“Aaah!” Toby froze for a beat, then let out a scream that rattled the windows. He was eight years old. He had only put hands on her because he was the bigger one. It had never once occurred to him that someone a good head shorter could pick him up bare-handed. His feet had nothing under them, and the panic came out of him as noise. Monster! She’s a monster! “Aah! Mom! Mom, help me!” The screaming went straight through Wren’s ears, and she decided it was far too loud. She carried him down two more steps, looked around, and settled on a wide-mouthed vase that stood half as tall as a grown man. Face set, she trotted over with him on her shoulder and stuffed him into the opening. The room spun. By the time Toby got his bearings, he was folded in half inside the vase. He had gone in backside first and wedged perfectly at the neck. He shrieked and tried to haul himself out, only to find half of him pinned with nothing to push against. Panic and humiliation hit him at once, and Toby burst into tears. “Mom! Mom, get me out!” Noelle came out of her shock and started prying Daisy off her. A voice cut across the entryway, low and furious. “What in the world is going on in here?” Victor Rhodes filled the doorway, and a single look at him placed him as Wren’s father and the head of that household. Beside him stood Vivian Lowe, an actress and the closest friend Victor had, tall and polished from her heels to her hair. The two of them had barely walked in when they froze at the sight before them. No child that size should have been able to lift someone a full head taller. Is this kid some kind of monster? The thought sat in Victor’s head while he and Wade went straight over to work Toby out of the vase. Once he was satisfied Toby was unhurt, Victor turned back to Wren with cold anger in his eyes. “You just walked in the door. Where do you get off putting hands on Toby?” Wren met the glare without flinching and answered like she had nothing to apologize for. “I was defending myself!” Warrick had taught her that self-defense did not count as fighting. Victor looked at the small stubborn face in front of him, and whatever guilt he carried about the years she spent outside that house burned away. What replaced it was plain dislike. “And now you’re going to talk back? You vicious kid! You haven’t got an ounce of…” Noelle cut him off before he could finish. “Victor!” She could not believe her husband had used that word about a daughter they had just found, on the first day he ever laid eyes on her. This was his own child. Wren might have gone too far, but Toby had put his hands on her first. She got up through the pain in her back, pulled Wren against her, and covered both small ears so nothing else her father said could reach them. Being pulled back into that warmth stopped Wren short. She could feel her mommy’s back trembling. She lifted her arms as though to hug her back, and her hand brushed lightly across the hurt place. Her fingers traced a quick shape over it. Nobody saw the witchlight that spilled from her fingertips as they moved. The light sank through the fabric and into Noelle’s back. Noelle could have imagined it, but warmth seemed to run wherever that small hand passed, and the stabbing pain simply stopped. Before she could think it through, Daisy pulled free and stumbled across the floor toward Victor and Vivian. “Daddy! Ms. Lowe! She’s so scary. I don’t want to live with her…” Vivian was exactly who Daisy kept begging to have for a mother. She had also been Victor’s closest friend for years. She had chased an acting career through her twenties and never married, and it showed in how young she still looked. She crouched without thinking, gathered Daisy in, murmured something soothing, and only then looked up at Noelle. “Noelle, I know you’re happy to have your own daughter back. But you raised Daisy too. How can you stand there and watch her hurt like this?” Her voice stayed gentle, and even the disapproval in it landed soft. Noelle’s brows drew together anyway. Victor spoke before she could answer, low and hard. “I told you Daisy would still be ours once this one came home. And here you are, letting her go after Daisy and Toby. Noelle, I’m disappointed in you.” The impatience on her husband’s face pulled something tight in her chest. She could not name the moment when Victor started looking at her that way, after all the years he had adored her. It had come on around the time the company found its footing and the money started arriving. He grew busier every year, and on the rare nights he came home he spent them with Daisy and Toby. The old tenderness only surfaced when he needed her standing beside him in front of a camera. She had never worked out where it went wrong. What she did know was that she was not the one in the wrong here. “Why don’t you ask what Daisy and Toby did first?” One cry out of Daisy, one pointed remark from Vivian, and he had picked his side without asking a single question. Wren is his own blood! “I don’t care what they did. That’s no reason to put hands on Toby and Daisy.” Victor glanced at Wren, tucked safe against Noelle, and let the blame show plain on his face. He kept going before Noelle could argue. “I wasn’t sure before. Now I can see those two don’t mix. So here’s what we’ll do. She stays somewhere else a couple of days, and once Daisy comes around, we bring her back.” He said it like the most reasonable thing in the world. Noelle could not believe what she was hearing. What is he saying? Send Wren out of the house? Wren is theirs. He wants to keep his own daughter out of her home for the sake of the one they raised? By what right? “Not a chance.” It was rare for Noelle to refuse so sharply. The softness usually written across her features was gone, replaced by a firm, commanding resolve that left no room for argument. She already owed her daughter for not being there to bring her home. She was not about to let Wren be turned out of that house for an imposter. Even if the two girls really didn’t get along, Wren was not the one who would be leaving.