“It’s us,” Kori called as the door creaked open.

Gran exhaled softly, Van put her knife back and Ian let go of his gun and stood.

“Hey.” Kori glanced at Sera, then went straight into the arms Ian held open. Behind her, Annika and her daughter, Hadley, stood in the living room. Only Hadley wasn’t really Annika’s. She was Noelle’s.

For a while, when we were young, and stupid, and unfettered by the bitter obligations of our adult realities, I’d loved Noelle, and she’d been mine. But her baby was not.

Hadley could have been mine, if the cards had fallen another way, and maybe that would have changed Elle’s fate. I’d never really thought about being a parent, but I would have done it for Elle. There was a time when I would have done anything for her, if she’d asked. Anything.

Instead, she carried, delivered and let herself die to protect Ruben Cavazos’s secret baby.

There were days I still hated her for that. Though, mostly I hated her for not telling me. For never once telling me that she was pregnant, and that the father was the head of a fucking Skilled mafia family. The married head of the Skilled mafia.

I’d found out about Hadley less than six months earlier, when Anne was finally forced to admit that her child wasn’t really hers and Olivia figured out who the father was.

The child looked like Cavazos, in a certain light. But mostly, she looked like Noelle.

“Hey, Hadley!” Vanessa called as my grandmother wrapped the little girl in a hug and Ian scruffed her hair. Everyone loved Hadley the same way everyone had loved Elle. And not just because—like her mother—she was beautiful.

Hadley harvested love like it was a plant in her garden. She tended it with hugs and watered it with sweet smiles, and I, too, loved her, even though looking at her hurt.

She had no idea I’d ever known her birth mother beyond the occasional hello.

There were days when that still broke my heart.

I could have helped Noelle. I could have protected her. I could have saved her, and kept her little family together. If I’d been able to interpret the lines scribbled in that damned notebook.

But I’d failed Noelle, and although I didn’t know it at the time, I’d failed Hadley. And I’d put my notebook away, convinced after Noelle’s disappearance that I would never be able to interpret enough of fate’s Rosetta stone in time to truly make a difference for anyone referenced in it.

I’d remained convinced of that until the moment I saw Sera and recognized her scarf from a line written with my own hand.

In the kitchen, I ran one finger over my sealed cuts, then I looked up and found Sera watching while everyone else fussed over Hadley. A ghost of a smile haunted her lips—her mouth was beautiful, now that she’d stopped scowling—and some private pain shone in her damp eyes.

The window she’d broken hadn’t been repaired, yet she wasn’t running. Maybe she knew there were more than enough of us to stop her. Maybe she finally understood that she was safer with us than on her own, if Julia Tower was willing to kill her.

But ultimately, she was there because she was supposed to be with us. Sera was there to help us get Kenley back. Or maybe I was supposed to help her with whatever accounted for that battered determination—that visceral need to fight—that echoed in every word she said. Or maybe both.

Either way, in the hour since I’d met her, Sera had frightened, fascinated and fought me. She’d drawn my grandmother’s amusement, Kori’s compassion and my blood. Even if I’d wanted to let her go, deep down I knew it was too late. Like Van and Ian, she’d already been caught by the Daniels’ family snare, snagged not just by my interest, but by everyone else’s, as well.

And like the Towers—perhaps the only thing our families had in common—once the Daniels get a good grip, they don’t let go.

Five

Sera

“Okay, here’s how this works.” Kori Daniels dropped into the chair on my right, and it took most of my concentration to avoid looking as on-guard as I felt. She was serious about giving me a quick death if I turned out to be a threat to her sister, and the scary part was that she truly seemed to think she’d be doing me a personal favor. “Kris and I are going to ask you some questions and you’re going to answer them. Anne’s going to let us know whether or not you’re telling the truth.”

I crossed my arms on the table, hoping my anger came across as confidence. “So this little game is predicated on the fact that you all already think I’m a liar? Doesn’t that mean the deck is stacked against me?”

Across the table, Kris scooted forward in his chair and my gaze was drawn to his as if the man had his own gravitational pull. Why was it so easy for me to look into his eyes, yet so hard to do...everything else in the world? “We don’t think you’re a liar,” he said, and I didn’t get a chance to point out the irony of him saying that in the company of a Reader because Kori opened her big mouth. Again.

“Yes, we do,” she said. “Everyone lies. I don’t give a shit about most of your lies. I just need to know you’re telling the truth about a few things.”

I glanced at the little girl seated to my left, contentedly munching on spaghetti I’d helped make. No one seemed concerned about her picking up bad language. Or hearing something that might scare her.

Maybe that was all par for the course with Skilled children—surely she was Skilled, if her mother was a Reader. Unless her father was unSkilled. With only one Skilled parent—as in my case—a child had a slightly less than fifty-percent chance of inheriting a Skill. At least, according to what I’d read online.