Matteo’s voice lowers. “They never imagined...” A pause. “That one day he would walk through the front door himself.”
The man slowly turns, and time stops as honey-colored eyes roll over my frame in scrutiny. The same eyes that have stared back at me every morning in the mirror. The same sharp jaw and heavy shoulders. Age has added silver to his temples and experience to the lines around his mouth, but nothing else. He studies me for a long moment.
As someone trying to find pieces of a woman inside the face of the son she kept from him.
Finally, he speaks. “You stand exactly the way I did at your age.” His voice calm. “You got that from me.” He takes one step forward. “But the shape of your eyes...” The faintest sadness crosses his face. “That is the last thing she ever gave me.”
Silence settles between us. Neither of us knows how to bridge eighteen years with a single conversation. This is not the way I imagined meeting my father for the first time.
So we simply stand facing each other. Two men separated by a lifetime, looking at the proof that blood remembers what time cannot.
The fire crackles softly between us, and every instinct I learned inside Unit 9 tells me to find the exit points. Two doors. Eight windows. Six cameras. Two hidden inside the carved beams. Old habits don’t disappear because someone builds a prettier cage.
Valet notices my eyes moving. “The cameras aren’t for you.”
“I wasn’t worried about me.”
His mouth almost smiles. “I know.”
A long silence stretches between us. Then, unexpectedly, he walks past me to the bar on the far corner. He pours two fingers of whiskey into a crystal tumbler before setting it on the table nearest the fireplace.
He doesn’t hand it to me because he leaves the choice entirely up to me.
“I don’t drink.”
“I know.”
“You seem to know a lot.”
“I’ve spent eighteen years trying to.”
That answer lands harder than I expect.
He walks toward a wall covered in portraits. They’re not paintings of strangers. Based on the resemblance, they’re family. Generations of men, women, and children.
Each carry the same wolf somewhere on their clothing. Valet stops beneath the largest portrait of a man in military dress standing beside a throne that no longer exists.
“Bastien Devereaux.” His voice carries quiet respect. “My grandfather.” Another portrait. “Aurelia, my great-grandmother.” Another. “Lucien. He was the first Devereaux to sit on the Crown Council.”
My eyes drift across dozens of faces, and one thing becomes impossible to ignore. They all resemble him. Which means...
They resemble me.
“You’ve spent your entire life wondering who you looked like.” He turns toward me. “Now you know.”
The room falls silent again.
Finally, I ask the only question that matters. “Why?”
His expression changes immediately. “Why didn’t you find me?” I shake my head, trying to make sense of it all. “Why now?”
He walks to the fire, and for a long moment, he simply watches the flames before he speaks. “When your mother disappeared...she disappeared from everyone.”
He reaches into the inside pocket of his jacket, removes a photograph, and turns. He slides it across the table between us.
I see a younger woman and instantly recognize my mother. She’s laughing with one arm wrapped around me while we’re feeding birds in a park. I must be three years old. My chest grows tight as needles prick my nose.
I’ve never seen this picture.
