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it. My heart wasn’t affected at all.
    Just like hers wasn’t.
    “Why don’t you just ask her?” Raoul’s girlfriend Allegra said cheerfully, and Damien almost said, Because every time I try she makes it clear she thinks it was a mistake, letting me in that close.
    “Why she’s doing it,” Allegra elaborated. “You could try talking to her. She’s your aunt.”
    Oh. She meant Tante Colette.
    Allegra stopped beside Raoul to smile up at him. Raoul had returned from Africa quite adamantly at Christmas, his russet hair streaked with a premature charcoal, looking and acting like a wolf come in out of the cold to inspect the contents of the nearest warm barn. But Allegra fed him cookies, and all of Raoul seemed to ease into calm whenever she came near him. In fact, even when she wasn’t around, you could tell when he thought of her by the way his face relaxed.
    Something about it twisted Damien’s middle into a tight, jealous pang, and he didn’t even know why. Allegra was not remotely his type. And unlike Matt and Raoul, he wasn’t grumpy or wild. He didn’t need anyone to help calm him down—he had control of himself.
    “ You could ask her,” Damien said, disgruntled. “If I ask her, she’ll say something cryptic.”
    “You could ask her,” Layla said sweetly to their grandfather, Colette’s stepbrother. “She’s your sister.”
    Pépé gave her the look he used to crush insolence.
    “Well, she might tell you,” Layla said, friendly and about as uncrushable as her exuberantly curly hair. She brought a handful of jasmine to her face and breathed deep. “In honor of all those times you two worked together to save children during the Occupation.”
    “If I were you, I wouldn’t go burying my nose in any pretty thing you decide is supposed to smell sweet,” Pépé told her. “It’s a good way to get stung.”
    “Pépé,” Matt said, low and growly.
    “Anyway, if this girl’s last name is Bianchi, she’s probably some kind of cousin of yours,” Pépé told her. “I know perfectly well who that Bianchi boy’s real father was. I don’t need to ask Colette. I’m the one who told her that boy was getting girls pregnant around here.” He grimaced. “Léonard had a mother who would give her life to save others, and her boy turned out…like that.”
    Layla just stood there, dumbfounded. “I have a cousin?”
    A cousin? Merde. Damien had four first cousins on his father’s side—three of them standing right here—five more on his mother’s side, and so many second and third cousins that he couldn’t even begin to count them. He knew, technically, that Layla had a much more limited family than the Rosiers did, but the stunned, hopeful expression on her face at the idea of having a cousin really brought the difference home.
    “Given the way that boy of hers behaved, you might have several. Maybe more than we even know about,” Pépé growled.
    All his grandsons just stared at him. This was a little bit beyond their capacity for imagination, children trailing around who weren’t solidly embedded in the expectations of family, particularly step-cousins who might show up out of nowhere and claim all the family heritage Tante Colette held. Hell, there was her house in Sainte-Mère still, too. And God knew how many family heirlooms. She’d produced Niccolò Rosario’s war-lost seal for Matt, and an old Renaissance perfume box Niccolò’s mother had had made for him for Raoul, but so far she hadn’t shown any inclination to trust anything as heart-precious as their family heirlooms to Damien.
    Even though he spent his whole fucking life fighting to protect everything that was fragile and precious to his family.
    “Well, in that case, you might, too,” Layla said sweetly, not looking away from Pépé. “After all, you had a son run off, too.” Lucien’s father, although he’d done it at forty-five and not sixteen. “And are you one hundred percent sure that all those boys of yours