THE BROKEN DADDY ALPHA

The Lie He Built His Life On

For three full seconds, nobody in the room moved.

Then Damon turned toward the window, and Elena watched a different man come up over the surface of him. The grief was gone. The hope was gone. What was left was the thing the rest of it had been built to hide: something older than the suit and the cold manners, something that made the air in the dead nursery go tight and electric, that pressed against her skin like the moment before lightning.

"Take Lily," he said. His voice had dropped into a register that wasn't entirely human. "Backstairs. Her room. Lock it."

"Damon, who's in the car—"

"Now."

Elena scooped Lily up. The little girl didn't fight it, just wound her arms around Elena's neck and pressed her face into the place where the charm hung, and went very still and very quiet, the way small animals go quiet when something larger is hunting nearby.

"It's her," Lily whispered against Elena's throat. "The lady from the picture in Daddy's drawer. The one he thinks I don't know about. She's come back."

Elena's blood went to ice.

She got down the backstairs fast, Lily a warm weight against her, the house seeming to lean and creak around them as if it too had felt the gate open. She found the child's room, slipped them both inside, turned the lock, and put her back against the door, heart slamming. Through the window she could see the headlights now, closed, sweeping gold across the ceiling, and then the engine cutting, and then nothing. The worst kind of nothing. The kind that's waiting for a door to be answered.

"Lily," Elena breathed. "Who is the lady?"

Lily climbed onto her bed, pulled her knees up, and looked at Elena with those gray eyes far too old for five.

"My mommy," she said simply. "The one Daddy says is dead. She isn't. She just didn't want us." She said it without drama, the flat report of a child who decided long ago not to cry about it. "But that's not the lady you smell like. You smell like the other one. The sister. The one in the locked room." Her small face creased, working at something. "I don't understand how there can be two of you. One that left, and one that they hid. And you've got the third necklace, which means—"

"Which means what, sweetheart?"

Lily looked at her, and, for the first time all night, the child looked frightened.

"Which means the prophecy started," she whispered. "Auntie Sienna reads it to me when Daddy's asleep. About the three thorn branches. About the lost one coming home. She says when the third necklace comes back through the door, everything that's been buried starts digging itself up." Her lip trembled. "You came back through the door, Elena." Tonight. In the rain."

Downstairs, the front door opened.

Elena didn't hear it so much as feel it, a change in the pressure of the whole house, a cold draft finding its way even up here through the locked door. And then a voice floated up the stairwell, low and amused and unbearably calm, a woman's voice that turned every hair on Elena's body to standing.

"Damon. You kept the nursery. After everything, you sentimental man, you kept her little room exactly the way it was." A soft laugh. "And you've redecorated the staff. Tell me, where did you find a nanny with my dead sister's face?"

Elena stopped breathing.

She heard Damon's answer come up on the floor, and it was quiet, and it was lethal. "You have ten seconds to tell me why you're standing in my house, Vivienne, before I forget every law that's kept you alive."

"Oh, put it away." Vivienne's heels clicked across the marble, unhurried. "You're not going to hurt me. You've never once been able to do the necessary thing, that was always your trouble. You grieve. You keep rooms. You hire orphans who look like the loose end. I spent twenty-six years making sure stayed lost." The clicking stopped. "Where is she, Damon? The girl with the necklace. Because if your perfect nose has told you what I think it's telling you, then you already know what she is. And you already know I came back to finish what I should have finished the night she was born."

The silence after that was the loudest thing Elena had ever heard.

And then, terribly, Damon's voice, and the thing in it, she had not expected and could not bear, because it wasn't fury anymore. It was the careful, level tone of a man stepping out onto ice over deep water, choosing every word so it wouldn't c***k beneath him.

"There's no girl," he said. "Sienna's nanny quit this morning. There's no one here but me and Lily."

He was lying. For her. To the most dangerous woman either of them had ever known, Damon Cross was standing in his own front hall and lying through his teeth to keep a stranger safe, a stranger he'd met six hours ago, and Elena pressed her hand to her mouth, so the sound wouldn't get out.

"Mm." Vivienne didn't sound convinced. She didn't sound anything. "You were always a bad liar, my love. It's the one honest thing about you." Her heels started moving again, slow, deliberate, toward the stairs. "Tell you what. I'll just have a look around. For old times' sake. I do so love what you've done with the place."

Step. Step. Step. Coming up.

Lily's hand found Elena's and gripped, hard, and the little girl looked up at her with absolute trust and absolute terror, and whispered the worst possible thing.

"Elena. The necklace is glowing."

Elena looked down.

Against the dark of the room, faint but unmistakable, the little thorn branch charm had begun to burn with a thin silver light, brighter with every step the woman climbed, as if it knew exactly who was coming, as if after twenty-six years of waiting in the dark, it had finally, finally found its way home and meant to announce it to the whole house.

And out in the stairwell, three steps down from the landing, the footsteps stopped.

"Now that," said Vivienne softly, "is a light I haven't seen in a very long time."