SHE TOOK A BULLET FOR HIS TWINS—CEO REALIZES HIS NANNY WAS ALWAYS HIS FAMILY

## CHAPTER 4

Bastian leaned forward slightly. “You were shot,” he said, like she might not have been informed. “The bullet went through the lateral deltoid. It didn’t hit anything it can’t recover from.” Another pause, and this one was longer and had more weight in it. “You threw yourself over my children.” “Yes.” “You could have run.” “I had the stroller,” she said. “I wasn’t going to run.” He looked at her for a long moment. His jaw worked slightly, the way it sometimes did when he was about to say something he hadn’t cleared with himself yet. “Why,” he said. Just that. She thought about it. The honest answer felt too large for a hospital room with the curtains moving in no wind. “Because they’re Lara and Kit,” she said finally. “I wasn’t going to let anything happen to them.” He didn’t say anything for a moment. Then he said, very quietly, “She would have done that.” Selene didn’t have to ask who. She didn’t say anything either. Some things didn’t need filling in. She watched something pass across his face, quick and private, the particular grief of a man measuring a stranger’s instinctive courage against the memory of someone he’d loved and lost, finding an echo he hadn’t expected and wasn’t sure what to do with.

The investigation moved fast. Selene was not privy to most of it, but she was not naive, and she had spent enough time in that apartment to understand that Bastian Caruso’s business interests extended into territory that had shadows in it. She knew the security protocols were unusually rigorous. She knew the way certain names made certain people in his orbit go very still. She had understood from early on that the men who worked for him were not just employees. What she learned in pieces over the following days was that the shooter had been hired by a man named Renwick Gale, a name she recognized from a document she’d seen on the kitchen counter once, a name Bastian had circled in red ink. Renwick Gale was a former associate who had been skimming from a logistics deal for three years and had recently been informed that Bastian knew. His solution to that problem had been blunt and catastrophic, and it had failed. They found Renwick Gale on a Thursday. She didn’t ask what happened after that. She didn’t need to. She had learned, in her months in that household, precisely which questions belonged to her world and which belonged to a world she was permitted to live adjacent to but not permitted to fully enter, and she had made her peace with that boundary a long time before the parking garage ever made it personal.

What she asked about when Bastian came to see her on the third day was whether the children were sleeping. He stopped in the doorway. “You’re in a hospital bed.” “I know where I am.” He came in and sat down. “Lara slept through the second night. Kit is still waking at 2.” “He’ll settle when he can smell that I’m nearby again. He’s more sensory than she is.” She shifted against the pillow, wincing slightly at the pull in her shoulder. “You should put something that smells like me in the room. One of my cardigans. He has a sensory memory. I think he’s been—” She stopped. “Sorry, you didn’t ask.” “I came to ask,” he said. Something in his voice was different than before. Not managed. “That’s why I’m here.”

She looked at him carefully. Bastian Caruso, in four months, had been punctual, demanding, professional, and occasionally so cold she’d felt it like a draft from under a door. He had read her notes every morning. He had paid her exactly on time. He had said good night to the twins through the baby monitor in a voice she wasn’t supposed to hear, low and halting, like a man learning a language he’d never been taught. He had not once sat on the edge of a hospital chair and looked at her like she was the thing in the room he was most afraid to lose. “I put your cardigan in the room,” he said. “The gray one. He stopped crying at 2:15.” She felt something pull behind her sternum. “Good. You were right.” “You’re usually right about them. I didn’t expect that. When I hired you, I thought competent. I thought competent would be enough. I didn’t think—” He stopped. “Didn’t think what?” “I didn’t think they would love you,” he said. “I wasn’t prepared for that.” The monitor beeped its patient rhythm. “Are you prepared for it now?” she asked. He looked up. And this time his face didn’t seal over. “I’m working on it,” he said. “I’m working on a few things.”