“Try to relax,” Alessandro said gruffly. “You’re safe here.” His hard voice and flat mouth belied what he was saying. “The hospital is bringing in extra security for the entire floor. So am I. Each baby will have a guard of his own until this is sorted out and so will you and Sorcha.”
Sorcha looked up at her name and Octavia wondered whether Enrique’s father was capable of this kind of dispassionate lockdown of lives. Did he also bury frightening news in the guise of comfort? Octavia was introspective, not stupid.
“You think this was deliberate.” Her limbs drained of feeling and her heart slowed to clumsy, disjointed bumps. “Who—?”
She looked to Sorcha, thoughts flying to who could possibly want to attack such a nice woman in such a subversive, evil way?
But the grim way Alessandro kept his gaze on her and Lorenzo told Octavia that Sorcha wasn’t the target. She was. They were.
All the air in her lungs dried up, leaving her sipping for oxygen.
“We have your blood types,” the administrator said, glancing up from a clipboard as he addressed both mothers. “I’d like to give you the results, even though they’re not conclusive.”
Not conclusive? Octavia instinctively cradled Lorenzo closer. The babies now wore additional tags reading Baby One and Baby Two, but this was her son.
“Ironically,” the administrator said, “we should have labeled the boys A and B, since that is the blood type they’ve come back with.” He smiled faintly.
“I’m a B. That was confirmed, si?” Alessandro said swiftly. His hawk-like gaze swooped onto Lorenzo with an avid light, making Octavia wonder if he’d been holding back attaching to his child until he knew irrefutably that this boy was his.
An electric jolt went through her as she sensed him reaching out in a preternatural claim in that moment. Recognizing. Accepting. It was bittersweet because it came on the heels of something dark and nefarious that he wasn’t sharing with her. If only she knew him well enough to see beneath that granite-like mask he wore.
“You are a B, Mr. Ferrante. And your wife is an A,” the administrator said, gaze on the form. “Ms. Kelly is an O and the baby she holds is A. At the moment, none of you can be ruled out as a parent for either of these infants. If Mr. Montero comes up as an A, however, we can rule out his fathering this baby.” He nodded at Lorenzo.
“Did you call him?” Octavia swung her attention to Sorcha, even though she hadn’t seen her new friend use a phone. But she was ready to beg. In some ways it didn’t matter to Octavia who had caused this misery or why, they both just needed their beliefs confirmed so they could move on with mothering in peace.
“We’ve been in touch with Mr. Montero,” the administrator said smoothly. “He was heading straight to the clinic and his results should be with us shortly.”
“Wait. What? You called Cesar?” Sorcha screeched.
* * *
The results came from Spain while Alessandro was still out. What the mothers had known instinctively, science had proven. The babies would be kept in the hospital until the DNA tests confirmed it, but everyone accepted that Lorenzo was hers and Enrique belonged to Sorcha.
Both she and Sorcha slumped in relief and Octavia finally returned to her room—where a bouquet the size of Sicily had been delivered with a card that read, “I’ll be with you as soon as I can, A.”
And yet he was still with Primo.
That bitter reality kept her awake despite her exhaustion. We have a baby, she mentally shouted. Don’t you care? She had texted the blood test results, had seen the notification that her message had been read, but all she heard back was radio silence.
She might as well be Sorcha, raising her baby alone.
The thought sliced a kind of agony through her, but she couldn’t keep doing this, either: waiting for Prince Sandro to arrive on his steed to make her feel worthy.
What she needed was to work on her self-esteem. It had never been particularly strong. Her childhood had been one of strict rules and sighs of tested tolerance, impelling her to press herself hard into the mold her parents wanted just to earn a shred of approval.
She might have kicked up at boarding school, but that had been as much about trying to fit in as proving to her parents she wasn’t under their thumb. By nature she was the bookish sort, so hanging with the party crowd, pretending she was into boys and fashion and drinking hadn’t felt right in the first place, but she’d loved the sense of freedom and independence in making risky decisions: sneaking out of her room at night, voicing strong opinions without caring what anyone thought of them.
Then someone had slipped her something and she would have been one more assault statistic, no doubt, if the party she was at hadn’t been discovered by the faculty as she was passing out. Having her stomach pumped and being suspended for a few weeks had almost been a relief at that point, becoming an excuse to eschew the rowdy crowd and their superficial pursuits if she wanted to return to school.
She had toed the line after that, scared of that spark of insurgence inside her, learning to get by with her own company and buckling to her father’s dictates because it felt safer than trusting her wild side. Eventually she’d attached loosely to a group of girls from Naples because they had geography in common, but she didn’t have a history of fancy vacations or brushes with celebrity to turn into engaging stories. She definitely didn’t have shocking sexual exploits to share.
The identity of her husband had been the first thing to cause ripples of reaction—mostly admiration—among her shallow social pool. To this day, Octavia didn’t understand why Alessandro had chosen her. She was supposed to have married Primo.
She thought back to that gala when she’d met the two men, searching for clues to what he’d seen in her when she’d been such a generic example of an heiress.
“That’s the man your father invited,” her mother had said, pointing out Primo. “The one he thinks might accept you. He would love a connection like the Ferrante family.”
“The one on the right?” Octavia had asked, intimidated and alarmed as she glanced toward the two men, both thirtyish. Primo’s boyish good looks hadn’t even registered beside the compelling Alessandro’s carved features and arrogant sweep of his stern gaze around the room.
“The left,” her mother had said. “The taller one is his cousin, the head of the family. He controls Ferrante Imprese Internazionali. He doesn’t look very approving, does he? I wonder if that’s why he’s here, to decide if we measure up.”
He didn’t look approving at all, Octavia had silently agreed, intimidated by his air of censure. She told herself she was relieved her father wasn’t aiming so high as to think Alessandro Ferrante would be interested. The second-in-command, Primo, would be enough of a coup. He looked arrogant in a different way. Smug almost.
“Make a good impression,” her mother had ordered.
Blowing out a surreptitious breath, Octavia had tried to imagine how one made a positive impression on a potential husband. It was the first time she was being forced to try, but she’d said she would marry the man they chose, so try she would.
Her father had introduced her to the men a few minutes later. Primo had looked her up and down like a buyer at an auction considering a broodmare. Alessandro waited for her gaze to come up to his and locked the contact into something unbreakable.
His air of dissatisfaction was stronger up close. The way he dourly took in every detail from her upswept hair, to the shade of her lipstick, to the scoop of her neckline across her breasts, suggested he was searching for flaws.
Her insides quivered under his inspection while she found herself holding her breath, waiting for his verdict.
“We should dance,” Primo had said in a hard voice,