LOGIN
Cold gel hit my stomach. I barely felt it.
"There it is." Dr Whitfield turned the monitor toward me. "Right there. See it?"
I leaned in, searching for the single flicker she'd shown me at my last visit. There were two.
"Wait." My voice cracked. "Are those... two separate?"
"Two sacs." She tapped the screen with her pen, calm, like this happened every Tuesday. "Congratulations, Mira. You are having twins."
Twins.
The word just sat there. Too big. I stopped hearing anything about due dates or vitamins. My palm found my stomach and pressed flat, like I could feel both of them right through skin and a cotton gown.
"Best gift you could give Mr Wrexley," the doctor said, smiling now.
A laugh tore out of me, half sob. Damon's babies. Two of them. I could already see his face crumbling open the second I told him that rare unguarded look he only ever gave me, never anyone else.
I thanked her, cleaned up, and walked out of that exam room like my feet had stopped touching the ground.
The corridor buzzed with hospital noise, carts rattling, and a kid crying somewhere past the curtains. I had the ultrasound photo clutched to my chest and didn't see the man stepping out of a side hallway until I slammed straight into him.
The photo hit the floor.
"Sorry." He crouched fast and scooped it up. "You okay?"
"Fine." I barely looked at him. Some stranger in a grey suit didn't matter. I had two heartbeats to celebrate.
I didn't see him watch me all the way to the elevator. Didn't hear the phone go back to his ear the second the doors shut.
"That's her." Quiet. Flat. "Mira Castellan, and she is pregnant."
A pause.
"Dig into her. Background, connections, every secret she's got buried. "Another pause, longer. "She's worth more than we thought; she may be the key to bringing down the Wrexley brothers."
I floated through the rest of that day. Picked up Damon's favourite wine, the dry red he pretended to hate. Stopped at the bakery on Holloway for the lemon tart I'd been craving since week six. By the time the car turned up the gravel drive to Wrexley Estate, my hands shook. Not from nerves of having to break the news to Damon but from just too much joy crammed into one body.
Twins. Tonight I'd tell him.
The house sat quiet when I slipped in through the side entrance, the one I used when I didn't want staff hovering. I set the wine and tart on the counter, opened my mouth to call out for him, and heard voices instead. Low. Tense. Coming from the study.
Ingrid's voice first. Sharp, clipped, always sounding like it was holding something back.
"She still doesn't know."
A man answered. For half a second I thought it was Damon. Something was off, though. The rhythm of it.
"We took turns."
I froze mid-step. My hand found the doorframe before I told it to.
"She never had a clue."
Then Damon's actual voice, unmistakable, cutting in. Something about her father. Something about secrets.
I should have turned around right then. Walked back to the kitchen. Pretended the floor hadn't just dropped out from under me. Instead, my feet kept moving, pulling me closer until I stood just outside that door, pulse roaring louder than anything being said inside it.
"Her father died protecting Thorncrest's secrets. " Damon, cold and even, used the same voice he used to close million-dollar deals. "So I kept her close."
The wine bottle slipped out of my hand. Glass exploded against the hardwood.
Silence on the other side of that door.
I shoved it open before anyone could stop me. The room tilted.
Two of him.
Damon stood by the fireplace in the charcoal suit he'd worn that morning. Three feet away, leaning against the bookshelf, stood another man. Same suit. Same face. Same eyes that had looked into mine a thousand times and said I love you.
My lungs forgot how to work.
"No." I shook my head, stumbling back toward the door. "No, that's not... that can't be true."
Damon didn't flinch. No guilt. No surprise that I'd just walked in on whatever this was. He looked at me the way he looked at contracts that needed a signature.
"Damon." My voice split clean in half. "What did you do to me?"
Ingrid let out a breath near the desk, almost relieved. "Oh. You heard us."
I looked between them. Two faces. One memory cracking down the middle in real time.
"There were two of you." Barely a whisper. "This whole time?"
