Page 172 of Lethal Legacy

A child isn’t something I can run from. It isn’t something I can lie about or keep secret.

A child is an inescapable reality.

A reality I have absolutely no idea how I’m going to face. Let alone how Roman will.

Or, God help me, the children. What are they going to make of this?

I put my burning face in my hands before I throw up.

How could I have been so damned stupid?

I don’t know how long I sit on that closed toilet, head in hands, staring at the white stick on the floor. It could be ten minutes, or an hour. All I know is that, at some point, I’m jolted out of my shocked stupor by a hard knock on my apartment door.

“Luce!” Ofelia’s voice is high with tension. “Mama wants to meet you.”

You have got to befuckingkidding me.

I wrap the offending stick in toilet paper and drop it into the shining silver bin.

Everything around here gleams,I think randomly. It’s like a shiny, happy world where nothing is supposed to go wrong. I feel like a dark smudge on the pristine window, a carelessly spilled glass on the clean surface of their lives.

I glance at myself in the mirror, then quickly look away again. I’m a mess. Hair is falling out of my braid. My white shirt is crumpled, my linen trousers creased. I splash water on my burning face and take a few deep breaths to try to calm the hectic look in my eyes.

“Luce!” Ofelia knocks again.

“I’m coming.” My voice at least sounds reasonably sane.

I guess that’s one advantage of having spent the past six years faking sanity.

Ofelia is hovering anxiously outside my door. She’s holding a new designer bag, the price of which would easily feed an entire family for a year, and she has twice as much makeup on as she did when she left the apartment.

“It’s not good,” she whispers in my ear. “Masha’s been acting up all day, and Mickey disappeared with Luis in the middle of our meal. Mama’s seriously pissed.”

Great.

Trying to still my frantic pulse, I plaster on a smile and follow her through the door.

My first impression of Inger is, surprisingly, how beautiful she is in the flesh. It’s not hard to see where Ofelia gets her amazing features from. If I’m being fair, the images in the tabloids don’t remotely do Inger justice.

She has sloping cornflower-blue eyes, a few shades lighter than her eldest daughter’s, fringed with long, dark lashes that look annoyingly natural. A perfectly diamond-shaped face with cut-glass Slavic cheekbones and sculptured lips. And her skin is completely, almost uncannily, flawless.

Add in endless tanned legs, subtle cleavage, and trim curves, and Inger Stevanovsky is one-hundred-percent pure Russian model knockout. Even dressed in a skintight pantsuit and dripping with far too much gold jewelry.

Unsurprisingly, she takes one look at me and curls her lip in contempt. “Sothisis the famous Lucia Lopez.”

The moment she opens her mouth, the beautiful illusion is completely shattered. Her voice is petulant and shrill, her eyes flashing maliciously as she crosses the room toward me, holding out a pale hand topped with fierce red talons. It’s limp and cold in my own.

“It’s a pleasure to meet you, Mrs. Stevanovsky.” I meet her eyes briefly when I smile, then lower them respectfully. If there’s one thing I’ve learned over the past few years, it’s how to be invisible.

“Is it.” She injects the words with enough hostility to make her meaning more than clear.

I’m still trying to work out how to respond when Masha comes barreling out of her room and hurls herself at my legs.

“Luce!” She reaches up for the hug I would normally bestow.

Instead, I gently remove her arms and turn her around to face her mother. “I hope you had a lovely afternoon together.”

“No.” Masha turns back around and eyes me belligerently. “Shopping,” she says, with such contempt I press my lips together to stop myself grinning. Mashaloathesshopping.

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