Page 78 of Kingpin's Secret Baby

“No!” I lunge for the handle, my fingers closing around it just as the locks click. “No, no, no!”

I pound my fists against the window, my cries turning frantic as the car jolts forward.

“Stop the car!” I scream. “Please!”

“Fantasia—”

“Let me out!” My voice breaks, raw and desperate. I throw my shoulder against the door, twisting the handle again and again even though I know it won’t budge. “I have to get to her! I have to?—”

“Fantasia!” Achilles’s voice cuts through the chaos, sharp and commanding. “You need to listen to me!”

I whip around, breathless and shaking. “I don’t need to listen!” I snap, tears still streaming down my face. “I need to get to her before it’s too late!”

“You won’t get to her if you run out there alone,” Achilles says, his voice gentler now but no less firm. “We have a plan. We’ve taken precautions.”

I shake my head violently, chest heaving. “You don’t understand,” I whisper, my voice breaking. “He’s going to hurt her- he’s going to?—”

“She’s alive,” Achilles says firmly. “And we’re going to keep her that way. But you have to trust us.”

Trust? How can I trust anyone right now when Harold’s carrying my little girl further away with every second that passes?

“Please,” I choke out, my voice crumbling into a sob. “Please, just… let me go.”

“Fantasia, stop,” Piers growls, his voice low and strained. “You’re not helping her like this.”

I freeze.

It’s his voice- only... it’s not. The words are softer, the accent thicker- a rich Irish lilt that curls around my name in a way I’ve never heard before.

Slowly, I turn.

Piers- or the man I thought was Piers- is watching me from the other side of the car. His face is familiar, so painfully familiar. The sharp line of his jaw, the intense dark eyes, the copper-red hair that curls slightly at the ends. But now that I’m really looking, I see what I missed before- the faint scar along his cheekbone, the way his brow creases just a little deeper when he frowns.

“You’re... not him.”

“I’m not,” he says quietly.

It hits me- the memory I’d buried, blurred by panic and exhaustion. The night we ran through the forest, stumbling blindly in the dark with Harold’s men and the Crowes closing in. This is the man who, instead of dragging me back, let me go two years ago, the man who could only be Piers’s identical twin.

“You,” I whisper. My voice trembles. “It was you.”

His gaze softens. “Aye,” he says. “It was me.”

I stare at the man across from me- the man whoisn'tPiers.

But that means…

Piers didn’t come.

He didn’t come for me. Didn’t even try.

After everything- after Valeria, after Harold- I thought... I thought if anyone would show up, it would be him.

But he didn’t.

He sent someone else.

The man- Piers’s mirror image- shifts in his seat. Our eyes meet, and in that suspended heartbeat, I see it- the hint of understanding, maybe even pity. He sees it. The heartbreak I can’t hide, the way it’s bleeding out of me no matter how hard I try to swallow it down.

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