Damon had spent enough time looking at Wren Calloway's records to know that something was missing.The problem was that the missing pieces were exactly where an ordinary life should have been.Her current records were easy enough to follow. Business registration. Tax documents. Property records. Medical insurance. A handful of professional references. Calloway had built a successful company quickly, and the paperwork surrounding it was almost annoyingly tidy. There were dates, addresses, signatures, and bank statements. Everything a person needed once they had decided to become someone.But when Damon went backward, the trail became thin.There was no school photograph with Wren's name beneath it. No university record that connected cleanly to the woman now running Calloway. No old address where she had spent years before becoming wealthy enough to attract attention. The references she had provided when Calloway was starting had all known her for relatively short periods. None of them
Damon had asked for the original autopsy report twice before anyone finally brought it to him.The first copy had been sitting in the Wrexley legal archive for years, sealed inside a thin brown folder with a faded case number written across the front. It had looked ordinary when his assistant placed it on the desk. No warning. No note explaining why it had taken so long to find. Just another old file from a case everyone had stopped discussing.Damon opened it after the office had emptied.The city outside his windows had gone dark, and the lights from the lower floors reflected against the glass. He had left his jacket over the back of his chair hours ago. His tie was loose around his neck, and the coffee beside his hand had gone cold without him noticing.He read the first page twice. Then he went back to the beginning. The report listed the body recovered from the river after the crash three years earlier. Female. Estimated age. Injuries consistent with a high-impact accident. Wate
The first thing Wren noticed was the date.She had been staring at the accident report for so long that the numbers at the top had begun to blur, but the date remained clear enough to read without effort. Three years ago. The same week she had disappeared. The same week everyone else had been told that Mira Castellan was dead.The file lay open across the dining table in Lucian's apartment, surrounded by the things they had collected over the past few weeks. Bank statements. Security records. Copies of old Wrexley correspondence. Photographs that had been enlarged until faces became little more than grey shapes. Wren had stopped caring about the mess hours ago. She had taken off her shoes sometime after midnight and had not noticed when the coffee beside her went cold.She turned another page.The report described a vehicle found at the bottom of the river after it had gone through the barrier on the east bridge. The car had belonged to Mira. There was no question about that. The regi
The photographs arrived at Damon’s office shortly after four in the afternoon, tucked inside a plain brown envelope that had been left with his assistant without any explanation beyond his name. He had spent most of the day trying to work and failing at it in small, irritating ways. Numbers that normally took seconds to check had required rereading, two emails had been left unanswered, and a meeting with the legal department had ended with Damon asking for a document that had been sitting directly in front of him for nearly ten minutes. He blamed the reopened investigation, although he had not told anyone how often his mind had returned to it since ordering the old files pulled. Mira Castellan had been dead for three years. There should have been nothing left to discover that could change what he already knew.He opened the envelope anyway.The first few photographs were exactly what he expected. Old security images. A section of road near the crash site. The restaurant where Mira had
Wren had been staring at the same set of figures for nearly twenty minutes when she finally noticed that the coffee beside her had gone cold. She had forgotten to drink it. The office was quiet except for the faint hum of the air conditioning and the occasional sound of footsteps passing beyond the glass wall, but none of it had registered properly because the figures on her screen had begun to form a pattern she had been searching for since the day she entered Wrexley. The private subsidiary had appeared in one of the older financial reports almost by accident, buried beneath several layers of corporate ownership and registered under a name that meant nothing on its own. It had no public-facing operations, no obvious staff and no reason to move money through it on the scale she had discovered. Yet the account had been active for years.Wren leaned closer to the screen and opened the transaction history again. She had already checked the dates twice, then a third time because the firs
Killian had spent most of the night telling himself that the conversation with Wren had meant nothing, which might have worked if he had been able to stop thinking about it. He had tried sleeping first, then working, then opening a bottle of wine he barely touched before abandoning it on the kitchen counter. By two in the morning, he was sitting at his desk with his phone in one hand and an old cardboard box beside him, staring at photographs he had not looked at in years. Most of them were ordinary. Mira laughing at a restaurant. Mira standing beside Killian at a company function with one hand raised to block the camera. Mira holding a paper cup of tea and complaining about the cold in the Wrexley offices even though everyone else had been perfectly comfortable. He had forgotten how many photographs he had taken without thinking about it. At the time, she had been part of his everyday life, which meant he had never imagined there would come a day when remembering the smallest things







