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LIA

I had my driver drop me off at my apartment, then changed clothes, and went to go wait in the park. I picked a non-descript bench in the shade near the Conservatory Garden Fountain, and idly played with my phone, waiting.

Assorted headlines asserted I was a “Tormented Heiress” or went with alliterative titles, like “The Beauty and the Breakdown”, or rhyme schemes like, “Private Pain, Public Shame,” which I kind of wanted to tilt an imaginary hat to.

The thing was…all of the information inside of the articles was real.

They’d pinpointed my past with utmost accuracy, hopping through the cavalcade of boarding schools I’d been forced to attend—so it wasn’t even worth pretending they were wrong.

They’d even gone and confronted Dolly , for crying out loud—although she’d apparently slammed her door in their face.

And, of course, all of the rags already knew about my mother. When a beautiful woman mysteriously dies in her thirties and you don’t say it’s cancer or a heart attack or a car accident—people know.

She was beautiful but troubled, and was well known for partying , which could only mean one thing: like daughter like mother.

The thing was though—Arnold wasn’t blowing up my line.

Or Marcus either.

Arnold had taken the helicopter back without me, while I was gone at the luncheon, but I knew no one had stolen his phone.

So maybe my past had saved me?

And they were at Corvo, distancing themselves from me, ala-pre-nup, even now?

“Lia?” a man’s voice asked, after clearing his throat.

I turned, and saw Dr. Genziani there, looking grave. “Enzo—we need to talk,” I said, as I stood.

I waited until we were far enough away that anyone who’d been staking out my prior location for photos would’ve lost us—or had to make their following very, very , obvious. “Your lab tech—is she trustworthy?”

He blinked and looked at me. “Of course! Why do you ask?”

“Because no one’s seen me with my sleeves rolled up in almost three months here—until I gave you blood to test against my father,” I said, holding up my phone to show him the screen. “I know these places pay good money?—”

“She didn’t talk, Lia. I’m certain of it.”

“Why?”

“Because there’s a different story that’d be out there, if she had,” he said, giving me a tense look. “Lia…” he began, and then looked around to make sure no one was listening. “I got your test results back.”

The bottom fell out of my stomach. I’d been so wrapped up in my own bullshit I’d forgotten to follow up with Enzo earlier—what kind of shitty daughter was I?

“You’re not a match for Nero,” Enzo said. “Not just for his kidneys…but…at all.”

My brow furrowed as I looked at him. “What do you mean?” I pressed.

“He’s not your father.” My jaw dropped, and he nodded sorrowfully as he went on.

“Your mismatched blood-types were my first clue, but I ran the HLA markers for transplants just to be certain. You share some DNA, but not enough. And I guarantee you that those awful papers would’ve paid a lot more for that story, if my office had a leak. ”

“But…we share…some?” I said, my voice softly rising.

“Yes,” he said, and then gave me a look—same as the one he’d given me when he’d come into our old family home years ago after dark, when my uncle was bleeding in the foyer, and spotted me peeking through the iron-wrought railings from the second-floor balcony.

And here I was, perhaps giving him that same little girl’s look back at him now.

A look from both of us that said we’d learned things that we did not want to know.

“Please—do the best job you can of taking care of my father, for me,” I said, before angrily fishing in my purse to hand a pill bottle over to him. “And you can have these back. Count them. I haven’t taken a single one,” I said, before standing and walking away.