With the stranger’s face in such close proximity to my own, it was impossible to ignore his features. He was an older man, late fifties maybe, with graying hair and electric blue eyes. Despite his age, his grip was strong, and judging by the efficiency of his offense, he had studied some kind of martial art. He wore dark clothing, but unlike the Raptors, he did not drip with the appearance of wealth. The fabric around the collar and sleeves of his jacket had been worn down, and the shabby, navy sweatshirt underneath smelled of woodsmoke and cheap aftershave. A thin, gold ring encircled his left ring finger. I opened my mouth to yell, but he clamped a hand across my lips.
“Listen to me,” he whispered, his blue eyes flashing as they scanned Eileen’s house for signs of movement. “Listen.”
I bit his thumb. He yelped, yanking his hand away from my mouth. “Who the hell are you?” I spat, still struggling to free myself from beneath the deadweight of his body.
“If I tell you, will you stop trying to run off?”
“That depends,” I answered. “I don’t take kindly to being tackled.”
He sighed and sat up, but his knees remained stapled to either side of my hips to ensure my cooperation. “My name is Henry Danvers. I’m married to your mother.”
Prologue
In the past several weeks, I had been physically accosted so many times that it was starting to feel commonplace. So when a strange man called out my name from the shadows of a dark night, fight went out the window, and I let flight do its thing, making a wild bid for the safety of the house behind me. Unfortunately, my pursuer seemed to be expecting this. Before I knew it, he had tackled me to the ground, and as I wrestled to free myself, I wondered if maybe one day, I’d be able to walk outside to my car without having to resort to sticking my fingers into somebody’s eye sockets to free myself from their clutches. But that day did not seem to be drawing nigh, and judging by my attacker’s ease in dismantling my defense, he had been trained in some higher level of combat, the likes of which I had no hopes of competing against.
“Who the hell are you?” I demanded, pinned against the frozen ground beneath the weight of the stranger.
“If I tell you, will you stop trying to run off?”
“That depends. I don’t take kindly to being tackled.”
He took a deep breath, propping himself up so that I had a little bit more mobility in my upper body. His knees, however, still framed my hips, trapping me against the scratchy, dead grass. I considered my options. If I jerked my thigh up and angled it just right, I might have been able to hit him in his weakest spot, but before I could go through with it, he spoke again.
“My name is Henry Danvers,” he said. “I’m married to your mother. She’s alive.”
Henry Danvers may have removed the majority of his weight from my chest, but his words knocked the wind right out of me.
“What?” I asked, dumbfounded.
“Your mother,” he said again. “You are Nicole Costello, correct?”
Wordlessly, I nodded, and when he realized that I wasn’t going to make another attempt to flee the scene, he shifted back on his heels and let me shuffle into a seated position against the porch steps of the quaint house behind me.
“Natasha Petrov, your mother, is my wife.”
“My mother is dead.”
Henry Danvers shook his head and reached into the back pocket of his faded jeans. He took out his cell phone, busied himself with the touch screen for a moment, then turned the phone around to face me.
“This is a photo of you and your mother when you were two years old. It was taken a few days before she gave you up to your aunt,” he said. To my complete and utter shock, the phone displayed the exact same picture as the one that sat on the mantle above my aunt’s fireplace while I was growing up. My mother, at that time only twenty-four or so, held me up to face her at eye level, our noses touching and our smiles wide. “And this,” Henry continued, using his index finger to swipe across the phone screen, “is a photo of me and your mother that was taken just a few months ago.”
My stomach flipped as I studied the new picture. It had been taken on a clear, crisp day in front of a beautiful white farmhouse. The front yard was littered with vibrant red and orange leaves, and on the wraparound porch of the house, Henry Danvers stood with one arm casually slung across the shoulders of a woman who was unmistakably my mother. She had aged, of course, but the shape of her face and her impeccable posture remained the same. Gingerly, I took the phone and zoomed in on my mother’s face.
“That’s impossible,” I whispered.
“Not quite,” said Henry, reaching for the phone. I leaned away from him, hugging the phone closer, unable to tear my gaze from the photo. “Believe me, your existence was a bit of a surprise to me as well.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I didn’t either. It took me a while to put all the pieces together.”
Finally, I came back to earth. I thrust the phone back at Henry. “Why now?”
“Sorry?”
“Why come looking for me now?” I asked. I stood up, dusting dirt from the seat of my jeans. “And why tackle me in the middle of the night?”
“You clearly weren’t going to hear me out otherwise,” Henry said as he rose out of a crouch. “The second I called your name, you tried to bolt.”
I crossed my arms. “If you knew anything about my life right now, you’d understand my
