"Victoria shoved my little girl away from a grand piano because she thought a maid's daughter had no business touching anything inside that mansion. Seconds later, the most feared man in New York walked into the room, took one look at my daughter's gray-green eyes, and dropped his keys like he'd just seen a ghost. In that instant, everything everyone believed about us changed.

I stayed inside the locked West Wing suite with Sophie for the rest of that night while Damon dealt with the storm downstairs, though I barely slept a wink. When morning sunlight finally spilled across the silk sheets, I dressed in one of the simple cream cashmere sweater dresses Damon had ordered for my closet, refusing to put the gray maid’s uniform back on.

Sophie looked like an absolute doll in a navy pleated dress, her dark curls bouncing as she held my hand down the grand spiral staircase.

As we approached the formal dining room, harsh, aristocratic voices echoed off the marble walls.

"Have you lost your mind completely, Damon?" Evelyn Vance’s icy voice sliced through the morning air. "Throwing out a Senator’s daughter at midnight over a scullery maid? Your father spent forty years building the Vance reputation, and you are dragging it into the gutter for some opportunistic girl from Queens!"

I paused at the threshold, my stomach knotting tightly. Sitting around the long mahogany table were Damon, his impeccably dressed mother Evelyn in her signature pearls, and Camille, whose eyes were puffy and red beneath thick layers of makeup.

The moment Damon spotted us in the doorway, the cold mask on his face softened instantly. He stood up from the head of the table and held out his hand.

"Good morning," Damon said warmly, ignoring the scandalized gasp from his mother. "Come sit down, Elena. I had the chef make blueberry pancakes for Sophie."

"Why is the help wearing cashmere and coming into the dining room without an apron?" Evelyn demanded, her sharp gray eyes narrowing at me like twin daggers. "Girl, go back to the kitchen and bring us fresh coffee."

"Her name is Elena, Mother," Damon said, his tone dropping to a dangerous warning as he lifted Sophie into the velvet chair immediately to his right and pulled out the chair on his left for me. "And she will never pour another cup of coffee for anyone in this house again."

Camille glared across the linen tablecloth at me with pure venom. "See, Evelyn? I told you! She’s completely brainwashed him! She claims that little street rat is Damon’s child just because the kid happens to have light eyes!"

Evelyn froze, her silver coffee spoon halting mid-air. Slowly, the matriarch of the Vance empire turned her aristocratic head to look down at Sophie, who was happily swinging her small legs and reaching for a strawberry on her plate.

Sophie looked up at the terrifying older woman and offered a bright, gap-toothed smile—revealing the exact crooked left canine and silver-hazel eyes that hung in the massive oil portrait of Damon’s late father above the fireplace.