Brooke frowned. “Are you okay?” she said to Alice.
Alice stared at her, clearly stunned.
Owen did the only thing he could think of, given the narrow range of options.
“Alice,” he said, sharpening his tone to get her attention, “drink some of my coffee. Now.”
She managed to drag her gaze away from Brooke and look at him. “What?”
“Forget the herbal tea.” He set his cup in front of her. “You need the caffeine.”
“Coffee. Yes.” She wrapped both hands around the cup and took acouple of sips. When she was finished, she straightened her shoulders. “Core Principle Number One:Do not mistake impulse for true intuition.”
Brooke was bewildered. “What?”
“Core Principle Number Five,” Alice continued, her voice unnaturally thin, “You control your talent; your talent does not control you.Core Principle—”
“Alice, snap out of it,” Owen said. “Drink some more coffee.”
He was starting to feel deeply uneasy. He’d had a couple of clients drop to the floor in a faint when they discovered an unsettling truth about their ancestry. Others had turned on him in fury, as if the facts of their paranormal DNA were his fault. One had tried to kill him to ensure that he did not reveal the truth to anyone else—the FBPI, for example. Everyone knew the Bureau maintained a not-so-secret list of people known to possess potentially dangerous paranormal talents.
To his great relief, Alice blinked a couple of times and then appeared to come back to the real world. She gulped some more coffee, set the cup down with her customary grace, and gave Sebastian a reassuring pat.
“I apologize,” she said to Brooke, her tone excruciatingly polite. “I wasn’t prepared for that information.”
“No shit, I can see that.” Brooke shook her head. “I’m sorry to drop that on you with no warning. I just figured that by now, what with the video and all, you knew everything.”
“It’s okay,” Alice said. She visibly braced herself, as if preparing for another blow. “I just needed a moment to process your statement. You said Travis told you my mother married Dunstan Kelbrook. Is Kelbrook my father?”
“No,” Brooke said, startled. “That was the problem, you see.”
“I cannot tell you how relieved I am to hear that.” Alice briefly closed her eyes and took a deep breath. “I really, really do not want to think that I might be a blood relative of the Kelbrooks.” She opened her eyes. “Do you know the identity of my father?”
“All I know is what Travis told me. He said your mother ran off with a Guild man when she was eighteen.”
“A Guild man,” Alice repeated softly, as though tasting the words.
“Lillian’s parents were dead. She had been living with her grandmother when she eloped with the Guild man. It was just a Marriage of Convenience, but then your mother got pregnant with you.”
“Legally speaking, that automatically transforms an MC into a full Covenant Marriage,” Owen observed.
“Yes.” Brooke’s lips twisted in a humorless smile. “Lillian’s grandmother was furious. Marriage to a Guild man was not supposed to be the fate of an heiress who had been raised in upper-class circles. But your father was killed in an Underworld accident before you were born.”
“What happened to my mother?” Alice asked.
“Travis said your great-grandmother whisked your mother off to some unknown location for the duration of the pregnancy. Your mother was told that you had been stillborn, but the truth was, your great-grandmother made sure that you disappeared into an orphanage.”
Owen did the math in his head. “According to the ancestry files, Kelbrook’s first wife was nineteen when they were married. That’s unusually young, especially for a woman in the upper classes. Kelbrook was considerably older. There was no record of it being an agency match, but everyone knows that in Kelbrook’s world, marriages are primarily business arrangements.”
“Money marries money,” Brooke said with a fatalistic air.
“And power marries power.” Owen took his phone out of his pocket and did a quick search. “Kelbrook’s first wife died at the age of twenty. Suicide.”
“I imagine she never recovered from the loss of her husband and baby,” Brooke said quietly. “Such a tragic story.”
“Did Dunstan Kelbrook know about me?” Alice asked.
Brooke snorted. “According to Travis, no one even knew you existed, let alone that you were still alive, until Kelbrook’s brother, Hampton, died and left you a bunch of shares in Kelbrook Industries. Travis said that’s what led to the plan for him to marry you. He said that doing so would allow him to control those shares.” Brooke briefly closed her eyes. “He told me that once you were locked up, he and I would be able to live together just like a real married couple.”
