PROLOGUE:
Serena Cole has been running for three years. She witnessed something she was never meant to see, and the man responsible has been making her pay for it ever since. With forty-seven dollars, three days before eviction and no one she can safely call, she answers a four-line newspaper ad that offers immediate employment, generous pay and asks no questions.
The voice on the other end hires her in two words before she speaks a single one.
Damien Frost is one of the most powerful men in the city and one of the most closed. He runs a billion dollar company, lives behind iron gates and raised his four-year-old twins alone for fourteen months after their mother disappeared from public life without explanation. He is cold, precise and surrounded by rules, eleven of them, handed to Serena on a single sheet of paper on the night she arrives, with the final rule torn deliberately from the page.
He tells her the children's mother is gone.
He is not telling the full truth.
From the moment Serena steps inside the Frost mansion she understands that this house is built on layers, the layer that can be seen, the layer just beneath it, and the layer beneath that one that nobody is supposed to reach. A black car watches from the gate at midnight. Music comes through the walls of a wing that is supposed to be empty. White flowers appear on the kitchen counter from a garden that was locked all night. And Damien Frost's knuckles are sometimes split and bleeding in the morning from fights he never mentions.
But the greatest force in the Frost house is not the conspiracy, the blackmail or the corporate war being waged against Damien from the inside. It is two small children in matching navy pyjamas who have been watching every nanny come and go for a year with the patience and precision of people who know exactly what they are looking for.
Zara and Zane chose Serena before she chose them. They engineered her arrival, they are managing her integration and they have a plan that is several phases deep and entirely their own. They are four and a half years old. They are the most dangerous people in the building.
As Serena digs deeper into the secrets of the Frost house she discovers that nothing about her arrival was accidental. Her past and Damien's present are connected by a thread she never knew existed, pulled by people who have been manipulating both of them for far longer than either realised. The woman in the east wing is not a ghost. The man behind the locked study door is not as unreachable as he pretends. And the twins watching from the top of the staircase with their dark eyes and identical smiles have been one step ahead of everyone from the very beginning. Serena came looking for safety. She found a family instead. But in a house where every door hides something and every secret has a cost, keeping what she has found may require her to face everything she has been running from.
And the twins, for their part, have already factored that in.
The question was: had he decided that on his own? Or had two very small, very clever people decided it for him?
