Before - Bethan-Kris Page 0,27

baby was his. His daughter—a child made from his blood. Her big blue eyes, wide-eyed despite the early morning hour, peered all around with the wonder and curiosity only a baby could have.

“Six months old,” the officers had explained shortly after they arrived at the station and got him sat down on the other side of one of their desks. For a moment, he thought the two of them were about to play a game of good cop, bad cop with him. It wouldn’t be the first time and at that point, Lev was still convinced they brought him there about the shooting. God. He was such a fucking idiot. “Her mother had a rough time after her birth according to the grandmother. She voluntarily entered a facility three months ago ... she struggled with addiction and mental health before and after the baby was born, but it got worse after Arely arrived. Unfortunately, she came out of the seventy-two-hour hold and was found identified a week later after a fatal overdose.”

They’d shown him a picture.

Of the mother.

And the child that was apparently his.

Sitting in that hard chair, with officers across from him that seemed to both watch his every move and stare at him with a sympathy he’d never been offered before, Lev didn’t know what to do. He was struck glancing between the two pictures on the desk.

One of a newborn wrapped in a pink blanket.

The other, of a woman he remembered too well though her disappearance in his life hadn’t even been a blip on his radar. Dawn Marks was just ... a chick he slept with occasionally and nothing more, really. He hadn’t the time for anything else, and she never suggested she wanted more from him over the ten or so months that they’d been friends.

“Was she just a hook-up or—”

He understood the officer’s curiosity and didn’t blame the man for it. “And a friend who lived in the building. I didn’t know she ... had any issues. Not like what you’re saying. She didn’t let on to me. We just had fun when she came to drink at the bar. I mean, we were basically going to the same place when we went home, you know? It was a week after she moved out of the building before I even knew that she was gone. It wasn’t like we were close. I didn’t get offended that she hadn’t said goodbye.”

But fuck.

He was mad right then.

So goddamn mad.

That was his kid. She got pregnant with his kid, said nothing, and then left ... just gave his baby to someone else to take care of when she couldn’t do it. He tried to sympathize with the situation she must have been faced with and the way she probably felt at the time. Hopeless. Agonized. At the very end of her rope, clearly.

Maybe she thought he wouldn’t help.

Or that he wouldn’t want the child.

“Arely, you said?” he remembered asking.

Although which officer he asked, he couldn’t say. By then, the room had closed all around him and the whooshing in his ears was far worse.

Arely Dawn Marks, they explained. That was what her mother named her just before she signed custody of the barely week-old baby—at the time—over to her mother. The pregnancy hadn’t been easy, according to the information the police had and what his daughter’s grandmother explained.

And then her grandmother got sick. To the point that she couldn’t care for a six-month-old that was starting to move and explore more than she ever had before. The late nights were hard enough, but add in a baby starting to explore and do what babies did, and well ... it was too much for her to handle.

“At least,” the kinder of the two officers told him shortly before his child arrived at the police station, “her mother had enough understanding of her situation to let the child’s grandmother know who the father was if she needed to find you. All she had was a name and a bar. When the grandmother handed the baby over to social services, it took them a couple of weeks to find you.”

“And here you are.”

“Here we are, Mr. Arsov.”

That was that.

Then, his baby arrived with the social worker. Just like that, Lev no longer cared to talk about the details because as soon as he laid eyes on her, he knew she was his. And without a doubt, with no question, he had suddenly never wanted anything more in his life than