Jane tiptoed toward the dark living room, trying not to bump into anything. Her suede ankle boots felt like blocks of concrete, throwing off her balance and making her clumsy. It’s probably not just the boots, she admitted to herself as she smashed into a doorknob. Ow! She put out a hand to steady herself and felt curious grooves under her fingertips. The infamous family tree, she realized.

Her fingers brushed across Malcolm’s name, and then Annette’s. She stopped short, suddenly, her fingers lingering over Annette’s birth year. She would have been twenty-four, just like Jane, if she’d lived.

The house was eerily still around her; not even the whoosh of cabs rushing down Park Avenue could penetrate the double-paned windows in this room. Jane wondered what Annette would have been like if she’d gotten the chance to grow up. Would Annette have been a friend? An ally even, someone she could count on and complain to and ask for advice?

As Jane slid her hand further along the wall, she felt the oddly smooth patch that she had noticed on her first night. She pushed away from the wall dizzily, her mind too wobbly to think the anomaly through.

She navigated the now-familiar turns of the hallway carefully, gasping once when her heel got caught in the fringe of a narrow Oriental rug. When she reached her room, she fumbled in the darkness for the doorknob, but her hands found nothing but empty air. After a moment, she realized the door was already open. Malcolm’s not home yet? It’s three a.m.! Not that she had the moral high ground here, but still—what kind of “guys’ night out” was this, exactly?

Her eyes adjusted quickly to the dim light from the street filtering through the heavy curtains, and she realized she’d been wrong. Someone was in the room after all, leaning over their bed. And that thing that goes bump in the night is . . .

“Malcolm?”

The man straightened and turned to look at her, and she felt her stomach heave in a way that had nothing to do with alcohol. The height was right, and so were the broad shoulders, but even in the near-darkness, she could tell that the man in her bedroom was a complete stranger. His hair was longer and darker than Malcolm’s, and while the two men shared the same large frame, this man’s build was fleshy and slack, nothing like Malcolm’s taut torso and arms. Before she could speak again, he lurched toward the door, his meaty hands reaching for her.

“Get away,” she shrieked. She tried to spin on her heel, but it got caught again in the carpet. “Help!”

She’d only made it a few steps before a rough hand closed on her arm, forcing her to a stop so abrupt that she almost fell to the floor. She screamed again, trying to jerk her arm away, but the hand was like stone, pulling her ruthlessly against the man’s chest. She drew in a breath to scream, fight, beg, anything, but the air around the man was absolutely foul, and when it hit the back of her throat, she began coughing in choked spasms. She leaned backward as far as she could, fighting for breath and ignoring the pain in her shoulder as it twisted awkwardly to accommodate her still-imprisoned arm.

The moment of clear air allowed her mind to function just enough to come up with a plan. She spun her body as hard to her right as she could, bringing her left arm up to swing at where she hoped the man’s face was.

Missed, she groaned silently as she felt her balled fist barely graze his cheek. With a bellow of rage, he tightened his grip on her arm and used it to shove her against the wall. She opened her mouth again, trying to ignore the stench, but just as she did, there was a soft click and light flooded the hallway.

“Charles!” a voice shouted, and the hand circling Jane’s arm disappeared—as did the smell.

There was more shouting, and then Jane felt strong hands on her shoulders, holding her up against the wall. She realized belatedly that they were probably necessary, since her knees had gone watery, but she flinched when they got too close to the bruise already forming on her right arm. Stupid pale skin, she thought randomly. Shows everything. She looked up then, and nearly cried with relief. There, his head bent so low that his dark eyes were only inches from hers, was Malcolm. Still wearing his leather jacket, she noticed, but looking every inch the loving and concerned fiancé.

“Did he hurt you?” he asked, his voice soft enough to be private but forceful enough to rumble the air between them.

She shook her head mutely and glanced over his arm. The stranger had vanished, and Lynne was storming down the hall, two terrified-looking maids trailing behind her.

“I’m okay, but how—who was—” She frowned; she didn’t even know what to ask. “I have questions,” she finished stiffly.

Malcolm nodded and drew her into their room, shutting the door behind him. She didn’t notice that she’d been holding her breath until he switched on the lights and the wall sconces illuminated every dark corner. As the air rushed out of her burning lungs, she realized she hadn’t believed that the room was really empty until she’d seen it for herself. Malcolm shrugged off his coat and slumped tiredly into one of the overstuffed chairs, gesturing for her to do the same. “I’m so sorry,” he began. He sounded sincere, but Jane didn’t move a muscle; she needed to know just what he was sorry for before she could forgive him.

