Enforcer's Bargain

Chapter Twenty One: What The Second Test Said

Roman

The lab called on a Tuesday, seven days before the wedding, and the woman on the phone had the careful, practiced gentleness of someone who delivered difficult results for a living.

"Mr. Kade, I want to walk you through this properly rather than just reading you a number." A pause, professional, measured. "The second test excludes you as the biological father. There's no genetic match between you and the child sample provided. I'm sorry to be the one telling you this over the phone."

Roman sat down hard on the kitchen floor, phone still pressed to his ear, the specific vertigo of an entire six weeks reorganizing itself instantly around a single sentence.

"That's not possible. The first test was positive."

"I can't speak to the first lab's methodology or results. I can only confirm what our own testing shows, and it's conclusive. No match." Another pause, softer. "I understand this is a lot to process. Take whatever time you need."

He called Delaney before he called Nadia, the same instinct from the first result, needing her voice to hold the weight of this before he faced anyone else with it.

"She's not mine," he said, the words feeling foreign in his mouth, wrong, like a language he didn't actually speak. "The second test excludes me completely. No match at all."

The silence on the line stretched long enough that he thought the call had dropped, and then Delaney's voice, quiet, furious in a way he'd never heard from her. "Then the first test was fabricated. Someone paid a lab to fake a positive result, and I want to know who and why, because that's not a mistake, Roman, that's a deliberate lie that cost you six weeks of your life and nearly cost us our wedding."

"I need to talk to Nadia."

"We'll talk to Nadia together."

Delaney

Nadia met them at the same park, Mia mercifully left with a sitter for the conversation, and something in her face when she saw the printed lab results in Roman's hand told Delaney, instantly, that whatever explanation was coming wouldn't be an innocent one.

"You faked it," Roman said, no preamble, voice low and controlled in the specific way Delaney had learned meant he was working very hard not to let fury take over entirely. "The first test. You paid someone to fabricate a positive result. I need to understand why."

Nadia's composure cracked, finally, six weeks of careful performance giving way to something raw and desperate underneath. "Mia's father left before she was born. No support, no involvement, nothing. I've been working two jobs and barely making rent, and then I saw the wedding announcement, saw how much money the league's throwing at you now that your redemption story's paying off, and I thought, for one desperate month, that I could give her a father who actually had the resources to take care of her, even if it wasn't strictly true."

"That's not a reason, Nadia. That's a justification for lying to a man about his own daughter, and to a child about who her father actually is."

"I know." Nadia's voice broke. "I knew it was wrong the whole time I was doing it. I told myself I'd stop before it went too far, and then you crouched down in that grass and she handed you a dandelion and you looked at her like she'd already changed your whole life, and I couldn't figure out how to take that back from either of you without breaking something I didn't have the right to break in the first place."

"So you let it keep going. Six weeks. Overnight stays. A custody schedule built on a lie."

"I didn't know how to stop it once it started." Nadia wiped her eyes, something genuinely wrecked in her expression that Delaney, despite everything, found herself unable to fully hate. "I'm not asking you to forgive the lie, Roman. I know I don't deserve that. I'm asking you to understand that some of it wasn't a lie. Mia asks about you now. She has a photo of the two of you from the park on her nightstand. Whatever I did wrong, starting this, the bond that grew out of it, that part became real, whether either of us planned for it to."

Roman

He walked away from that conversation without answering, needing air, needing distance, and Delaney let him go, understanding instinctively that some things had to be processed alone before they could be processed together.

He found his grandmother in her garden that evening, the same steady presence she'd always been, and told her everything, the fake test, Nadia's confession, the specific, disorienting grief of losing a daughter he'd never actually had, six weeks of bedtime stories and dandelions collapsing into a lie he hadn't seen coming.

"I don't know how to feel," he admitted, sitting heavily on the garden bench beside her. "I'm furious at Nadia. I'm grieving a little girl I have no actual claim to. And underneath all of it, I still love her, grandmother, the same amount I did yesterday, before the phone call, and I don't know what to do with loving a child who isn't mine and was never going to be mine, no matter how much I wanted her to be."

His grandmother was quiet for a long moment, working a weed loose from the soil with the same patient, unhurried care she brought to everything. "Love doesn't check paperwork first, Seo joon. It never has. You loved that little girl before you had any proof at all, on instinct, the moment she handed you a flower. The test didn't create that love, and the second test doesn't erase it either. What you do with it now, that's the actual question."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean you have a choice in front of you that has nothing to do with biology." She finally freed the weed, set it aside, met his eyes directly. "You can walk away from Mia entirely, which no one would blame you for, given how this started. Or you can decide that six weeks of showing up, however it began, built something worth continuing to show up for, regardless of what a lab report says about shared blood. Family isn't only built from paperwork. Sometimes it's built from choosing, again and again, the way you chose Delaney, the way I chose you when your own parents couldn't."

Roman sat with that for a long time in the quiet garden, the weight of the day settling into something he could finally, slowly begin to carry instead of simply being crushed beneath it.

"The wedding's in a week," he said, finally. "I don't know what any of this means for that anymore. I don't know what it means for Mia, for Nadia, for the family I thought I was building six weeks ago."

"Then you go home," his grandmother said, gentle but firm, "and you talk to the woman who's stood beside you through every complicated turn this year has thrown at both of you, and you figure it out together, the way you've figured out everything else. That part, at least, hasn't changed. Whatever happens with Mia, you still have that. Don't lose sight of it in the grief of losing the rest."

He drove home in the dark, the week until the wedding stretched out ahead of him uncertain and heavy, but underneath the grief and the fury at Nadia's lie, something steadier remained, unmoved by any of it, the specific certainty of a woman waiting for him at home who'd chosen him through blackmail and injury and now this, and would, he trusted, choose him through whatever complicated shape came next.