Chapter 3
For the next three days, I doubled security without telling the girls why.
Hannah noticed immediately. She always did.
“Something’s different,” she said, catching me in the hallway. “The men at the gate. The new cameras on the east wall. You’re worried.”
“It’s business.”
“It’s not business. It’s your daughters.”
I didn’t answer, which was answer enough.
That night, an unfamiliar car idled outside the property for eleven minutes before my security team moved in. The driver fled before they reached him, but not before cameras caught the plate.
My head of security delivered the news personally.
“Registered to a shell company. Same shell company we traced back to the Castellano network six years ago.”
Marco Castellano.
A man I thought I’d buried, figuratively and otherwise, after he tried to have my brother killed over a shipping dispute I never fully explained to anyone outside the business.
“He’s dead,” I said. “I confirmed it myself.”
“His son isn’t.”
The words landed like a blow.
Vincent Castellano. A boy who would be in his twenties now, old enough to inherit both his father’s fortune and his father’s grudges.
I found Hannah in the sunroom that evening, helping Claire practice steps between two chairs while her twin sister, Josie, clapped from the floor.
“We need to talk,” I said. “Alone.”
Hannah kissed the top of Claire’s head, told both girls to keep practicing with the nanny cam watching, and followed me into the hallway.
“There’s a threat,” I said. “Someone from my past. He may be targeting my family to get to me.”
Her face didn’t crumble the way I expected. It hardened.
“How serious.”
“Serious enough that I’m considering sending the girls somewhere safer.”
“No.”
The sharpness in her voice surprised me.
“Excuse me?”
“Claire is finally walking, Mr. Reyes. Consistency is everything for her right now. Uprooting her, changing her environment, changing the people around her — it could undo six weeks of progress in six days.”
“Her safety matters more than her progress.”
“I’m not disagreeing. I’m telling you there are other ways to protect her that don’t require destroying what we’ve built.”
“Such as?”
“Better security here. More trained eyes. People who understand children, not just threats.”
I studied her.
“You say that like you have experience with exactly that kind of danger.”
Something shifted behind her eyes again, gone as quickly as it appeared.
“I grew up around people who took security seriously. That’s all.”
I didn’t believe her, not entirely, but I let it go.
Two nights later, a man scaled the perimeter wall near the east garden. My security caught him within ninety seconds, but ninety seconds was long enough to remind me how fragile safety truly was.
I burst into the girls’ wing to make sure they were untouched.
Hannah was already there, standing between the twins’ beds, a fireplace poker gripped steady in her hand, positioned exactly like someone trained to defend a room, not someone improvising out of fear.
“They’re fine,” she said calmly, lowering the poker only once she saw it was me. “I heard the alarm. I got here before your men did.”
I stared at her stance, her control, the complete absence of panic in her face.
“Who taught you to hold a weapon like that?”
She set the poker down slowly.
“Someone who wanted me to survive things I never should have had to survive.”
“Hannah—”
“Not tonight, Mr. Reyes. Please. Not tonight.”
I let it go again.
But I understood now that Hannah Mercer was not simply hiding a resume.
She was hiding a history.
And somehow, that history had led her directly into the middle of mine.
