He ran toward Milo’s room, terrified of what he might find. What he found instead rewrote every assumption he had carried for the last year. Inside, the new maid, Adriana Vegares, sat on the floor with Milo in her arms. The boy was thrashing weakly, but his eyes were bright. Awake. Fighting. Alive. Adriana looked up at Rafael with tears streaking her cheeks. “Sir,” she whispered, her voice trembling. “I found something.”
The truth, once revealed, had a way of burning everything that came before it.
Three weeks earlier, Adriana had arrived in the Donnelly residence before dawn. She needed the job desperately. Her aunt’s medical bills back in Phoenix were suffocating, and work in New York was hard to come by. Still something in her chest twisted as she stepped into the gleaming marble lobby. Like a warning. She ignored it and rode the elevator to the thirty-first floor.
