High above the clouds on a violently shaking private jet, my billionaire husband looked my pregnant belly in the eye and chose his first love instead.

Vincent stood three paces away, pinned to the floor as if four-inch steel spikes had been driven through the soles of his shoes.

The air left his lungs in a cold, silent rush that left him dizzy. His vision narrowed into a terrifying, razor-sharp tunnel, the surrounding conservatory—the palms, the fountain, the brass lanterns—dissolving into total blackness, leaving only the woman in the red gown kneeling on the stone, holding the child in her arms.

His eyes dropped from Anna’s face to the little boy.

The child had turned his head slightly, his cheek resting against Anna’s shoulder, his small hands clutching the delicate fabric of her sleeve. The golden light from the lantern directly overhead illuminated the boy’s features with unforgiving, clinical clarity.

Vincent’s heart gave a single, violent convulsion against his ribs.

It was not a resemblance; it was a resurrection.

The boy’s hair, though lighter in shade, curled in the exact, undisciplined waves that Vincent’s own hair had possessed before the gray had begun to touch his temples. The shape of the boy’s ears, tucked close to his skull, mirrored Vincent’s own with mathematical precision. But it was the eyes that struck Vincent like a physical blow to the sternum.

They were not blue like Anna’s. They were not brown like her father’s.

They were slate-gray—a rare, stormy, pale gray that had belonged to the Moretti line for four generations, an unmistakable genetic signature that had stared back at Vincent from the bathroom mirror every morning of his life. The child had the same heavy, deliberate brow, the same subtle, stubborn cleft in his chin, and the same unblinking, serious intensity in his gaze that Vincent had carried since his own childhood in the back alleys of Chicago.

The mathematics of his existence tore through Vincent’s mind with the speed of an avalanche.

Three years.

Thirty-six months.

Nine months of gestation, twenty-seven months of life. The child was roughly two-and-a-half years old. The timeline was not close; it was exact to the day.

The baby had not died in the icy water of Lake Michigan. The pregnancy had not been terminated by decompression or fire. The child had been carried to term, delivered in secret, dressed in tailored suits, and taught to call this woman Mommy while Vincent sat alone in an empty mansion, staring at an ultrasound picture and ordering the execution of men who had never touched his family.

Vincent took half a step forward. His leather boot made a faint, scuffing sound against the stone.

The boy heard it. His slate-gray eyes shifted away from the fountain and locked directly onto Vincent.

There was no fear in the child’s gaze. He did not shrink away, nor did he hide his face in his mother’s neck. He simply studied the tall, dark-clad man with the tattoos on his wrists with a quiet, solemn curiosity that was unnervingly familiar. The boy’s small brow furrowed in the exact same way Vincent’s did whenever he was assessing a stranger across a negotiating table.

Anna felt the shift in her son’s attention. Her hands went still on the child’s back.