Daddy's Worst Nightmare

And I did.

Making her mine came next.

1

Arya

Eleven years later

We were just about to cut the cake when the shooting started.

As much as I’d begged and pleaded for my eighteenth birthday party to have a puppy theme, my mother insisted we go with something more grown up.

To reflect that I’m a woman now.

I don’t feel like a woman.

It has been six months since I left the five-story palace in the sky I call home—and only for a doctor’s appointment. Before that, it had been a year. The only people I come into contact with are my tutors, seamstresses and personal trainer. How can I call myself a woman if I’ve experienced so little of the world? In many ways, I’m still a coddled child.

So I should be excited about the rooftop pool party, even if most of the attendees are friends of my parents. Right?

Don’t be ungrateful. So much work went into this.

I’m pretty sure it wasn’t my parents who did the work, though. My father is never here and my mother just returned from a three-month trip to the Mediterranean. This is the first time I’ve been in the same space as both of them since…well, I can’t even remember. But they did remind me via text to be extra polite and dutiful with so many of their friends here tonight.

Forcing a smile onto my face, I adjust the strap of my pale blue bikini and watch our chef, Huxley, bury the knife in the center of the three-tiered cake. Everyone is crowded around, talking excitedly over the tropical music that started blaring from the speakers as soon as they’d sung Happy Birthday. The sun is beginning to set between the buildings that make up the Manhattan skyline and tiki torches are lit up all around the edge of the pool, supporting mother’s luau theme.

I scan the faces of the people huddling together, drinks in hand. I notice a couple of my father’s business associates watching me under the hoods of their eyelids, their gazes drifting down and over my bikini bottoms. One of them even leans to the side, seeming to assess my backside. My father is on his fifth or sixth drink and doesn’t appear to notice. Or care. Feeling trapped, my heart starts to pound—

A gunshot splits the night air, traveling straight through the cake and frosting flies everywhere. Huxley drops to his knees with a hole in his neck and my mother screams.

The guests scatter, most of them running for the exit, others diving for cover.

I’m rendered immobile, my eyes fixed on the sniper just above the doorway, crouched down behind a brick piling. The muzzle of his gun is aimed directly at me.

Time slows down, my pulse pumping methodically in my ears, and I’m reminded there are valid reasons I’m never allowed out of the house.

My father is the Manhattan District Attorney.

His enemies are countless, especially since he’s made organized crime his target.

The threats to my life started happening in my early teens. Kidnapping attempts, threatening letters, shots fired at me in the park. For some reason, they come after me, not my father. They must believe it will hurt him more.

So they locked me away.

Unnecessarily.

See, I have a guardian angel. My parents think I’m ridiculous for believing so, but I know it’s true. Every attempt that has ever been made on my life, he’s been there. A righteous blaze through the shadows, hood drawn up to hide his face, smelling of oranges.

Something is always triggered in my memory, but I can’t place why he’s familiar.

I only know that he saves me, every single time. And tonight will be no exception.

Goosebumps travel up the flesh of my arms and I close my eyes, heat percolating the lowest, most feminine points of my body. He’ll be here. It has been so long. Too long. I’ve started getting urges, confusing ones, and apparently they connect to him because little pulses tick in my wrists, between my legs, just knowing he’s near.

I can already smell the oranges.

The red light from the gun’s scope travels across my belly and I quell a frisson of fear.

A split second later my faith is rewarded when a muscular forearm wraps around my waist, my feet leave the rooftop and I’m suddenly traveling through the air, narrowly missed by the bullet. I land in a strong set of arms, enveloped in citrus, and I look up, finding a pair of intense green eyes glittering down at me from inside a black hood.

“Just can’t stay out of harm’s way, can you?”

I blink up at my guardian angel. That voice. He’s never spoken before. There’s something about it that calls to the furthest recesses of my mind, but I can’t place it. Surely if I’d heard this rasping baritone before, I would remember exactly where.

“Happy birthday, Arya. This is going to be one you never forget,” my guardian angel mutters, gathering me close to his body and striding across the roof. “Over the doorway. Take him out,” he shouts to someone I can’t see. “There are more waiting in the stairwell. Put a bullet in every last goddamn one of them. Come find me when it’s done.”