THE BROKEN DADDY ALPHA

What Sienna Knew

"You can let go of it now. He's gone up."

Elena hadn't heard Sienna come back. The woman stood at the foot of the stairs with a towel folded over one arm and her eyes fixed, not on Elena's face, but on Elena's hand, which was still wrapped tight around the charm at her throat. Elena made herself lower it. It felt like setting down a weapon in a room full of strangers.

"He didn't mean the part about the morning," Sienna said. "He says things like that. It's armor. Come on. You're dripping on a rug that costs more than your last paycheck, and I'd rather not explain that to him too."

She led Elena up the wide dark staircase, past walls hung with paintings of people who all had the same gray eyes and the same unforgiving mouth, past a long window where the rain came down the glass in sheets. The house didn't feel empty, exactly. It felt held. Like somewhere in it a breath had been drawn years ago and never let out.

"This is you." Sienna pushed open a door into a room bigger than any apartment Elena had ever rented, warm lamplight, a bed turned down, fresh clothes already folded on a chair in roughly Elena's size. Elena stared at them.

"You did this before I got here," she said slowly. "You laid out clothes. In my size."

Something passed over Sienna's face, there and gone. "I'm organized."

"You guessed my size from an email."

"Get changed. You'll catch your death." Sienna set the towel down and turned to go, and Elena, who had spent twenty-six years learning to read the exact moment a person was about to lie to her, said it before she could stop herself.

"Why me?"

Sienna stopped in the doorway.

"There are agencies full of qualified nannies," Elena went on, her heart going hard against her ribs. "Women with references and addresses and emergency contacts. I have none of those things. I'm the worst possible hire, and you reached past every safe choice to pick me, and then you laid out clothes in my size before you'd ever laid eyes on me. So. Why me."

For a long moment, the only sound was the rain.

Then Sienna closed the door, quietly, and leaned back against it, and when she looked at Elena again, the bright easy thing she'd worn all evening was gone. What was underneath it was tired in a way that had nothing to do with the hour.

"Take off the necklace," Sienna said. "Just for a second. Let me see it."

Every instinct Elena had told her not to. She did it anyway, lifting the chain over her head, holding the little thorn branch out on her palm in the lamplight. Three thorns, a single curved branch, the silver worn soft and dark from a lifetime of being touched.

Sienna didn't reach for it. She just looked at it, and her eyes filled, and she pressed the back of her hand into her mouth like a woman keeping something in.

"Where did you get it," she whispered.

"It was in the basket. When they found me," Elena's voice had become strange. "I was a few days old. Left at a fire station with no name and no note and this around my neck. It's the only thing I've ever had that was mine. The sisters at the home tried to sell it once when money was tight and the buyer said the metal was wrong, that it wasn't any silver he knew, and they gave it back." She closed her hand over it. "Now tell me why a billionaire and his sister both go pale when they look at it."

"Because there were only ever three made," Sienna's voice cracked on it. "And I have spent five years being told the third one burned. I helped scatter the ashes. I held my brother while he grieved." She pushed off the door and crossed the room and took Elena's face in both her cold hands, searching for it, feature by feature, like a woman checking a sum that couldn't possibly come out right. "And now it walks into my house around the neck of a girl who has Rosa's exact—"

She stopped.

She let go of Elena's face like it had burned her.

"Rosa," Elena repeated. The name landed somewhere deep and unfamiliar, a key turning in a lock she hadn't known was there. "Who's Rosa?"

"I've said too much." Sienna stepped back, shaking her head, the practiced brightness scrambling to climb back over her face and not quite managing it. "Forget the name. Forget I said it. You're tired, you're soaked, and tomorrow this will all look like nothing."

"It won't, though," Elena followed her toward the door. "You hunted for me. You found an orphan with a strange necklace, and you wrote a job posting to fit her like a net. Didn't you. You didn't hire a nanny. You hired me."

Sienna's hand was on the door handle.

"You really don't know," she said softly, not turning around. "All these years out there in the world, with that thing against your skin, and nobody ever told you what you are."

"What am I?" Elena's mouth had gone dry. "What does that mean? What am I."

Sienna opened the door. The hallway beyond was dark, and from somewhere down it, faint, came the sound of a child's voice, Lily, talking to someone in the low certain murmur of a kid who is not being talked back to.

"Don't go into the west wing," Sienna said. "Whatever you do. He locks it for a reason, and the reason has your face." She stepped out into the dark hall. "Goodnight, Elena. Sleep while you can. After tonight, I don't think any of us will get much."

The door clicked shut.

Elena stood alone in the warm lamplit room with the charm cutting into her closed fist and a dead woman's name ringing in her ears, and against every shred of sense she had left, she found her bare feet carrying her to her own door, easing it open, and looking down the long black hallway toward the one part of this house she had just been forbidden to enter.

At the far end of it, under a door that should have been locked, a thin line of light was burning.

And as she watched, something on the other side of that door moved across the light, slowly and deliberately, and stopped.

As if it had heard her. As if it had been waiting.