Page 4 of Royal Caleva: Luis

The short silence pulsed with her angry frustration.

“Our daughter lives in Iowa,” Odette said. “I went to see her.”

A tiny crack of doubt worked its way into his certainty that Odette was lying. Her trip to Iowa had been the last unresolved thread in the investigation into Gabriel’s kidnapping. No one could figure out why she would go there.

Yet her actions still made no sense to him.

“If you truly had carried my child, you would have used her as leverage long ago,” he said. “You wanted to be queen.”

“Va te faire foutre, connard!” Spit droplets sprayed from her mouth as she cursed him. “You dumped me like a sack of trash. You did not deserve to have me as your queen, and I was not going to give you the happiness of having a child. I gave birth and tossed her away like you did me.” She leaned forward. “And now—now that you have been deprived of holding her as a child, of grooming her to be a perfect princess, of being loved by her as her father—now I reveal her to you. This is my revenge on you, one I have waited almost three decades to take.”

If she had really had a daughter and cast her off, she was even more monstrous than he could fathom. Yet her words about not being able to hold his daughter, of not having her love him as a father, struck at him like knives. Odette was right about how effective her revenge would be…if it was true.

“What did your daughter say when you met her in Iowa?” Luis couldn’t imagine the reunion had been a happy one.

“Nothing. I didn’t speak to her. I saw her.” Odette’s face twisted with disgust. “She wore no makeup. She was dressed in jeans and a shapeless sweatshirt. I overheard her voice. She sounds like un péquenaud, an uneducated yokel. I could not bear it, so I left. That was not my daughter.”

“You made her that way by refusing to accept your responsibility as her mother.” His voice was harsh. “I do not understand how seeing your daughter incited your desire to kidnap Raul.”

“Because instead of being un péquenaud, my daughter should have been a princess. She should have been raised in a palace by me as the queen.” Odette’s mouth twisted in fury. “You did not deserve to have a perfect prince of a son. Your child needed to be ruined like mine. You needed to suffer the way I did when I looked at my daughter. Too bad those incompetents took Gabriel instead of Raul.”

“You find wearing blue jeans and speaking with a Midwestern American accent comparable to slicing off a young man’s ear?” He had met many unstable people in his reign, but this went far beyond that. He would not remind her that he loved Gabriel like a son. That the torment had almost been worse because his nephew had not been the real target.

“Oh, come now,” Odette said. “It was not so terrible. I made sure one of the world’s best ear surgeons performed the surgery to ensure the reconstruction would be easy. No one can tell that Gabriel’s ear is not the one he was born with.”

His vision went red as he imagined wrapping his fingers around her throat and feeling her struggle to breathe while he squeezed.

After the mutilation, Gabriel had believed he could no longer hear music properly. He had nearly given up his passion for playing flamenco guitar. If he hadn’t met Quinn, he might have done so, depriving the world of a brilliant talent and, even worse, extinguishing his own radiant spirit.

Luis clenched his fingers into fists so tight his fingernails bit into his skin. When he finally had control of himself again, he asked, “How do you expect me to believe that this long-lost child is really mine and not a creation of your twisted need to punish me?”

“I put your name—Luis Dragón—on the birth certificate as her father. That was to needle you when I decided to tell you about her. There it was, the truth of her parentage, but no one in the U.S. would ever believe it was you, the King of Caleva, even if they connected you with the name. They would think I was delusional…or joking.” Odette laughed, a sound of smug satisfaction. “And my secret would be safe because you didn’t know she existed so you wouldn’t look for her.”

“That is not proof that she is mine,” Luis said.

Odette waved that away before her expression turned calculating. “I have her DNA analysis from a blood sample taken when she was born. It was entered into a private genetic databank.”

At last, something that could be confirmed or denied. His nephew’s fiancée, Quinn, was an expert at tracking information in databases. She could find the DNA analysis and confirm or disprove its validity.

“That is the extent of your so-called evidence?” Luis put unalloyed scorn in his voice, but the crack of doubt in his mind widened.

“It will be enough to stir up a storm in the media.” Odette sneered. “The noble, widowed king has a bastard child. Quite a blot on the escutcheon.”

“Our affair was never a secret, and it is now ancient history,” Luis said. “The media has already had its fun with it.”

“Ah, but a child! In line to inherit the Dragon Throne. That will pique the media’s interest,” Odette said.

“The media isn’t going to run a story based on an old DNA record in an unofficial database. All that might prove is that a baby you delivered nearly thirty years ago was related to me.” Luis sat back in a pose of unconcern. “You have no evidence that the young woman in Iowa is my child. If the media claims she is, it will be met with a denial and the threat of a lawsuit from the palace, not to mention whatever legal action the girl’s family might take to protect her.”

In fact, his press office would quietly put out the word that this story had come from a psychopathic criminal bent on revenge and had no basis in fact. No respectable media outlet would touch it after that. He didn’t care about the tabloids.

Odette leaned forward, her eyes gleaming with sly cunning. “But you always wanted more children. How can you brush off the possibility that you might have a grown-up daughter who is alive and well and living in Iowa?”

He couldn’t. Even worse, he could feel the bud of hope beginning to unfurl in his chest. Odette wanted to make him suffer, and she had found a brilliant new way to do it. “Tell me how to access the databank record.”

“Oh, no. You will have to get your minions to do that. But I will give you a gift,” Odette said. “Your daughter’s name is Grace. Grace Howard.”

It was a poisoned gift, and Odette knew that. Instead of an anonymous woman, he now had a name for the fresh-faced, jeans-clad young lady who might be his daughter. “What do you want?”

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