“What the hell was that?” she demanded.

He picked at the nubby fabric of the armchair. The lamp cast a golden halo of light over his blond curls, but dark circles lined his eyes, and his mouth was drawn. He looked exhausted. “There’s a lot I should have told you about my family. But when you keep secrets for so long, well . . . I guess it just becomes a habit.”

She massaged her sore shoulder and waited for him to continue.

“I used to have a sister, Annette. She . . . well, she drowned when she was six.” He smoothed his jeans over his knees. He hadn’t met her gaze once, as if it was easier to tell the story without looking at her. “It was . . . awful, and Mom was devastated. I’ve never seen anything like it. She went off the deep end, actually,” he admitted, “and then she tried to fix it.”

“ ‘Fix it’?” Jane echoed. “How do you ‘fix’ a dead child?”

Malcolm inhaled deeply. “She decided to have another baby. She was sure she could have another girl, like she could just replace Annette and everything would be right again.” His lips twisted in a horrible approximation of a smile. “You’ve seen how her family is about girls. On top of everything else, they’d just lost their only shot at carrying on this incredibly long tradition, and she was convinced that she could just make it all better.” He frowned. The heat clicked on, hissing through the room like an angry snake.

“She was older by then, though. Even carrying Annie had been a risk. My parents fought about it a lot. Her first doctor said it was too dangerous, so she got another one, and another, and—well, you’ve seen Mom when she wants a certain color tablecloth. Can you imagine when she wanted a baby?” His dark eyes flickered up briefly, and Jane nodded, picturing Lynne flipping through a book of baby portraits, demanding that her ob-gyn give her the beautiful blue-eyed girl with the dimples.

“So she got her way. Except that there are things that no one can control—not even her.”

Another shout sounded from the hall, followed by a slamming door. Jane didn’t move.

“I was a kid—the medical stuff went right over my head—but I guess that she was taking something experimental, to make sure the pregnancy took. To make sure she got to have her one last shot at a perfect little girl.” He looked up, eyes burning with an emotion that Jane couldn’t name. “Except that he wasn’t a girl. And he wasn’t perfect, either.”

“Charles,” Jane breathed, remembering the shout in the hallway right after the lights had blazed on. She sank down into the chair next to Malcolm’s.

He nodded, looking absolutely miserable. “It was obvious right away that something was wrong. She said it was just one of those things, but between her age and whatever she took, I know she feels responsible.”

She is, Jane thought darkly. But it was hard to judge the grief-stricken mother of a dead child too harshly, and she reprimanded herself silently for the thought.

Malcolm shifted in his chair. “Dad wanted to send him to a place—an asylum, I guess—where they could take care of him, but Mom didn’t want anyone to find out. She couldn’t face people asking about him, knowing about him. She’d been on bed rest for pretty much the whole pregnancy, so if we kept him here, he could stay a family secret.”

Jane’s jaw dropped open; this time the judgment was harder to suppress. “So no one knew he existed?”

Malcolm chuckled bitterly. “It wasn’t even hard to hide. After Annie died, people just stopped asking where Mom was. She had a perfectly good reason to shut herself in, and then a year later she announced that she was done with ‘mourning,’ and picked up right where she’d left off. Except that then I had a brother living in the attic who no one was allowed to talk about.”

A lump formed in Jane’s throat. The terror she’d felt when Charles attacked her fell away, replaced with heartbreak for Malcolm’s teenage self, for the loss of his sister, and the horrible secret he’d had to carry all these years. “I won’t tell,” she whispered.

He stared at her as if he didn’t know who she was, for a split second, and then blinked back to himself. “I know that. I was just so used to shutting him out by the time I met you that it was almost like he wasn’t real. And Mom promised that he was getting care around the clock. If he’d hurt you . . .” He dropped his dark-gold head in his hands.

Jane slid from her chair to his and settled into his lap. “He didn’t,” she murmured, stroking the waves of his hair. She felt a stab of guilt for questioning his feelings for her earlier. For a brief moment, she remembered the clean smell of Harris’s aftershave when she had pressed against him at the club. She winced as the guilt doubled.

“Everything’s okay now,” she whispered into Malcolm’s ear. “I promise.”