hospital.
Me carrying groceries in the rain.
Fern asleep beside a pharmacy bag.
Dates ran along the bottom of every photograph.
Some were from before Fern was born.
I stared at him in horror.
"You've been watching us."
"Guarding you."
"Without telling me?"
His jaw tightened. "Telling you would have told them."
"Who?"
The lights outside the office suddenly went dark.
A second later, an alarm sounded somewhere beneath the mansion.
Fern woke crying.
Stellan stood with her against his chest and looked toward the black windows.
"The men who made me disappear that morning."
My anger vanished beneath something colder.
One guard spoke into his earpiece, then went pale.
"Boss. They breached the outer gate."
Stellan handed Fern back to me.
Then he opened the final section of my folder.
There was a sealed envelope inside, stamped with the name of the hospital where Fern had spent her first six weeks alive.
I reached for it.
Stellan caught my wrist.
Not hard.
Desperate.
"Selene, once you open that, you don't get to go back to believing our meeting was an accident."
A gunshot cracked somewhere beyond the hall.
Fern buried her face against my chest.
I tore my wrist free.
"Then stop deciding what I get to know."
I ripped open the envelope.
The first page contained Fern's name.
The second contained Stellan Cross's.
And before I could read the line connecting them, Stellan's security chief looked through the doorway and said, "They're not here to kill Cross."
His eyes dropped to my daughter.
"They're here for the baby."
Type TRUTH and I'll continue.
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