Chapter 6 The Nine-Month Equation

Rain slicked the limestone steps of my brownstone. Through the leaded glass, Damian Blackwood looked less like a client and more like a predator assessing a breach.

His tailored wool coat was damp at the shoulders. His jaw was set in that ruthless, hard contour I used to trace in the dark before our world incinerated.

I gripped the doorknob until my knuckles went bloodless. "Mr. Blackwood. It is past seven in the evening."

"Marcus Vance called me after leaving your parlor," Damian said, his voice cutting through the chill. "He noted that when he requested your children's certificates, your pulse spiked and you made excuses about a deposit box."

"It wasn't an excuse. It's standard precaution."

"Standard precaution is complying with the security detail of a five-million-dollar event." Damian stepped forward without permission, forcing me to either step backward or let his chest brush against my shoulder. I retreated into the foyer.

He pulled the heavy door shut with a dull click.

"Vance ran a preliminary sweep of your commercial incorporation," Damian continued, sliding leather gloves off his fingers one digit at a time. "Five years ago, your agency appeared from nowhere. No prior clientele, no apprenticeships, and capitalization funded through an unlisted ledger. You have no recorded spouse. Your daughters have no registered father."

Every nerve in my body screamed. "My personal life has nothing to do with table linens and floral arrangements."

"Your personal life becomes my concern when you position unvetted minors inside the Laurent estate," he countered smoothly. "Foreign ambassadors will attend. Rivals would pay millions to place an operative within three feet of my fiancée. I need to know who fathered those children."

"Why?" My voice was barely more than a whisper, but it carried the edge of a blade. "Are you afraid their father is someone powerful enough to rival you?"

Damian's gray eyes narrowed, dangerous and cold. "I am concerned that you are hiding a vulnerability that my enemies could exploit. Where are they?"

"Upstairs. Sleeping."

"I'll verify the second-floor exits and perimeter access myself."

"You have no legal right to roam my home—"

He was already moving up the hardwood staircase, his stride deliberate. I scrambled after him, terror hammering in my ears. Only moments ago, my daughter Rose had blurted through the telephone that Lily had dragged our hidden photograph out into the light.

If Damian walked into the nursery and saw his own face staring back at him from our wedding portrait, the game would be over.

I reached the second-floor landing just as Damian pushed open the nursery door.

The nightlight cast a honeyed amber glow across the room. Rosa, our trusted nanny, was kneeling beside the small bookshelf, trembling with sheer relief. Hearing heavy footsteps on the stairs, she had intercepted the photograph and shoved it into hiding.

On the rug between the twin beds, Lily was sitting cross-legged in her yellow flannel pajamas, clutching a heavy, gold-embossed fairy tale volume against her small chest. Across the room, her twin sister Rose was safely tucked beneath her quilt, watching the doorway with wide, silent apprehension.

"Girls," I said, my chest heaving as I crossed the threshold. "Mr. Blackwood was just leaving."

"He's very tall," Lily announced. She didn't flinch. She had never known fear in her four years of life, possessing that terrifying, innate arrogance that Damian wore like a second skin. She scrambled to her feet and marched straight toward him, holding out the thick book. "Are you the bad king from the forest?"

Damian froze. For the first time since he walked back into my life, his icy detachment cracked. He looked down at the tiny girl, his gaze arrested by the fierce tilt of her chin, the unruly dark curls framing her forehead, and the piercing gray of her irises.

He slowly knelt on one knee so they were at eye level. "I'm not a king."

"You look like one," Lily insisted, thrusting the heavy volume into his hands. "Read page seven. The prince gets lost in the dark."

Damian took the book. His long fingers rested on the spine.

My breath trapped in my throat. Protruding from the gilt pages, hidden clumsily inside the binding, was the silver-foil edge of a photograph backing. If Damian turned the volume over, the photograph would slide free onto the floor.

"Lily, that's enough," I said, stepping between them. I reached down and ripped the fairy tale book from Damian's fingers with far more force than necessary.

Damian didn't release it immediately. For a suspended, suffocating second, we were both holding the book, our fingers nearly touching. His gray eyes snapped up to mine, dark with sudden, sharp scrutiny.

"You're shaking, Ms. Winters," he murmured.

"You're invading my children's bedroom," I shot back, wrenching the volume away and tucking it tightly under my arm. "Say whatever you came to say to me downstairs. Leave my daughters out of your corporate paranoia."

Damian lingered on one knee, his eyes shifting from me to Lily, then across the room to Rose, who watched him silently from her pillows. The resemblance was an electric current in the room, but Damian was a man of ledgers; he saw two striking children and assumed an elite, unseen father.

He stood up, adjusting his coat. "Eight o'clock tomorrow at the Laurent salon. Bring their verified state records, or Isabelle will select replacement flower girls before noon."

He turned and walked down the stairs.

I followed him down to the front hall, my limbs trembling with delayed shock. Damian reached for the doorknob, but his shoe kicked a folded white memo that had fallen from Vance's folio earlier onto the console table runner.

He picked it up, glancing at the handwritten scrawl his head of security had jotted in the margins.

I watched his back stiffen.

The silence in the hallway became absolute.

"What is that?" I whispered, dread choking my lungs.

Damian didn't look at me. His thumb traced a single line of Vance's notes. It was the vital statistics cross-reference Vance had pulled from the municipal clinic: Winters twins. Certified date of delivery: October fourteenth.

October fourteenth.

I watched the terrible realization hit him. Five years ago, on our first anniversary—January tenth—Damian threw me into the rain.

From January tenth to October fourteenth.

Nine months and four days.

Damian slowly turned around. His face drained of color, his gray eyes burning into mine with a terrifying, unholy realization.

"Ms. Winters," he said, his voice dropping into a dangerous, ragged register. "When did you say your marriage ended?"