His Secret Heirs

Chapter Five

Sienna’s POV

I didn't sleep that night. Not really.

I lay in bed with the fan pushing warm air around the room, listening to the twins breathe through the thin wall between us: Gio's soft, even snores, Rosalie's occasional restless mumbling, and I kept replaying the ten minutes Reyna had described as I could somehow go back and prevent them by sheer force of will.

A tall man. He looked at me funny.

It meant nothing. I knew it meant nothing. Kids got lost at crowded events; strangers helped them; the world, occasionally, was not as cruel as my job trained me to expect it to be. That was the whole story. That had to be the whole story.

I got up twice to check on them anyway, standing in their doorway in the dark, watching the rise and fall of two small chests until my own heartbeat slowed to match theirs.

By morning I'd decided two things. One: I was never again letting anyone but myself take the twins anywhere with a crowd bigger than the corner bodega. Two: I was almost certainly overreacting, and I needed to get a grip before I turned into the kind of mother who couldn't let her kids breathe without a tracking device.

I didn't fully believe either conclusion. That's the thing about fear: it doesn't care how reasonable you try to be with it.

"You look like hell," Reyna said when I dropped the twins off two days later, back to our normal routine, her guilt from the fair still radiating off her in waves she hadn't let go of.

"Thanks."

"I mean it nicely." She pulled Rosalie into a hip carry with the ease of a woman who'd been doing this since before I had kids of my own. "You've been weird since the fair thing. Weirder than the fair thing should've made you, honestly."

"My son disappeared for eleven minutes, Reyna."

"And came back fine. Happy, even. Eating string cheese like it was the best day of his life." She gave me a look the specific look she'd been giving me since we were nine years old and she could always tell when I was hiding something. "This isn't just about Gio."

I busied myself with Rosalie's diaper bag, not meeting her eyes. "I don't know what you mean."

"Sienna."

"I have to get to work."

She let me go, but I felt her watching me all the way down the stairs, and I hated that she was right. It wasn't just about Gio wandering off. It was the splinter underneath it, the thing I hadn't said out loud to anyone: that somewhere in the last three years, in some small unexamined corner of myself, I'd built a low, constant hum of waiting. Waiting for a version of my past to walk back into my present.

I told myself the man at the fair had nothing to do with any of that. I told myself a lot of things that week.

I threw myself into work instead, the way I always did when my own head got too loud. Twelve-hour shifts blurred into each other: vitals, charts, the particular exhausted camaraderie of the nurses' station at three in the morning, Danielle sneaking me coffee when the charge nurse wasn't looking. I picked the twins up every evening and did not let them out of arm's reach at the park, at the grocery store, on the walk home, watching every stranger's face a beat too long, hating myself a little for it and doing it anyway.

Gio, for his part, had entirely moved on. Three-year-olds are mercifully unburdened that way. He mentioned the "tall man with the nice watch" exactly once more, a week later, apropos of nothing, while I was cutting his sandwich into triangles.

"Do you think he'll come find me again?" he asked, swinging his feet against his chair, entirely unbothered.

My knife stilled on the cutting board. "What do you mean, baby?"

"He said—" Gio scrunched his face, working to remember. "He said 'I'll see you soon.' Before the other guys took me back to Auntie Reyna."

The kitchen went very quiet.

"He said that?" My voice came out careful, controlled, nothing like the way my pulse had just spiked.

"Uh-huh." Gio, entirely uninterested in the weight of what he'd just said, reached for his sandwich. "Can Rosalie have the crust part? She likes crust."

I gave Rosalie the crust. I don't remember doing it. I stood in my kitchen with my son's words looping through my head I'll see you soon and felt, for the first time since the fair, that the low hum of waiting I'd been trying so hard to ignore might not have been paranoia after all.

Something was coming. I didn't know what, or who, or how only that some instinct older and surer than logic had started quietly rearranging the furniture of my life to make room for it.

I just didn't yet know how right I was.