Chapter Three : The Lie

I didn’t sleep. I spent the entire night staring at the ceiling, replaying the same sentence over and over in my head. Ask your mother what happened the night your father disappeared.

My mother had always hated talking about him, and whenever I asked questions she changed the subject, and whenever I mentioned his name she suddenly found something else to do with her hands. When I was younger I told myself it was grief. Now I wasn’t so sure.

By six in the morning I’d made a decision. I was going home, not to sleep, but to get answers.

Her apartment was forty minutes from the club, and I hadn’t shown up unannounced in months, so when she opened the door the smile on her face fell apart the second she saw mine.

“Zaire?”

“Can I come in?”

She stepped aside without a word, and I walked past her into an apartment that smelled exactly the way it always had, lavender and coffee and something that used to feel like home, and for one dangerous second I almost forgot why I was there. Then I pulled the photograph from my pocket and held it up between us.

“Who is this?”

She froze completely, her eyes locked on the photograph like it might come alive, and I watched real fear move across her face before she could hide it.

“Where did you get that?”

“Answer me.”

“Zaire.”

“Who is he?”

She sat down slowly, like her legs had stopped trusting her. “Your father.”

The words hit harder than I expected. “I know that.”

“No,” she said, looking up at me. “You don’t.”

My chest tightened. “You told me he died.”

“I lied.”

Everything inside me went silent. “You what?”

Her eyes filled with tears. “I didn’t have a choice.”

“Sixteen years,” I said, and my voice cracked right down the middle. “Sixteen years, Mom.”

“I was protecting you.”

“From what?”

She didn’t answer, so I stepped closer. “From who?”

She covered her face with both hands and finally said it. “Your father wasn’t the man you thought he was.”

I laughed, bitter and disbelieving. “You said he was a businessman.”

“He was.”

“You said he loved us.”

“He did.”

“Then why did he disappear?”

She lowered her hands and looked at me like she’d been waiting sixteen years to say the next sentence. “Because of the Veyls.”

My blood ran cold. Dorian. I couldn’t breathe.

“What do the Veyls have to do with my father?”

She stood up suddenly. “Forget that name.”

“I can’t.”

“You have to.”

“Why?”

“Because if Dorian Veyl knows who you are, you’re already in danger.”

I stared at her. “What does he want from me?”

She didn’t answer.

“Mom.”

Still nothing.

“Tell me.”

She walked to the window with her back to me, and when she finally spoke her voice was barely more than a whisper. “Your father made a deal with the Veyl family.”

“What kind of deal?”

“He promised them something.”

“What?”

She turned around, her face wet with tears, and said the one word I never saw coming. “You.”

I couldn’t move. “What?”

“Your father promised Dorian’s father that you would belong to the Veyl family when you came of age.”

My stomach twisted into something I didn’t have a name for. “That’s insane.”

“I know.”

“Then why would you let him?”

“I didn’t,” she said, wiping her face with the back of her hand. “I took you and ran.”

I thought about Dorian then, his calm voice, his endless quiet questions, the way he always watched me like he already knew something I didn’t, and the photograph and the envelope and the messages all clicked into place at once like pieces of a lock finally turning.

“Does Dorian know?”

My mother looked at me with an expression I’d never seen on her before. “He found you.”

Silence dropped between us.

“How?”

“I don’t know.”

A knock sounded at the door, three slow and deliberate raps, and we both froze at exactly the same moment. My mother’s face went white with terror.

Another knock.

I moved toward the door on instinct.

“Don’t,” she said, her voice stopping me cold. “Stay here.”

She walked toward it herself, but before she could reach it her phone rang, and she looked down at the screen and then up at me like the two of us were standing on opposite sides of something that couldn’t be undone.

“It’s him.”

“Who?”

She whispered the name like it might hear her. “Dorian.”

My heart stopped completely. Her phone kept ringing in her hand, and then someone knocked again, this time with no hesitation at all, and my mother closed her eyes like she was bracing for impact.

Then a voice came through the door, calm and deep and unmistakable.

“Mrs. Laurent.”

My blood turned to ice.

“I think it’s time we stopped hiding your son from me.”

My mother looked at me, and I looked at the door, and in that single frozen second I finally understood the truth neither of them had been able to say out loud. Dorian hadn’t been coming to Velvet Room for me.

He had been coming there because he already knew exactly who I was.