Page 72 of Captive Promise

But there’s something in the set of her mouth, something stubborn and a little wicked, that is pure Brennan, and I already know that this child is going to give her parents absolute hell for the next sixteen years.

A whimper escapes my mouth and I clamp a hand over it. But it’s too late, Seraphina looks up.

She goes still, one block still in her fist, and studies me—head slightly tilted, eyes narrowed, like she is deciding exactly how much of her time I am worth.

It is such a perfect, exact copy of an expression I have seen on Emma Santoro’s face—at a gala Kolya and Maksim once dragged me to—that I actually take a small step back.

Instinct kicks in immediately to get down on her level so I can talk to her.

That’s rule number one with kids this age, except the second I start to crouch, I remember with horror that I am wearing a sports bra and a pair of leggings and nothing else and I am about to get down on the floor in front of a two year old like this.

Oh fuck me.

My face goes hot. “Oh—I should—I’m not really dressed for —” I straighten halfway back up, tugging uselessly at the hem of a shirt I am not wearing, and feeling my face turn even hotter. God, I must be redder than a goddamn tomato. “I didn’t think I’d be—I was going for a run, I wasn’t expecting⁠—”

The woman on the chair watches me flounder with open amusement, one eyebrow raised.

“Oh, don’t worry about that.” Her voice is warm and a little dry. “If Seraphina made the rules around here, we’d all be naked. That one fights clothes like no other.” She nods affectionately at the toddler who is still watching me curiously. “Half the time I can’t even get her pajamas on the right way around before she’s had enough of me.”

I look down at Seraphina sitting in the middle of her wreckage in pink teddy bear pajamas.

It’s only then do I realize they’re on backward.

The little embroidered bears march across her shoulder blades instead of her chest, the snap closures riding up the back of her neck.

A laugh escapes me before I can stop it.

“Are you,” I ask Seraphina seriously, a smirk playing on my lips, “some kind of tiny exhibitionist?”

Seraphina, delighted by the attention regardless of content, shrieks with laughter and throws another block. “No!”

The woman rolls her eyes good-naturedly. “I raised three boys. I have never in my life met a child who loves being naked as much as this one.” She shakes her head, smiling. “Backward pajamas is a good day, believe me.”

I’m nodding along, laughing and then, without warning, my eyes are hot and my throat is tight and I realize with mortification that I am also about to cry.

They’re not sad tears. They’re tears of relief. She’s here. She’s real and whole and giggling over blocks in backward pajamas, and some fist that has been closed around my chest for two weeks finally, finally starts to loosen.

But underneath the relief there’s a question I can’t stop turning over. Why now? Why here? He told me she would never come to this house. He was clear—and cruel—about that.