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.