Page 7 of Wicked Rivals

“Is this supposed to scare me?” I asked.

“Look at the rest of it before I answer that,” Tony said.

The page whispered as I flipped it to find a series of photos beneath it. I immediately recognized the girl in the first photo.

The one I had tried so hard to forget.

She looked the same as she had ten years before, with the same striking pale blue eyes. The same beautiful dark hair. The same perfectly pouty lips.

Her face had become a little more angular, and she’d lost some of the youth in her cheeks, but she didn't look too different. Not even older, just less innocent.

The girl who walked out on me.

The one I would never forgive.

She appeared in the second photo as well, this time walking down the street in Brooklyn. The same street I’d walked down a million times during college. The same street she’d taken to work at that little café where I first met her.

The next photo showed one gut-wrenching difference. She wasn't walking alone. No, in that picture, she held a young boy’s hand. The hand of a child with painfully familiar eyes and my mother's caramel hair.

“So this boy is supposed to be mine,” I said.

“I believe that’s the sender’s message, yeah. More than fifty pictures there, Stef. Her and the boy. Different places, different distances, but all pretty much like that one. And a hair sample.”

“A hair sample?” I snapped.

“Yes, sir. I had one of the boys run it to our guys at the lab. DNA test is the only way to know for sure. It’ll take a few days. Probably no results until after your wedding.”

I jerked my fingers away from the stack of photographs as if the glossy papers with her face and his on them had suddenly caught fire and burned me.

“He’s not mine. It’s impossible. She would have told me.”

My mind reeled, and as I turned away from those goddamn pictures, I fumbled with the top button of my shirt.

When unfastening the first two buttons didn’t relieve the stifling heat rushing over me, I gave up.

It wasn’t the shirt suffocating me or even the temperature in my office. The open balcony door still flooded the room with an icy chill, even if I couldn’t feel it.

No, the situation itself burned me up from the inside out.

She did that.

“What do you want to do?” Tony asked.

I lifted my gaze and scowled.

“I’ll tell you what we’re going to do. Whatever it takes to find out what the fuck is going on and put an end to it.”

I yanked at my shirt collar again.

“We’re going to pay this girl a visit right fucking now.”

CHAPTER 2

VAL

My phone alarm reminded me to pick up my son from school.

Grabbing my purse, I reached inside to shut off the alarm, then ran my fingers over the cold but soothing metal of the pistol I had sandwiched between my makeup bag and my billfold.

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