Seventeen year old Tobias Rainer had grown up moving through the shimmering glass corridors of the Rainer Plaza Hotel with the kind of quiet authority that came from being August Rainer’s only child. Guests admired him. Staff stepped aside for him. He had been raised to glide through marble lobbies and penthouse hallways as if the whole building were an extension of his own home. On that chilly afternoon along Lexington Avenue, however, everything he believed about who he was stopped abruptly. It stopped when he saw the boy sitting against a leaning traffic sign.
The boy wore three mismatched shirts layered beneath a torn navy coat. His dark hair fell in tangled curls across his forehead, matted from weather and neglect. Yet none of that was what made Tobias halt in the middle of the sidewalk. The boy’s face was like a reflection Tobias did not remember making. The same angled jaw, the same straight nose, the same pale green eyes. Even the startled expression matched his own.
The boy blinked as Tobias froze. New York noise churned around them. Honking horns, shouting vendors, rolling bus engines. Yet the city seemed to blur into silence for a moment that stretched strangely long.
“You look like me,” the boy rasped. His voice carried the roughness of sleeping outdoors.
Tobias’s pulse slammed against his ribs. “What is your name?”
“Jaxon. Jaxon Mirek.”
Mirek. Tobias felt a sting in his chest. That had been his mother’s surname before she married August Rainer. She had died seven years before, leaving behind a lifetime’s worth of unspoken memories. She had rarely spoken about her past at all. Tobias remembered her laughing, cooking, humming in the mornings. He did not remember her ever speaking of family.
“How old are you,” Tobias asked.
“Seventeen,” Jaxon replied. His gaze wandered to Tobias’s tailored coat before returning to his face as if afraid of being judged. “I am not trying to trick you. I am not running some scam. I have been on my own for a while. It has not gone well.”
Tobias swallowed the dryness in his throat. The more he looked at Jaxon, the more the resemblance tightened around his thoughts. “Do you know anything about your parents,” he asked.