Chapter 1 - The Silver Medal
Sixty million dollars had just changed hands when a baby crawled beneath my desk and exposed the secret my own brother had taken to his grave. Everyone believed Julian Caruso had died eighteen months earlier, but when that little girl looked up at me with his unmistakable gray eyes, I realized someone had been hiding his child inside my own house.
I stared down at her, unable to move.
She couldn't have been more than nine months old. Faded yellow onesie. One white sock. No fear whatsoever.
“Where did you come from?” I whispered.
She smiled and raised both arms.
No one entered my private office without permission. Armed men knocked. Lawyers waited outside. Even Vincent, who had worked for my family for thirty years, knew better than to cross that doorway uninvited.
Yet this baby had simply crawled in.
I lifted her awkwardly. She grabbed my tie, pressed a tiny palm against my chest, and rested her head against me as though she'd done it a hundred times.
Then I saw the silver chain around her neck.
My heart stopped.
A Saint Christopher medal.
I turned it over.
There, scratched into the metal, was a crooked J.
I had carved that letter myself when I was sixteen.
The medal belonged to Julian.
“Always come home,” I'd told my little brother when I gave it to him.
He wore it for twenty-three years.
Footsteps rushed down the hall.
Hannah Reed, one of my maids, appeared in the doorway. The second she saw the child in my arms, her face went white.
“Mr. Caruso... please.”
I held up the medal.
“Whose is this?”
Her eyes filled with panic.
“My daughter's.”
“That isn't what I asked.”
Hannah's hands trembled as she explained that her babysitter had been hospitalized eleven days earlier. Daycare wanted money she didn't have, so she'd secretly been bringing her daughter, Grace, to work.
I barely heard her.
“Who gave you this medal?”
Silence.
Then she whispered, “Her father.”
“Name.”
“I knew him as Evan Cole.”
Grace curled her fingers around my shirt.
Hannah looked at me with tears gathering in her eyes.
“Before he died, he told me his real name was Julian Caruso.”
For a moment, the entire room disappeared.
“My brother?”
She nodded.
“He said hiding who he was was the only way he could keep us safe.”
I looked at Grace again.
Those gray eyes. That faint gold ring around the iris.
Julian.
“How old is she?”
“Nine months and twelve days.”
The dates collided in my head.
Julian had died eight months before she was born.
“Did he know?”
“Yes.”
Hannah touched the baby's faded yellow onesie.
“He bought that the night I told him I was pregnant. It was the first thing he ever bought for his daughter.”
Suddenly, that cheap piece of fabric felt more valuable than the sixty-million-dollar deal sitting unsigned on my desk.
I had buried my brother believing I'd lost the last of my family.
All this time, part of him had been living under my roof.
I looked at Hannah.
May you like
Only one question mattered now.
“Where have you been keeping my niece?”
