light before dawn.
“No, Tante,” she managed to say. She would never know how she managed to keep herself from breaking down, right there on the phone. “Tell them not to call the police. Tell them it’s fine. I know where he is.”
“But, Anais—”
“I’ll explain everything when I get home,” she managed to grit out, and that wasn’t a lie. Not exactly. Though she had no idea where she’d start.
She ended the call with her aunt and yanked the divorce papers toward her, flipping through the pages with numb fingers until she reached the signatures and that scrawled taunt of a phone number. It took her two tries to enter it correctly because her hands shook so badly and her thumbs seemed suddenly twice their previous size.
It rang. Endlessly. Anais thought she aged a thousand years before she heard the line connect and then Dario’s smooth, calm voice, as effective as a gut punch. She doubled over, right there at the counter.
“Anais.”
“Where is he?” Her voice was rough. Terrible. “What did you do?”
“He’s perfectly fine,” Dario said coolly. “He’s happily watching a movie on his tablet.”
“I told you I’d let you see him, you bastard. You didn’t have to take him during recess! The school were going to call the police until they realized you were his father!”
“Go ahead,” Dario invited her, and he didn’t sound particularly cool any longer. “My son and I will be in New York in approximately ten hours. My entire legal team looks forward to handling the issue, however you choose to address it.”
She couldn’t make her trained legal brain work the way it should. She couldn’t think.
“Dario, you can’t—”
“I can and I did.” His voice was the harshest she’d ever heard it. Worse than a stranger’s, judgmental and cruel. “You never should have hidden my child from me, Anais. You reap what you sow.”
And then, impossibly, he disconnected the call.
The smartphone fell from her hand and clattered against the hard marble, but she was already racing around the counter to pitch herself against the sunken sink and lose the contents of her stomach right there. Once. Again.
For a moment she thought her knees would give out. She could see herself in her head, sliding to the floor in a kind of puddle of despair and staying there until the hotel’s housekeeping team swept her out with the trash. Her breath came hard and harsh, loud against the sink’s hard walls.
But her knees didn’t give out, somehow. Slowly, surely, she straightened. She braced herself against the sides of the sink and then she ran the water cold. She splashed it on her face and rinsed her mouth and slowly, slowly fought back the panic so she could think this through.
Dario wouldn’t hurt Damian. That was the most important thing. He might be a terrible bastard to her, but he wasn’t a monster. The worst-case scenario was that her baby might be scared, might want her and not be able to find her—she let out a ragged sob at that thought—but Dario had nothing but stacks of money at his disposal. Damian’s physical and material needs would be met, no question.
She tried to take a moment to feel thankful for that. To remind herself how many women—many of whom she’d had as clients as part of her pro bono work on the islands—couldn’t allow themselves that same confidence in their exes.
But the thought of her little boy afraid, however well Dario might treat him, made her shake again. She fought it back, and that dizzy, swimming thing in her head that was so much worse than a mere sob...she thought it might take her to the ground, after all.
But it didn’t. She didn’t let it.
She’d been prepared to do what she could to ease Dario’s access to Damian. She’d wanted her son to have his father in his life, no matter her complicated feelings about that father. Despite what he’d thought, she’d never wanted to conceal Damian from him in the first place. She shouldn’t have slept with him, certainly, but that was a minor misstep, all things considered. She wasn’t sure she’d have forgiven herself for succumbing to that old addiction so easily, but she’d have handled it, somehow. She still would have done what she could to make things work well enough that Damian and Dario could build some kind of relationship between them.
He, meanwhile, had deliberately misled her and then kidnapped her child.
Which made what she had to do easy, she decided then and there, braced against an unaffordable sink in this outrageously luxurious resort villa on the edge of the vast, uncaring Pacific.
It felt a little bit like a death, but it wasn’t. It was a declaration. He’d made it, but she could answer it—and much, much louder.
Dario wanted a war, apparently.
And this time, she’d damn well give it to him.
* * *
It should probably not have come as a surprise to Dario that the child—his child, if any of what Anais had said to him in Hawaii could be believed—was an utter terror.
There was no other word for it.
On the fourth day of his surprise fatherhood, Dario stood in the foyer of his sprawling Upper West Side penthouse apartment with its three stories of sweeping views over Central Park, and watched the little demon who supposedly bore his DNA run in screaming circles for no apparent reason, putting priceless artifacts at risk with each lap around the expansive living room.
“I don’t understand why you haven’t handled this,” Dario said coldly to the nanny who’d come with the highest of references from the most prestigious Manhattan agency, which normally boasted a waiting list years long. “Why you haven’t done whatever it is I’m paying you to do to stop this kind of insanity at six-thirty in the morning.”
“I’m a nanny, Mr. Di Sione,” the woman replied crisply, with the hint of an English accent Dario was ninety percent convinced she faked for effect and her arms crossed over her ample bosom. “Not Albus Dumbledore.”
The tiny creature, who was, as far as Dario had been able to tell, made entirely of howls and fists and a boundless, terrifying energy, stopped of his own accord then and shouted something incomprehensible at Dario.
“Can you translate that?” Dario asked the nanny in the same cold tone. “Because if you can’t, I might as well fire you and locate a zoologist.”
“I’ll handle him,” the woman said with a sniff.
“See that you do,” Dario gritted out, and then he stalked for the door.
None of this was going according to plan.
You do understand that he’s an entire little person all his own, don’t you? Anais had asked him back in Hawaii. If you have some fantasy in your head about an angelic creature who will gaze at you and call you Daddy and serve as some kind of appendage to your whims, that’s probably not Damian.
It was definitely not Damian.
“Go to hell,” he
