The rain had turned into a cruel, stinging sleet that slicked the alleyway stones, but the cold outside was nothing compared to the absolute frost settling in my marrow. I stared at the man stepping out of the shadows.
He looked older, his hair silvered at the temples and his face etched with lines of a life lived in the dark, but the eyes were unmistakable. They were my eyes. The same mahogany depth, the same stubborn tilt of the brow. Arthur Hart. The man I had wept for as a ten-year-old girl. The man whose "closed casket" funeral had been the first great lie of my life.
"Father?" the word felt like a shard of glass in my throat.
Beside me, the real Ethan—the battered, mud-stained man who had bled for me tonight—stepped forward, his arm shielding my stomach. "Grace, don't. It’s anothe
