Page 138 of What Doesn't Kill Her

“I bet you are,” Rae said. “I bet if I dropped one in your lap, you’d run and scream like Martin.”

Kellen loved her daughter so much.

“There are no mice!” But he turned to look behind him.

He had no goatee, no mustache, no pointy eyebrows. His dark glasses had disappeared.

But it didn’t matter how much he had changed his appearance, Kellen should have recognized this man; she was staring into the face of her first husband, Gregory Lykke.

Gregory. He had cut her, humiliated her, broken her bones, taken the child he had conceived with her and killed it.

Poor baby. Never a moment of life, of breath, all chance taken from her from the man who should have loved her most.

Then the man on the floor turned back toward the door, and the illusion vanished.

Not Gregory. Similar in bone structure, eyes, lips, brows, sure. But with thinning hair and eyelids that sagged over cool brown eyes.

Not Gregory—then who? A Lykke relative, obviously. She’d never met any of the male relatives; Gregory had been too jealous to introduce her to another man, but she did remember the family talking about Daniel, a cousin they scorned as a parasite, a musician and...an actor.

An actor.

Kellen took her mental identification card labeled Dan Matyasovitch, tore it up and threw it away.

He held Rae’s upper arm tightly, so tightly that Rae squirmed and tugged and said, “My mommy’s coming!”

“I hope so. That’s the plan. That’s why I let you scatter your stars.” Rae must have stared at him in horror, for he laughed. “Did you think I didn’t know what you were doing? Stupid kid.”

“I’m not stupid!”

“Yeah? Think about this. Your stars will bring your mommy, and then I’ll shoot her.” He showed Rae the Glock he held in his free hand. “I’ll kill her.”

“You’re mean. You’re weird. Why would you want to kill my mommy?”

Yes, why?

“Because I’m a Lykke.”

That Kellen had figured out. She placed the pruning shears carefully, where they would not topple to the floor.

“A like?” Rae was truly confused. “Like on social media?”

“No. ALykke. Part of your mommy’s first husband’s family.”

Using the balance she’d developed from years of yoga, Kellen stood on the sloped oak surface of the giant cask, lifted one stockinged foot and slid the blue garter off her thigh.

“Gregory was my cousin. The Lykke family is a noble, wealthy family from New England, and everybody’s dead except me...and her.”

There it was.Kellen’s mind clicked all the pieces into place.

With everybody dead, the Lykke family fortune hung out there, waiting to be claimed. Kellen was really Cecilia. Cecilia had been Gregory’s wife...and was of course next in line for the inheritance.

Money. Of course. Dear cousin Daniel wanted to kill her to secure the fortune.

56

Kellen hadn’t thought of the Lykke fortune and her claim on it. Why should she? In the nine years since she’d escaped Gregory, her life had been in turns despairing, terrifying, adventurous and laced with the kind of surprises that would shatter most people.

Yet the money...my God. When she married Gregory, it had been in the tens of millions. On his death, his sister Erin had taken up the reins of the industry; she had been a brilliant businessperson, and fully as crazy as her brother.

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