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Willem was skeptical. “Almost an hour?”

“Forty-eight minutes to be exact, sir.” It was Molen’s turn to answer. “It’s SOP for us to take note of the time whenever we make contact during our shift. It could prove important later.”

“And what did you two talk about?”

“Nothing in particular, sir. It was mostly the young girl asking the questions.” The first bodyguard paused. “We did notice, however, her apparent reluctance to enter the home the moment she found out about her family entertaining a guest.”

“I see.” How...curious, Willem thought to himself. And then his phone rang, and as he became involved in a discussion about the current crisis hounding the continent and its economic impact, thoughts of Serenity Raleigh were forgotten. He would probably have never spared her another thought after that if fate hadn’t intervened the next day.

Willem was on the escalator descending to the central library’s ground floor, his security in front and behind him, when he heard a scuffle from the opposite escalator. He looked towards the sound curiously and saw a mother scolding her child for hanging half of his body off the rail.

Behind them was Serenity.

She was dressed in a pale blue short-sleeved shirt, tucked inside white embroidered shorts, and was on her way up on the opposite escalator. As if sensing his eyes touching her, she looked up, and blue eyes met blue.

She reached the top and stepped off the escalator.

He reached the bottom and promptly stepped off, went around, and took the escalator back up.

It threw his security off, all of them scrambling to follow him, but Willem paid none of them any heed. He was in a contemplative mood, his gaze never straying from the girl standing serenely at the side of the escalator, her own eyes unblinking as they met his.

If it had been any other woman, he would have suspected that their encounter had been engineered on purpose. But this was Serenity Raleigh, and there was something so dignified about the fourteen-year-old girl-slash-woman that made him dismiss any such notion.

If this girl were to do something intentional, then it would only be to avoid him.

When he stepped off the escalator and came to stand in front of her, the girl said politely, “Sir.”

“Willem.” His voice was just as polite, and he only corrected Serenity to tease her.

Her blonde brows furrowed, but even with the frown marring her smooth pale forehead, it failed to detract from her loveliness, and he marveled absently at how lovely she was.

She would be quite the heartbreaker when she grew up, Willem thought, but not in the way Shane was. No, her older sister’s beauty was more glamorous, the type to dazzle. Serenity’s looks, on the other hand, were softer and...kinder, the type that soothed, despite her lips never curving in a smile.

The realization made Willem grim, reminding him of what he had learned about the child’s past.

“Do you visit the ODA often?” he heard himself ask, referring to the central library by its name and testing to see if she would understand. He wasn’t certain why it mattered to him, only that it did. He wanted to be sure Serenity had properly adjusted to her new life.

“It’s my favorite place in the city.”

“And Mokum in general? How do you find it?”

“Peaceful. It’s nothing like the city I grew up in.”

Her recognition of Amsterdam’s colloquial name allowed Willem to relax.

If the news reports had been right, then she would have only been living in Amsterdam with her stepmother and Shane for over six months. A sufficient length of time for most people to adjust, Willem knew, but for someone who had to recover from the trauma of having one’s parent kill himself in her presence, even forever might not be enough to make one forget.

“Have you fully explored Amsterdam?”

Shane’s sister shook her head. “I like savoring every discovery.”

An unusual answer for a fourteen-year-old, Willem thought, but then again Serenity Raleigh was anything but ordinary.

“You walk often?”

“Sometimes. Other times, I take my bike.”

“I see.” Although it was a well-known fact that there were more bikes than people in Amsterdam, most women Willem was acquainted with considered biking beneath them and instead preferred traveling in chauffeured cars.