THE BROKEN DADDY ALPHA

The Room She Wasn't Allowed In

The smart thing was to close the door, get into the warm bed, and be gone by morning the way he wanted.

Elena had always been very good at knowing the smart things. She had simply never once been able to do it.

She went down the hall barefoot, the floor cold and silent under her, the line of light at the far end pulling her the way the charm pulled at her own hand. The house held its breath around her. Every painting she passed had those same gray eyes, and she had the unshakable feeling they were turning, very slightly, to watch her go by. She told herself it was the storm throwing shadows. She didn't believe it.

The light had stopped moving.

She reached for the door. It was heavier than the others, older, dark wood with a brass lock gone green at the edges, and it stood a careless inch open, which was wrong, because Sienna had said he kept it locked, and Damon Cross did not seem like a man who left the wrong things open. Elena put her fingertips into the wood. It was cold. From inside came the faint smell of dust and dried flowers and something underneath that, sweeter, older, that made the back of her neck prickle.

She pushed the door.

It was a nursery.

Or it had been, once, and then someone had stopped time in it. A crib stood against the far wall, made up with bedding gone gray with age. A rocking chair. A mobile of little silver stars, still and dull. And the walls, every inch of them, were covered in photographs and pressed flowers and pages torn from books, pinned up in a slow spiral that started small and neat near the window and grew wilder and more crowded as it wrapped the room, as though whoever made it had begun calm and ended desperate.

At the center of the spiral, where the light from the single lamp fell, was a painting of a woman.

Elena's legs stopped working.

The woman in the painting had dark hair and a soft, uncertain mouth and eyes that didn't quite meet the painter's, as if she'd been looking at something just past his shoulder the whole time he worked. She wore a pale dress. And at her throat, picked out in three small careful strokes of silver paint, hung a thorn branch charm.

Elena's hand went to her own. The same. Down to the curve of the branch, the count of the thorns. The same.

"Her name was Rosa," said a voice from the dark behind her.

Elena spun. Damon stood in the doorway she'd just come through, and he hadn't shouted, hadn't grabbed her, hadn't done any of the furious things she'd braced for. He just stood there in the dark with a glass in his hand he plainly hadn't drunk from, looking at the painting over her shoulder like a man looking at a wound he'd stopped letting heal years ago.

"You weren't supposed to be in here," he said. But there was no heat in it. The fight had gone somewhere else.

"The door was open."

"It's never open." He came in slowly, set the glass on the windowsill, and stood, looking up at the painted woman. "I locked it. I have the only key. And every so often I come up here and find it open anyway, and the lamp on, and I tell myself I forgot, because the alternative is something I am not prepared to believe." His jaw worked. "You shouldn't be able to see this. No one comes in here. Not Sienna. Not the staff. Not—" He stopped.

"Not Lily," Elena finished quietly.

His silence was answer enough.

"Who is she?" Elena nodded at the painting, though her whole body already knew the shape of the answer and was bracing against it.

"My mate's sister." The word Mate landed strangely, and he heard it land, and didn't explain it. "Or she was. Rosa. Vivienne's younger sister." A long breath. "Except that according to my wife, according to every record, according to every single person in this house but a portrait I can't bring myself to burn, Rosa never existed at all."

Elena turned slowly to look at him. "What does that mean, never existed?"

"It means I met her once." His voice had dropped low, and in the lamplight the careful control on his face was coming apart at the seams. "The week before, I was bound to Vivienne. A pregnant girl with a frightened smile took my hand and said, Please, whatever happens, remember there was a sister. Remember she was real. And by the next morning she was gone, and Vivienne wept and swore she'd never had a sister, that grief over the wedding had me imagining things, and there was no record of a Rosa anywhere, no birth, no name, nothing. So I let myself be told I'd dreamed of her." He looked at the painting. "And then I came home one night and found it on my wall, painted by a hand I didn't recognize, and I have spent five years not knowing if I am haunted or simply losing my mind."

The rain filled the silence.

"She has my face," Elena said. It wasn't a question. She was looking at the painting, and she could no longer pretend she wasn't. The mouth. The way the eyes slid past you. The line of the jaw she saw in every mirror. "That's why your sister hired me. That's why you can't look at the necklace. I have her face."

"You have her face," Damon agreed, very softly, "and her necklace, which only three women in the world were ever given, and you were left at a fire station as a newborn twenty-six years ago, which is exactly as long as it has been since the night a pregnant girl who supposedly never existed begged me to remember her and then vanished off the face of the earth." He turned to face her fully, and the look in his eyes was no longer cold, no longer afraid. It was something more dangerous than both. It was hope, fighting for his life against a man who'd sworn never to feel it again. "Tell me the truth. All of it. Where did you come from? What you know. Because if you are who the math says you are—"

"I don't know anything," Elena's voice shook. "I swear to you, I have spent my whole life with nothing, no family, no name, no story, just this necklace and a hole where all of that should be. I came here for a job. I came here because I was broke and desperate and your sister offered me a roof. I didn't come looking for any of this."

"And yet here you stand." He took a step closer. The air between them had gone thick, charged, and somewhere far down in Elena's chest, a warmth she had no name for stirred faintly, like something waking. "In a locked room. In front of a face that's yours. Wearing the proof," His voice dropped to almost nothing. "Do you know what it does to a man like me, Elena Vance, to have grieved someone for five years and then watch her walk through his front door in the rain?"

She couldn't breathe. "I'm not her. I'm not your wife's sister, I'm not your dead anything, I'm just—"

"I know what you are not," he said. "I am asking what you are."

And neither of them had an answer, and the space between them had gone to inches without either of them deciding it should, when the nursery door creaked the rest of the way open behind them.

Lily stood in the doorway in her nightgown, bare feet on the cold floor, clutching a stuffed rabbit by one ear. She wasn't supposed to be able to get in here either. She looked up at the painting of the woman with Elena's face, and then at Elena, and then at her father, with the calm, terrible clarity of a child who sees what the grown-ups have spent years refusing to do.

"Daddy," Lily said, in her clear small voice, "why does the nanny look exactly like Mommy's dead sister?"

The glass on the windowsill cracked clean down the middle, all on its own, and neither of the adults so much as glanced at it.

Because outside, half a mile down the dark drive, beyond the locked gate that had not opened for a stranger in five years, a single pair of headlights had just turned off the road and begun, slowly, to climb toward the house.