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The term of endearment—little too fucking pointed—makes my stomach drop. “What are you working on?”

I inspect him more closely this time, trying to find any resemblance, and a part of me thinks Lex’s test has to be wrong. This guy is a complete dud, with his scratchy beard and backwards baseball cap, which is probably hiding male pattern baldness. Maybe time was hard on him, but he looks older than the math would suggest. Aged. Worn.

“Changing an alternator for one of the girls,” he explains, tugging a part up onto the engine block. “Hand me that belt tensioner, would you?” When all I do is stare blankly into the toolbox, he rears back, eyeing me. “The one that looks kind of like a bike pump.”

Spotting it, I bend down to grab it, passing it over. “Did you used to be a Duke?”

The question catches me off guard as much as him, and when he props his forearm against the block, he swings a confused glance at me. “Afraid not. Almost—not quite.”

I watch as he pulls a belt through some pulleys. “Why not?”

“Ah, just life,” he answers, shrugging. “Heartbreak, drugs, and gambling. Went a little far west, you might say.”

Watching him carefully, I ask, “You ever go east?”

He flinches, dropping the tensioner. “Goddamn it,” he mutters, snatching it back up with a hard sigh. “Yeah, I playedaround in East End for a while. Not the kind of story a guy tells over a serpentine belt, though.”

My eye twitches. “You ever play around with someone named Odette?”

The flinch this time is full-body and he jolts back, fixing me with a scowl. “How do you know about her?”

“She was a Princess,” I reason, but already feel exhausted by the pretense. “Also, I’m her son.”

He turns fully now, regarding me with a long, thoughtful stare. “You’re—what, twenty-one? Twenty-two? That’d mean you were…” His frown falls away, understanding crossing his features. “So you were the kid she had with the Princes.”

For some reason, it makes my blood boil. “Let me rephrase that, Paul.” Crisply, I clarify, “I’myourson. Your son with Odette Delisle.”

The blood drains from his face and he takes two steps back. “Look, that’s not possible. Odette strung me along and then tossed me away more than once, and I think I’d know if she’d had my fucking kid.”

“Well that’s funny,” I reply, “considering I’ve got a pretty credible paternity test that says otherwise.”

His face goes slack. “Holy shit, you’re serious.” At my unflinching stare, he sucks in a breath that seems to never stop, his chest expanding comically. “Fuck, man, I’ve gotta sit down.” But instead of sitting down, he leans against the wall, rubbing a palm over his chin. “When did this happen?”

Astonished, I throw my arms out wide. “How about you fucking tell me? It’s not like I was there.”

He looks shaken to his core, snagging a crumpled pack of cigarettes from his pocket. “Odette and I—we had a fling the summer before that kid and his mom died. Michael and Miranda, wasn’t it?”

Nostrils flaring, I say, “My mother was her handmaiden.”

He nods, eyes squinting. “But she had a lot of free time over the summer, and we became a bit of an item.” Lighting the cigarette, he takes one shaky inhale before instantly tossing it on the ground, stamping it out with a grimace. “Once she became Princess, it got too complicated. She dropped me like a bad habit. I found her again a few years later, but there wasn’t any kid with her.”

“I was in foster care.” My voice feels brittle and dry, and when I look up, Pauly’s staring at me like he’s seeing a ghost.

“You have her eyes.”

I rub my forehead, grousing, “This isn’t going how I expected.” I thought I’d look this guy in the eye, tell him he’s to blame for everything that went wrong in my life, and hopefully get a good shot in.

Instead, the anger fizzles to ash.

Pauly’s face twists. “Whatdidyou expect, dropping a twenty-one-year-old bomb on a fuck-up like me?”

Spinning on my heel, I decide that I’m not equipped for this. Having a father I hate? I’ve got that shit down to a science. I could write a whole textbook on it. But having a father who was never given the chance to be one?

Good or not, I’m not ready to give anyone that opportunity.

It’squiet down in the dungeon.

The smell is mostly gone, replaced by the sharp scent of bleach and disinfectant. The cot is an empty metal frame, the thin mattress having been disposed of at some point in the last week. And it’s dark.