Chapter 1
Dominic did not strike Lucinda again.
The ballroom expected it.
His men expected it.
Lucinda expected it most of all.
Instead, Dominic turned toward his captain.
“Take Maisie upstairs. Call Dr. Bell. Then call the police.”
Lucinda laughed once, sharp and ugly.
“You’re inviting police into this house?”
Dominic looked down at Maisie’s torn pink ribbon, then at the hidden nursery beyond the broken panel.
“Yes.”
Maisie clung to his hand.
“Daddy, don’t go.”
He knelt.
“I’m not leaving you.”
“But she said—”
“I know what she said.”
He lifted Maisie into the bodyguard’s arms and watched until she was out of the ballroom.
Only then did he step inside the hidden room.
Dust coated everything.
Two cribs.
Two faded blankets.
Two tiny silver nameplates.
One said:
Maisie.
The other said:
Iris.
Dominic stared at the second name.
He had never heard it.
On the nursery dresser sat two baby brushes, two hospital bracelets, two framed ultrasound images, and a stack of sealed envelopes tied with a pale blue ribbon.
The room had not been abandoned carelessly.
It had been preserved.
Lucinda stood in the doorway holding her reddened cheek.
“You have no idea what you just opened.”
Dominic picked up one of the envelopes.
His late wife’s handwriting crossed the front.
For Dominic, when someone finally tells the truth.
His hand tightened.
Maisie’s mother, Juliet Valenti, had disappeared when Maisie was four months old.
Lucinda had spent seven years saying Juliet was unstable.
Selfish.
Weak.
A woman who fled motherhood and left Dominic with a baby.
Now Dominic was standing in a sealed nursery with two cribs and Juliet’s handwriting.
Police arrived twenty minutes later.
So did an ambulance for Maisie, mostly as a precaution.
She had bruised her elbow when she fell, but nothing was broken.
Lucinda’s cheek was swollen from Dominic’s slap.
The officers documented that too.
Dominic did not argue.
“She shoved my daughter. I hit her after Maisie was already behind me.”
His lawyer closed his eyes.
Detective Erin Walsh looked at him.
“So you admit the strike was not during the immediate rescue?”
“Yes.”
That answer would matter later.
But the bigger question was behind him.
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Why had Juliet built a nursery for two babies?
And why had Lucinda been willing to assault a child to keep a birthday gift from breaking the wall?
