Chapter 1 - THE GIRL IN THE AISLE
Adrian Vale was halfway through the vows when the wedding hall doors swung open hard enough to make everyone in the first two rows turn. A little girl in an old light-colored dress ran down the center aisle with a baby clutched tightly against her chest. Her hair was messy, her face streaked with tears, and the baby in her arms was fussing against a blanket that looked too thin for the season. Before the ushers or security guards could reach her, the girl stumbled near the front pews, caught herself, and screamed, “Daddy! Help us!”
For a second Adrian thought he had misheard her. Then Victoria moved.
His bride rushed down from the altar steps faster than anyone else, grabbed the girl by the arm, and tried to drag her back toward the open doors. The child nearly lost her balance but kept both arms wrapped around the baby, holding her so tightly that the baby’s little shoe slipped halfway off and dangled from the blanket. “Get them out of here. Now,” Victoria snapped at the guards, her voice low and vicious enough that the nearest guests fell silent immediately.
Adrian was already moving. He reached them just as the girl backed away again, crying, “No! Don’t take the baby!” He knocked Victoria’s hand away from the child’s arm and stepped directly between his bride and the two children. The little girl darted behind him at once, pressing herself against the back of his tuxedo while the baby began to cry harder. Adrian pointed at Victoria, stunned by how pale she had gone. “Don’t touch those children,” he said, and even to his own ears his voice no longer sounded like a groom’s voice. It sounded like a man who had just realized the room he was standing in might be a trap.
The girl was shaking so badly that Adrian could feel it through the fabric at his back. She reached inside the neckline of her dress with one hand and pulled out an old necklace. When she held it up, the pendant flipped open, and Adrian stopped breathing for a moment. It was a gold family-crest locket from the Vale side, engraved with a tiny rose and lion on one side and a Latin motto on the other. He had not seen that necklace in six years.
He took it from her carefully. “Where did you get this?” he asked.
The girl looked up at him with terrified, hopeful eyes. “Mommy said if something bad happened, I had to find Daddy Adrian and show him this.”
Nobody in the hall moved. Victoria made a small step forward, but Adrian lifted his hand without looking at her, and she stopped. The little girl then pulled a crumpled photograph from inside the baby’s blanket and gave it to him. In the picture, a young woman stood in front of an old greenhouse holding the same child as a baby. Around the woman’s neck hung the exact same family-crest necklace.
Adrian recognized the woman instantly.
“Elena,” he whispered.
He had not said her name in years. Elena Marquez had once mattered enough to him that he gave her his grandmother’s necklace, then vanished from his life so suddenly and so completely that he eventually let himself believe she had decided to leave him without explanation. Looking at the photograph now, Adrian realized the little girl in the picture was clearly the child standing behind him.
He turned the photograph over.
Across the back, in hurried handwriting he recognized as Elena’s, were seven words that tore the room open wider than the interrupted vows had.
May you like
DON’T LET VICTORIA TAKE THE CHILDREN AGAIN.
When Adrian looked up, Victoria was no longer trying to hide her panic. She was staring at the photograph like she had already seen it before.
