Page 3 of The Hidden Heir

He's just waiting.

For me.

Then he tilts his head, and the light finds his face.

Everything in me goes cold and quiet, the way the world goes quiet before a tornado.

Oh, God.

I know that face. Everyone in Chicago's old money and old blood knows that face. The papers call him the Devil of Chicago, usually right above the word acquitted.

Luca Petrucci.

No. Anyone but him.

Stefano told me once: If anything ever happens to me, the last man you want standing at your door is my brother. My brother doesn't negotiate.

Stefano is dead. It was on the news eleven days ago. Eleven days I've spent pretending that changed nothing.

Two years I've been gone. Two years, and Stefano never once came looking.

His brother found me in eleven days.

Apparently denial has an expiration date.

I could run. But men like this don't knock on doors they haven't already calculated. If Luca Petrucci is on my porch, then the back door, the alley, the forty seconds, all of it is already his. The knock isn't a question. It's a courtesy.

And somehow that's worse.

So I do the only thing left. I settle my son higher on my hip. Mikey immediately sticks his thumb in his mouth.

Great. At least one of us is handling this well.

I unlock the door, and I open it on a man who buries people, with my chin up like my mother taught me.

"Mr. Petrucci."

Something flickers across his face when I say his name, there and gone, too fast to read.

Up close he's worse.

Older than Stefano was, mid-forties maybe, silver threaded through dark hair and a short gray beard, shoulders that fill the doorframe, hazel eyes that catalog me the way an appraiser catalogs an estate.

Fuck.

He's beautiful the way winter is beautiful. The way certain predators are: built by God to be looked at right up until the end.

And I hate myself, I hate myself, because some idiot corner of my brain notices.

Seriously? Now?

Of course he looks like that. Of course the man who might kill me tonight looks like that.

His eyes are doing their own arithmetic, and they snag.

On the flare of my hip where Mikey rides it.

On the rest of me, all curve and fullness, a body I made peace with a long time ago because it grew a whole person and then carried him through two hard years.