The display went dark, and my own reflection stared back at me, white as a sheet. Behind my shoulder in the black glass, the hallway of the Montecarlo Estate stretched long and empty. Oil portraits of my father, my grandfather, three generations of blood that built this Family from nothing. And me, the last of them, sitting with a document that said the heir I'd been raising carried none of it.
Five years. Not five days. Not five months. Five full years.
Every ounce of my energy, my time, my money, poured into raising a child whose origins I knew nothing about. And my real child? Boy or girl, alive or dead, I had no idea.
Memory dragged me back five years.
Eight months pregnant, I was rear-ended on purpose. A staged accident on the coast road, made to look like a careless driver running a light. By the time I reached the hospital, the amniotic fluid embolism nearly killed me. When I woke, a baby girl was lying beside me.
Dante was on his knees at my bedside, eyes rimmed red.
He told me he'd taken care of everything. Including the driver who'd deliberately hit me, already handed over to the Feds for prosecution.
For five years, I believed him without question.