Free Web NovelChapter 262: I know, and I promise I will handle it
"Sadly, not our baby," Julian said quietly. He picked up the spoon and filled it. "But you need your strength. Eat first."
Amara opened her mouth to argue, to push, to ask the next question, but something in his face stopped her. She accepted the spoon instead.
Julian continued.
"The real mother of the baby we’ve been calling Divina," he said, keeping his voice even and unhurried, "is someone I know. From the states." He paused, choosing the words carefully, the way you carry something hot.
"She’s nobody to worry about. A little unpredictable. But I want you to know I never..." He stopped. "There was never anything between us, Amara." Amara looked at him over the bowl.
"But she wants her baby back," she said. Not a question. Julian held her gaze. "Yes."
Amara was quiet for a moment. He watched her process it the particular stillness of a woman who has been hit with too many things in too short a time and has learned to absorb each new blow, standing because there is no other option.
"Where is our baby girl then?" she asked. "If not any of the women from the hospital who has her, Julian?"
Julian filled the spoon again.
"I don’t know yet," he said. "But I know where to look now. The picture is clearer than it was this morning."
Amara watched his face.
"You think Sebastian has her," she said.
It wasn’t a guess. It was the conclusion of a woman who had spent months studying Sebastian the way a scientist studies something dangerous, cataloguing every pattern, every instinct, every move he made before he knew he was being watched.
Julian said nothing. He lifted the spoon to her lips. Amara ate it without looking away from him.
The silence between them was its own kind of answer. And then the noise started.
It came from downstairs, not the noise of something accidental, not a door or a dropped tray. This was the noise of someone who had arrived with the specific intention of being heard. Raised voices, the shuffle of guards, footsteps that didn’t slow down or wait for permission.
Only one person moved through spaces as he owned them when he didn’t. Amara’s eyes went to the bedroom door.
Then back to Julian.
Something shifted in her face past the exhaustion, past the hollowness of the day, something old and hot and dangerous rose up from underneath all of it.
"He has my daughter," she said. Her voice was very quiet. The quietest it had been. "He took my daughter, and now he has the nerve to come here..."
She was already moving to get up.
"Amara, baby." Julian set the tray down and put both hands on her shoulders. Firm. Not rough. But immovable. "Listen to me."
"Julian, I will..."
"Listen." His voice dropped low, close to her ear. "If Sebastian knows that we know about the switch, if he sees it on your face, if he hears it in your voice, he will move her. Tonight. Somewhere we can’t find." He pulled back just enough to look at her directly.
"The only advantage we have right now is that he doesn’t know what we know. You have to let me keep that advantage."
Amara’s jaw was tight. Her hands were pressed flat against the bed, trembling slightly, not from weakness. From the effort of holding something back that you wanted very badly to come out.
Her eyes were bright and furious and full.
"I can’t take it anymore, Julian," she said. "I know, and I promise I will handle it."
She held his gaze for a long second. Then she sat back. Slowly. Like it cost her something. Julian squeezed her shoulder once and stood.
Downstairs, the entrance hall had the particular charged atmosphere of a space where two opposing forces had arrived at the same time, and nobody quite knew what to do.
The guards were standing slightly awkwardly to the sides. And Julian understood why the moment he came to the top of the stairs and looked down.
Sebastian was there, jacket open, expression carrying that familiar layer of entitlement that he wore like a second skin. But Julian’s eyes went past him almost immediately.
Because Sebastian was not alone. He was holding Seren’s hand.
The little girl stood beside her father in the entrance hall of her mother’s house, looking around with wide, bright eyes, the eyes of a child who had been told something wonderful was about to happen and was ready to believe it completely.
She looked tired. More than tired. The kind of tired that settles into a child’s face when the adults around them have not been managing things well. Her small face had shadows under the eyes that had no business being there.
But she was smiling.
"Are we here to see Mummy?" Seren’s voice carried up the stairs, clear and sweet, and completely unaware of the weight in the room around her. She looked up at Sebastian. "And my baby sister? Do we get to live with Mummy now?"
Sebastian looked down at her. And smiled.
The particular smile of a man who had not answered because answering was not the point. The point was the question. The point was the child standing beside him in a house he had no right to walk into, asking about her mother and her sister, being used as a key in a lock he had no other way to open. freёwebnoѵel.com
Julian stood at the top of the stairs. His face revealed nothing.
But his eyes, watching Sebastian smile down at his daughter his eyes said everything he was not yet allowed to say out loud.
Julian came down the last step and into the entrance hall without hurry.
He had stopped at the nursery on the way. The baby, the little girl they had been calling Divina, Yvette’s daughter, a child who had no part in any of this and deserved none of its weight, was awake and quiet, looking up at the ceiling with the philosophical calm of someone who had no opinions yet about the state of the world.
Julian had lifted her gently, nodded to the nanny to follow at a distance, and walked the rest of the way downstairs with the baby in his arms. freeweɓnovel.cѳm
Seb saw the baby before he saw Julian’s face.
