Chapter 2 - The Girl He Could Never Forget
Reed Ashford had survived three assassination attempts, seventeen years of betrayal, and enough violence to make grown men tremble when he entered a room.
But nothing had ever frightened him quite like the sound coming from the sleeping maid beside him.
It was a lullaby.
Soft. Unsteady. Almost too quiet to hear.
Yet Reed knew every note.
He had not heard that melody in twenty-one years.
His mother used to sing it in a narrow kitchen overlooking Boston Harbor, back when his family still ate dinner together and his father had not yet turned their lives into something unrecognizable.
When the harbor loses its light, count the stars and hold on tight...
Reed's fingers tightened against the marble floor.
Maisie Lel shifted against his arm.
Her scarred left hand moved beneath the kitchen towel, exposing the pale mark running along her forearm.
Reed remembered that scar.
Not because it resembled another injury.
Because twenty-one years earlier, he had watched a little girl receive it.
A little girl with crooked bangs, enormous brown eyes, and a habit of asking questions nobody wanted to answer.
A little girl who had disappeared during the Bell Street fire.
A girl Reed had spent years believing was dead.
"Maisie," he whispered.
Her eyelids fluttered.
Outside the glass doors, Pierce Keenan pressed a hand against the security chief's shoulder.
"Did he just say something?"
Walsh shook his head.
"Stay where you are."
Maisie opened her eyes.
For several seconds, she appeared confused by the ruined ballroom, the broken furniture, and the powerful man sitting beside her.
Then she noticed his arm.
"Oh, my God."
She immediately straightened.
"I'm sorry. I didn't mean to fall asleep on you."
Reed barely heard her.
"Who taught you that song?"
Maisie frowned.
"What song?"
"The one you were humming."
She looked embarrassed.
"I don't know. I've always known it."
"Your mother?"
"I don't remember my mother."
The answer struck him harder than any bullet.
Reed swallowed.
"Do you remember a house near the harbor? Yellow curtains? A kitchen with a green wooden table?"
Maisie stared.
"No."
"An older woman who made cinnamon toast?"
Something shifted in her expression.
But then she looked away.
"Mr. Ashford, I don't understand what you're asking."
Reed reached toward her scar, then stopped himself.
"May I see your arm?"
Maisie hesitated.
"Why?"
"Please."
There was something so unfamiliar about hearing that word from Reed Ashford that she slowly extended her arm.
He examined the long, uneven mark.
Near her wrist, two smaller scars crossed the larger one.
He remembered those, too.
A little girl had once tried to carry a boiling saucepan because she wanted to make soup for someone who was sick.
He had arrived just as the pan tipped.
She had cried for an hour afterward, not because of the pain, but because she'd ruined the soup.
Reed shut his eyes.
"Little Finch."
Maisie's hand jerked.
"What did you call me?"
Reed looked up.
"Little Finch."
Her breathing changed.
For a heartbeat, the ruined room seemed to disappear.
She saw a yellow curtain.
A blue enamel cup.
Someone laughing while rain tapped against a window.
Then the image vanished.
Maisie pulled her arm away.
"How do you know that name?"
Before Reed could answer, Pierce pushed through the door.
"Boss, I'm sorry, but the southern delegation has given us until six. Forty million dollars is frozen, and they're threatening to shut down every shipment coming through our terminals."
Reed rose slowly, positioning himself between Pierce and Maisie.
"Not now."
"Reed, we've already lost two contracts."
"I said not now."
Pierce looked past him.
At the maid.
Then at Reed's face.
And something in his expression softened.
"What's going on?"
Reed answered without looking away from Maisie.
"I think I've found someone."
Pierce frowned.
"Who?"
Reed's voice dropped.
"Someone I buried twenty-one years ago."
The room went silent.
Maisie stood.
"Excuse me?"
Reed turned toward her.
"Not literally. I mean I was told you'd died."
Maisie stared at him.
"You're saying you knew me?"
"I think so."
"Before foster care?"
"Yes."
Her eyes filled unexpectedly.
For twenty-one years, every social worker, doctor, and counselor had told her the same thing.
The records were incomplete.
The fire had destroyed everything.
Nobody knew where she'd come from.
And now Boston's most feared criminal was standing in front of her, claiming he remembered.
"Then tell me something," she whispered.
"Anything."
"What was my mother's name?"
Reed's jaw tightened.
"Elena."
Maisie covered her mouth.
"Elena Lel."
A tear escaped before she could stop it.
She had never heard that name spoken aloud.
Not once.
Pierce stepped closer.
"Reed, are you sure?"
Reed ignored him.
"Your mother worked with mine. They ran a food program for families living near Bell Street. You were six years old."
Maisie looked at the destruction around them.
"And you were there?"
Reed nodded.
"I was twenty-one."
"Did you know what happened to her?"
The question brought back an image Reed had spent two decades trying to forget.
Smoke swallowing a stairwell.
A woman's hand slipping from his.
A child's terrified scream.
He looked away.
"I know there was a fire."
Maisie stared at him.
"That's not what I asked."
For the first time that night, Reed had no defense.
He could intimidate bankers, silence rivals, and make powerful men surrender everything they owned.
But he couldn't tell this woman that the last time he had seen her mother, he had been too frightened to go back into a burning building.
"She didn't come out," he said.
Maisie lowered her head.
The loss was strange.
She had grieved for a mother she'd never remembered.
Now she was grieving for a woman who suddenly had a name.
Reed took a brass key from his vest.
"There's something you need to see."
Pierce followed them into Reed's private office.
Behind his desk stood an old oak cabinet.
Reed opened the lowest drawer and removed a narrow wooden box.
Inside lay a broken pocket watch, a faded blue ribbon, and a photograph.
He handed the photograph to Maisie.
She saw a young man with dark hair standing beside two women outside a yellow house.
One woman had Reed's unmistakable gray eyes.
The other held a small girl with crooked bangs.
Maisie's knees weakened.
The little girl was wearing a yellow sweater.
Her left arm was wrapped in white gauze.
"That's me," she whispered.
Reed nodded.
"Yes."
Maisie turned the photograph over.
On the back, in faded blue ink, someone had written a message.
Her fingers trembled as she read it.
If anything happens, Reed knows how to bring our little girl home.
Beneath the message was a signature.
Elena Lel.
Maisie looked up at him.
"Then why," she whispered, "did you leave me there?"
Reed's face went pale.
May you like
Because for twenty-one years, he had been asking himself exactly the same question.
And the answer was far worse than she could imagine.
