The Billionaire's Hidden Heir

CHAPTER EIGHT

NADIA'S POV

The phone slips out of my hand.

That’s all it is. That’s the whole terrifying secret behind the silence Ezra must be hearing on his end right now. My palm goes slick with sweat the second I hear the doorknob turn, not open, just turn, someone testing it from the outside, checking if I forgot to lock it — and my fingers just stop working. The phone hits the carpet and slides under the little table by the door and I don’t even go for it. I stand frozen with my back pressed onto the wall and my whole body listening.

The knob stops turning.

I count. One, two, three. My heart is so loud I can feel it in my throat.

Footsteps. Slow. Moving away from my door, down the hall, toward the stairwell. I hear the stairwell door open with that same tired creak it always has, the one Glenn keeps promising to fix and never does, and then it closes, and then there’s nothing. Just the hallway. Just the quiet.

I haven’t moved for a long time.

When I finally do, it’s because I hear a much smaller sound behind me, one that matters more than anything happening on the other side of that door. Miles’s bedroom door, opening.

I turn around so fast I almost trip over my own feet.

He’s standing in his doorway in his dinosaur pajamas, hair sticking up on one side, blinking at me with the particular confusion of a five-year-old who woke up for no reason he can explain.

“Mama?” he says. “Why are you standing by the door?”

I cross the room in about two steps and crouch down in front of him, and I make my face do the thing I’ve practiced doing for five years, the thing where nothing that’s actually happening shows up anywhere on the surface.

“I thought I heard something,” I say. “It’s nothing, baby. Go back to bed.”

“I heard something too.” He rubs one eye with the back of his hand. “It sounded like footsteps.”

“Just the wind,” I say, and I hate myself a little for lying to him, but there is no version of tonight where I explain Victor Hale to a five-year-old holding a stuffed triceratops. “Come on. I’ll tuck you back in.”

He lets me walk him to bed, which tells me he’s more than half asleep already, and by the time I pull the blanket up he’s already gone again, breathing slow and even, one hand curled loose against the pillow. I stand there and watch him for a minute, the way I did an hour ago, except this time my hands are shaking, and I can’t make them stop.

I find my phone under the little table by the door. The call is still connected. I can hear Ezra’s voice coming out of it, small and frantic, saying my name over and over.

“Nadia. Nadia, answer me. I’m almost there, just answer me—”

“I’m here.” My voice comes out shaky. “I’m okay. I dropped the phone. He tried the door, and then he left. Ezra, I think he’s gone.”

“Don’t move. I’m pulling up right now.”

I hear the line go quiet at his end, then car doors, then footsteps taking the stairs two at a time because I know that sound, I’ve heard him do it before. Less than a minute later, there’s a knock at my door, fast and hard, nothing like the soft polite knock from before.

“It’s me,” he says. “Nadia, it’s me.”

I check the peephole anyway. Habit. Fear. Both. Then I unlocked the deadbolt and opened the door, and he was standing there breathing hard, his coat half off one shoulder, like he didn’t bother fixing it when he got out of the car, and for one second neither of us said anything. He just looks at me like he’s checking every inch of me for proof that I’m actually fine.

“You’re okay,” he says. Not a question. Like he’s confirming it to himself.

“I’m okay. Miles is asleep. He never saw anything.”

Ezra steps inside and pulls the door shut behind him and for a second I let myself lean into him, just slightly, just enough to feel steady again, and he puts one hand flat against my back like he’s afraid I might actually fall over if he doesn’t.

“He was right outside,” I say into his shoulder. “He tried my door, Ezra. He actually tried my door.”

“I know. I’m sorry. I should have been here already.”

“You couldn’t have known.”

“I should have known,” he says, and there’s something in his voice now that isn’t fear anymore, it’s colder than that, harder. “Victor doesn’t do anything without a reason. If he came here tonight, it’s because something changed. Something moved.”

I pull back and look at him. “What do you mean, something moved?”

He doesn’t answer right away, and that silence scares me more than anything that’s happened all night.

That’s when I see it.

Down by my feet, half tucked under the edge of the welcome mat like it was pushed there in a hurry, is a plain white envelope. It wasn’t there this morning. It wasn’t there an hour ago when I let Ezra out. Someone left it while I was standing frozen against the wall three feet away, close enough to hear my own heartbeat, and I never even heard it happen.

“Ezra.”

He follows where I’m looking and goes very still.

He crouches down and picks it up carefully, like it might do something if he moves too fast, and turns it over in his hands. There’s no name on the front. No stamp. Just my apartment number written in small, careful handwriting, the kind of handwriting that belongs to someone who has all the time in the world and never once needs to rush.

“Don’t open it,” I say, even as he’s already sliding his thumb under the flap.

“We need to know what it says.”

He pulls out a single photograph and goes completely white.

He turns it around so I can see it, and my whole body goes cold at once, because it’s a picture of Miles. Not from tonight. Not from this apartment. It’s Miles at his daycare, on the playground, mid-laugh, caught in a moment I never knew anyone was watching, and written across the bottom in the same careful handwriting are four words that make the floor disappear from under me completely.

“He is not safe.”