Chapter 1
“That boy is my son. And you dare tell me it’s not my business?”
Luca was tucked against my chest when I said it.
My voice stayed low, but Grant’s expression changed anyway. He was still half-buried in the collapsed swaddle cubby, and Vanessa was pulling herself away from the overturned bottle-drying cart when I bent down and picked up the framed photograph that had fallen beside her tote.
Then I saw the hotel key sleeve.
Vanessa saw me see it.
That mattered more than the key itself.
I handed Luca back to Claire only long enough to pick up the sleeve. She wrapped my son tighter inside her cardigan and turned her body away from Grant without being asked.
The hotel name was embossed across the front.
The Marlowe.
I knew it.
Not because I stayed there.
Because my father used to.
For years, the Marlowe had been neutral ground for Bellandi meetings too sensitive to hold inside the estate. After my father died, I stopped using it.
Grant did not.
Apparently.
“What room?” I asked.
Vanessa’s face tightened.
Grant pulled himself upright. “It’s a hotel key.”
“I can read.”
“Then why are you asking?”
I looked at him.
He stopped.
Claire shifted Luca in her arms. His tiny face was red, but his breathing had settled. That should have been enough to keep my attention entirely on him.
It almost was.
Then Edwin—no, there was no Edwin here. One of my bodyguards picked up the photograph Vanessa’s tote had knocked down.
He handed it to me.
It showed my father standing between Grant and me fifteen years earlier.
On the back was an old handwritten date.
The Marlowe.
Same hotel.
Same month my father stripped Grant of his first command after discovering he had been collecting younger soldiers around himself.
I looked at my brother.
His face told me he remembered too.
The freezing water was no longer the only thing in the room.
May you like
Someone had reopened an old Bellandi door.
And Grant had just dropped the key at my feet.
