The Billionaire's Hidden Heir

CHAPTER SEVEN

EZRA’S POV

I’m three blocks from her building when my phone starts ringing.

I almost don’t answer it. I’m driving with one hand and thinking about Miles with the other half of my brain, replaying the way he looked at me like I was just some tall stranger who wandered into his living room, and for a second the ringing phone feels like something I can deal with later. Then I glance down and see her name on the screen and something in my chest goes tight before I even pick up.

“Nadia?”

“There’s a man outside my door.” Her voice is fast and thin, like she’s trying to keep it steady and failing. “He knows my name. He says his name is Victor Hale, and he says he needs to talk to me and Ezra. He had a folder, he was looking at Miles’s window—”

“Wait. Slow down. What did you say his name was?”

“Victor Hale.”

I feel the blood leave my face. I pull the car to the curb without even thinking about it, because I need both hands and I need to not be driving right now.

“Nadia, listen to me. Do not open that door.”

“I haven’t. I’m not stupid, Ezra. I looked through the peephole and I locked the deadbolt, and I’m standing here with my back against the wall right now, but he’s still out there. I can hear him breathing on the other side—”

“I know who he is.”

The line goes quiet for a second.

“You know him?” she says, and her voice cracks on the word know like it costs her something to say it.

“He used to work for my father,” I say. My mouth has gone dry. “Fixer. Cleanup. Whatever needed doing that couldn’t have my father’s name on it, Victor did it. I hadn’t heard that name in years. I thought he retired when my father died. I thought he was gone.”

“Well he’s not gone,” she says. “He’s standing outside my apartment holding a folder and asking to talk.”

My hands are shaking on the wheel and I hate that they are, because I need to be the calm one right now and calm is the one thing I cannot find inside myself. Six years ago, I sat in an office and let my father’s people manage things I never asked them to manage, and I told myself I didn’t know, and maybe that was even true, but it doesn’t change what it cost her. It doesn’t change that a man like Victor Hale has apparently been circling her life for two years while I sat in meetings four miles away thinking about acquisitions.

“Is Miles awake?” I ask.

“No. He’s asleep. He doesn’t know anything is happening.”

“Good. Keep it that way. I’m turning around right now, I’m eight minutes out, maybe seven if the lights hold.” I’m already pulling back onto the road as I say it, cutting across two lanes with my heart slamming against my ribs. “Do not open the door for anyone but me. Not the homeowner, not a neighbor, nobody. If he says something through the door, don’t answer him. Just wait.”

“Ezra.” Her voice drops lower, and underneath the fear there’s something else now, something sharper. “Why would your father’s fixer be watching me for two years? Your father’s been dead for eight months. What is there left to fix?”

It’s the exact question I’ve been trying not to ask myself since the second she said his name, because I don’t have an answer, and not having an answer terrifies me more than anything Victor Hale could be standing outside her door holding.

“I don’t know,” I say. “But I’m going to find out.”

“What if he’s still there when you get here?”

“Then I deal with him.”

“Ezra, I’m scared.” She says it so quietly I almost miss it over the sound of the engine, and something about the way she says it — not dramatic, not performed, just true — makes my foot press harder on the gas than it should. “I have been scared for five years and I got used to being scared alone, and I don’t know what to do with being scared and not alone, I don’t know how this part works.”

“You don’t have to know how it works,” I say. “You just have to stay inside with the door locked for six more minutes. Can you do that?”

“Yes.”

“Talk to me until I get there. Tell me anything. Tell me what Miles had for dinner.”

It’s a stupid thing to say, and I know it the second it leaves my mouth, but I need her voice in my ear the entire time I’m driving. I need proof every ten seconds that she’s still on the other end of this call and still safe, and she must understand that too, because she actually laughs, one short broken sound that isn’t really a laugh at all.

“Chicken nuggets,” she says. “He wouldn’t eat the vegetables. He never eats the vegetables.”

“Keep talking.”

“He wants a dinosaur book from the library. The one about the one with the long neck. He calls it the neck one. He doesn’t remember the actual name—”

Her voice stops mid-sentence.

“Nadia?”

Nothing.

“Nadia, talk to me.”

I hear something at her end. A sound I can’t place, sharp and sudden, like a door somewhere, and then her voice comes back, but it’s different now, lower, urgent in a way that has nothing to do with performing calm for me anymore.

“Ezra, someone’s trying the doorknob.”

I ran to the last light.

I don’t remember making the decision to run it. I just do, tires screeching against wet pavement, my phone pressed so hard against my ear it hurts, and I can hear her breathing fast on the other end and I can hear, underneath it, very faint, a second set of footsteps that are not hers.

“Nadia. Nadia, are you there?”

The call goes silent.

Not disconnected. I check the screen while I’m still moving and the timer is still running, the call is still connected, but there’s no sound coming through at all, just a terrible, total silence where her voice should be, and I am four minutes away, and I have never in my life felt this powerless behind a wheel that is going as fast as it can possibly go.