I smiled, a genuine, powerful expression of victory, before stepping away from the podium and walking off the stage.
I bypassed the reporters, making a beeline for the VIP tables in the shadows.
Harrison was standing there, leaning on his cane, looking older but immensely proud.
Holding his other hand was a vibrant, fiercely intelligent five-year-old girl in a dark blue velvet dress.
June let go of her grandfather and ran toward me.
I scooped her up, burying my face in her neck, breathing in the scent of her shampoo, feeling the solid, magnificent reality of her existence.
Jacob Gray was a ghost.
My intelligence team gave me quarterly updates, but I rarely read them.
He had been denied parole again last month.
He was sweeping floors in a federal penitentiary in the northern district, entirely forgotten by the world.
I felt no anger, no trauma, no lingering fear when I heard his name; he was entirely irrelevant.
Later that night, we returned to the penthouse suite.
I tucked June into her sprawling, silk-canopied bed, pulling the thick duvet up to her chin.
She looked up at me, her bright blue eyes, so much like Harrison’s, wide with the sudden, innocent curiosity of a child trying to understand the world.
“Mommy,” June whispered, clutching a stuffed bear.
“A girl at school today said everyone has a daddy, so she asked what mine does,” she said.
“Where is mine?” she asked.
I paused, my hand resting gently on her cheek.
Five years ago, that question would have sent a spike of panic through my chest.
I would have felt the phantom pain of the courtroom, the echo of Jacob’s sneering voice.
Tonight, I felt nothing but a vast, deep reservoir of quiet, unbreakable strength.
The ghost had been thoroughly, entirely exorcised.
“Some people, June, are just stepping stones,” I said softly, brushing a lock of dark hair from her forehead.
“They are put in our path to teach us how to jump over the mud, so we don’t get stuck in the dark,” I explained.
I leaned down and kissed her forehead.
“You don’t have a father, my love,” I whispered, looking into the eyes of the sole heir to the Payne empire.
“You have a kingdom,” I told her.
“And you have a mother who will burn the entire world to ash before she ever lets anyone tell you that you are nothing,” I promised.
June smiled, a satisfied, sleepy expression, and closed her eyes.
I turned off the bedside lamp and walked out into the quiet hallway of the penthouse.
As I pulled the door shut, my encrypted, secure cell phone vibrated violently in my suit pocket.
I pulled it out.
It was a priority-one text message from Cole, my head of intelligence.
Target located in Geneva. The files on your mother’s disappearance were in the vault just like you suspected. Harrison lied.
I stared at the glowing screen in the dim hallway.
